Branden W. Joseph's formidable Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art and Architecture throws open the terrain [of Cagean studies] once again.
The Wire
Branden Joseph gradually unfolds the role of chance, transformation, performativity and transparency in music, and provides an interesting multi-layered understanding of the latter's intercourse with other disciplines ... The book provides an innovative understanding of ... Read morethe examined ideas that remains open, allowing for other disciplines to enter into the suggested discourse ... In this way Joseph offers to artists and architects valuable tools to work on the further development on the role of tracing, documenting, scoring and attuning in the performative understanding of their areas.
The Journal of Architecture
Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture is a brilliant and vital critical contribution to the growing body of art historical scholarship on John Cage's multidisciplinary legacy. The readymade Cage of chance and silence is replaced by a rich and nuanced narrative of a compositional practice nourished by its evolving and often conflicted exchanges with the artistic, architectural and political avant-gardes.
Ina Blom, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway
With great musical and historical sensitivity Joseph unpacks John Cage's struggles, on the one hand, with Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stockhausen-the whole weighty European musical tradition, and on the other, with changing notions of experimentation and the avant-garde. What emerges is an artist who places music in the service of remaking the entire institution of art. Joseph succeeds in writing a brilliant book that is equally captivating for musicians and art historians.
Alexander Rehding, Professor of Music, Harvard University, USA
...Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture provides its reader with an overview of Branden W. Joseph's two-decade engagement with John Cage and represents some of the most intellectually rigorous writing about the composer ... nuanced and important.
Critical Inquiry
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