Free John Cage: Composed In America Ebooks To Download
When the great avant-gardist John Cage died, just short of his eightieth birthday in 1992, he was already the subject of dozens of interviews, memoirs, and discussions of his contribution to music, music theory, and performance practice. But Cage never thought of himself as only (or even primarily) a composer; he was a poet, a visual artist, a philosophical thinker, and an important cultural critic.John Cage: Composed in America is the first book-length work to address the "other" John Cage, a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America. Cage, as these original essays testify, is a contradictory figure. A disciple of Duchamp and Schoenberg, Satie and Joyce, he created compositions that undercut some of these artists' central principles and then attributed his own compositional theories to their "tradition." An American in the Emerson-Thoreau mold, he paradoxically won his biggest audience in Europe. A freewheeling, Californian artist, Cage was committed to a severe work ethic and a firm discipline, especially the discipline of Zen Buddhism.Following the text of Cage's lecture-poem "Overpopulation and Art," delivered at Stanford shortly before his death and published here for the first time, ten critics respond to the challenge of the complexity and contradiction exhibited in his varied work. In keeping with Cage's own interdisciplinarity, the critics approach that work from a variety of disciplines: philosophy (Daniel Herwitz, Gerald L. Bruns), biography and cultural history (Thomas S. Hines), game and chaos theory (N. Katherine Hayles), music culture (Jann Pasler), opera history (Herbert Lindenberger), literary and art criticism (Marjorie Perloff), cultural poetics (Gordana P. Crnkovic, Charles Junkerman), and poetic practice (Joan Retallack). But such labels are themselves confining: each of the essays sets up boundaries only to cross them at key points. The book thus represents, to use Cage's own phrase, a much needed "beginning with ideas."
Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (August 1, 1994)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0226660575
ISBN-13: 978-0226660578
Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.8 x 7.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Best Sellers Rank: #1,678,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #701 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Biographies > Classical #3186 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Literature > American Literature #3334 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Performing Arts > Music
These are a collection of marvelous essays Marjorie Perloff has edited. The scope of Cage is seemingly immense, the implications of his work has touched varigated corners and crevices,abandoned places: the music world, the world of poetry,conceptual art, performance art, mushroom enthusiasts,opera, and other synergistic art forms we have no label for yet. Perloff herself chooses the influence of Duchamp to discuss, the ends of things of the Western canon was a frightening yet fascinating point in the last century. And Cage always had done everything,like Duchamp with an element of the lighthearted at work. There are analysis here as well as seasoned music essayist Jann Pasler's discussion on Cage's "Composition in Retrospect" a 1981 mesostic text. Pasler helps explain what this figuritivly complex yet disarmingly word play composition means. Cage wrote many of his most important works in this structural form. And his own "Overpopulation and Art" is included here, asa a guiding means of response to these participants. This is as close as Cage gets to social and political/environmental reflection, you will not recognize Cage here. Herbert Lindenberger is a well known writer in the cloistered world of Opera and he admirably reflects on Cage's one and only Opera "Europeras" and the Aesthics that may emit itself from that varigated and multidimensional work. Although aesthtics in its traditionally bound demeanor was always and remained a by-product of the Cage edifice, here in this opera he lets other impart their aesthtic desires by allowing singers to choose their own arias to perform.
John Cage: Composed in America Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed The Selected Letters of John Cage Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists John Deere: Plow, Plant, Grow (John Deere (Parachute Press)) (John Deere (DK Hardcover)) Snake Eyes: A Nicolas Cage Activity Book The Cage: A Holocaust Memoir They Cage the Animals at Night (Signet) How to (Un)cage a Girl King's Cage (Red Queen) Conversing with Cage Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch The Crippler: Cage Fighting and My Life on the Edge The Laws of the Ring: The Laws of the Cage from the California Kid The Gilded Cage Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane John's Secret Dreams: The Life of John Lennon (Big Words)
