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The Selected Letters of John Cage
John Cage
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Description for The Selected Letters of John Cage
Hardback. Letters of an avant-garde icon available to the public for the first time Editor(s): Kuhn, Laura. Num Pages: 656 pages. BIC Classification: BGLA; BJ. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). .
This selection of over five hundred letters gives us the life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important and groundbreaking composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham, and shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Cage's joie de vivre resounds in these letters - fully annotated throughout - in every phase of his career, and includes correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among others. Above all, they reveal his passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. The voice is one we recognize from his writings: singular, profound, irreverent, and funny. Not only will readers take pleasure in Cage's correspondence with and commentary about the people and events of a momentous and transformative time in the arts, they will also share in his meditations on the very nature of art. A deep pleasure to read, this volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.
Product Details
Publisher
University Press of New England
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2016
Condition
New
Weight
1099g
Number of Pages
656
Place of Publication
Hanover, United States
ISBN
9780819575913
SKU
V9780819575913
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-10
About John Cage
JOHN CAGE (1912-1992) was an American composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced twentieth-century music. He was an early proponent of aleatoric music (music where some elements are left to chance), used instruments in nonstandard ways, and was an electronic music pioneer. LAURA KUHN is the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College and director of the John Cage Trust.
Reviews for The Selected Letters of John Cage
John Cage created an offbeat gamelan-inflected, childlike, percussive wonderland of piano works. This rich legacy was the product of a long emotional evolution, as this vast compendium indicates, reflecting Cage's ever-genial, ultra-collegial personality.
Benjamin Ivry This book is an introduction to Cagean aesthetics to equal Silence, his 1960 collection of writings... In words, as in music, Cage still opens our ears and minds.
Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times The Selected Letters of John Cage, a wide-ranging selection of correspondence edited by Laura Kuhn, may stand both as Cage's best biography to date and an unfailingly engaging introduction to his thinking. It demystifies Cage the far-removed guru and restores to us an eternally curious human being with a sharp, original mind and a gift for language that is apparent from the first letter in the book.
Tim Page, The New York Review of Books (Merce) Cunningham became Cage's great love and remained his spouse for the remainder of his life. The correspondence from the dawn of their uncommon and intensely beautiful romance, found in The Selected Letters of John Cage, is on par with Nabakov's love letters
that gold standard of the most intimate genre of the written word
makes a crowning addition to history's greatest LGBT love letters.
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Each decade of letters is introduced with un-precious biographical narrative: how in the mid 1930s 'Cage was broke more often than not'; how in the late 1950s he won an Italian TV game show with mushrooms as his special subject; how in the early 1980s his neighbours John Lennon and Yoko Ono recommended he take up a macrobiotic diet
Kate Molleson, Gramophone I might argue, from a Zen perspective, that music that says nothing also says everything. And so does Cage's work.
American Record Guide ....these letters are important for those seeking a personal understanding of Cage.
Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News, Editor's Choice Cage's letters are charged with the ecstasy of the found, the joy of the unexpected, the unanticipated connection, and it spills over into his relationships with his fellows and friends (including some amazing women), among them the giants of music in his time.
Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter Cage's lifelong struggle to break down the European influence in music and the arts
in his view a tradition that was totally spent
is a tale engagingly told in his own words in a new 650-page book, The Selected Letters of John Cage
Michael Johnson, Facts & Arts This is not a book that can be devoured in a bite...remains an indispensable source for Cage research and interpretation.
Gisela Groneymeyer, MusikTexte
Benjamin Ivry This book is an introduction to Cagean aesthetics to equal Silence, his 1960 collection of writings... In words, as in music, Cage still opens our ears and minds.
Alastair Macaulay, The New York Times The Selected Letters of John Cage, a wide-ranging selection of correspondence edited by Laura Kuhn, may stand both as Cage's best biography to date and an unfailingly engaging introduction to his thinking. It demystifies Cage the far-removed guru and restores to us an eternally curious human being with a sharp, original mind and a gift for language that is apparent from the first letter in the book.
Tim Page, The New York Review of Books (Merce) Cunningham became Cage's great love and remained his spouse for the remainder of his life. The correspondence from the dawn of their uncommon and intensely beautiful romance, found in The Selected Letters of John Cage, is on par with Nabakov's love letters
that gold standard of the most intimate genre of the written word
makes a crowning addition to history's greatest LGBT love letters.
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Each decade of letters is introduced with un-precious biographical narrative: how in the mid 1930s 'Cage was broke more often than not'; how in the late 1950s he won an Italian TV game show with mushrooms as his special subject; how in the early 1980s his neighbours John Lennon and Yoko Ono recommended he take up a macrobiotic diet
Kate Molleson, Gramophone I might argue, from a Zen perspective, that music that says nothing also says everything. And so does Cage's work.
American Record Guide ....these letters are important for those seeking a personal understanding of Cage.
Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News, Editor's Choice Cage's letters are charged with the ecstasy of the found, the joy of the unexpected, the unanticipated connection, and it spills over into his relationships with his fellows and friends (including some amazing women), among them the giants of music in his time.
Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter Cage's lifelong struggle to break down the European influence in music and the arts
in his view a tradition that was totally spent
is a tale engagingly told in his own words in a new 650-page book, The Selected Letters of John Cage
Michael Johnson, Facts & Arts This is not a book that can be devoured in a bite...remains an indispensable source for Cage research and interpretation.
Gisela Groneymeyer, MusikTexte