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In Musicologia--meaning _musical reasoning_ as distinct from a mere love of music--author and composer Robin Maconie takes aim against the fashionable misconception that music is empty of meaning, or _auditory cheesecake._ Fresh and penetrating insights draw attention to the influence of musical analogy in the history of science and philosophy from ancient Greece to modern times. Since music has always existed, it is an expression of human consciousness. The discoveries of Pythagoras, Zeno, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein would not have been possible without a tradition of musical acoustics. The story of Musicologia unfolds in thirty-one chapters from primordial considerations of silence, communication, selfhood, balance, and motion to focus on more recent and specific issues of chaos, order, relativity, and artificial intelligence, showing that even the most controversial aspects of modern art music form part of a wider endeavor to engage with universal propositions of science and philosophy. ... Read more

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This collector's edition is signed by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper Johns. It's in perfect condition and in it's original packaging. ... Read more

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John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933--1950 explores the early part of John Cage’s life and career, concentrating on the "pre-chance" period from roughly 1933 to 1950. These essays consider influences on Cage’s work, his early percussion pieces, his evolving aesthetic, and his movement toward an ideology that would later shape his own work, arguing that a reevaluation of this early period is crucial to understanding his later work. It includes contributions from an international group of music and art scholars.

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In this book has to do with music notation. Cage collates, reproduces, & displays 255 scores by a variety of contemporary composers invited to send their work with a limited word number commentary. The book is a wonderful exploration through the avant-garde, and it is great compelling nourishment for the composer to see the various graphic icons of someone's hand. Each work is reproduced in manuscript with the composer's submitted commentary.The composers included represent most the 20th century.Sample list of composers:? Boulez Carter? Cardew? Ralph Shapey? Stockhausen? Milton Babbitt? Christian Wolff? Frederic Rzewski? Roman Haubenstock Ramati? Bo Nilsson? Luigi Nono? Luciano Berio? Dick Higgins? Nam June Paik? David Tudor? Alison Knowles? George Brecht? Giuseppi Ciardi? Peter Maxwell Davies? Jean-Claude Eloy? Pierre Schaffer? Luc Ferrari? Pierre Henry? George Maciunes? Jackson Maclow (poet not composer)? Franco Evangelisti? Dieter Schnebel? Henry Cowell? Virgil Thompson? Ben Johnston? Lou Harrison? Samuel Adler? Eric Satie? & many more ... Read more

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it's just black dotes,circles on a page
if it is possible for a composer to have a signature, then it is possible to be able to recognize the "voice", the "timbral signature" of a composer from what you see on the page, like a DNA configuration, you are what you are for what you become "magnetize" towards, some shape in music, genre, patterns, listening to telephone generators, or simply making money, lots of it,And if one comprehends this it is first seen in the musical language one employs, and the shapes,densities, distributed,conflated in the designs of melodic import,harmonies,registers, rhythms of graphics, someone like Stravinsky was interested in both while in Switzerland, I beleive Zurich he was travelling with Maurice Ravel, they happened into a bookshop where Stravisnky simply purchased a large bound book of blank pages, handsome paper heavyset. This became the 'Sketchbook' for the "Rite of Spring" done into different coloured inks to incourage Stravinsky's compositional process of re-arranging fragments(assemblage) of what he writes.

Cage has always been interested in notation for the pure challenge in it,what the line tells you,and in the 1950s, with the demise of serial music,Cage began doing his scores in graphic(s) notation,it was for a sense of linear and conceptual freedom,and the "Concert for Piano"(circa 1955) being the ultimate encyclopedic magnum citadel for graphics in music. It was not until in (1965-1967) Cornelius Cardew's "Treatise" where we find a work of similar scope, although for Cardew, "Treatise",done with impeccable craftsmenship was a score of 193 pages for improvisation, for AMM. For a number of years just about everyone was interested, fascinated by the Question "What is Notation?" and why do we need to write certain things in certain ways ignoring others. Of course if you simply wrote music without a bend toward the truly innovative,, the experimental strain,there never was a question,there was then the question of how to deal with complexity, which simply grew by leaps and bounds,irresepctive much of the time of the content or meaning, which we can still ponder.
This "Notations" originally published by the Something Else Press, and Dick Higgins (a post-Cage activist,Fluxus maverick)was a contribution to this quest, this Jabes-ian Question. For many the fascination with graphics was in the pre-compositional phases,like creating charts and pitch configurations, arrays,templates and harmony notebooks of intervallic import, mining the depths of the endless almost possibilities, of two-three-four, hexachords, tetra-chords.Today with the aid of the computer and fractal-like thinking this is commonplace. So this book reads like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" in many respects, the "Here Comes Everybody, for everbody seems to be here of those cadre within the post-war avant-garde. Cage simply wrote a letter to hundreds of composers asking to provide one sheet and one comment on what they think music notation is/was, should be,could be, and is not. The book is a wonderful ride through the avant-garde, and it is great compelling nourishment for the composer to see the various graphic icons, of someone's hand as Boulez's "Second Piano Sonata", or Carter's "Piano Concerto", Cardew's "Treatise", or Ralph Shapey,Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, Christian Wolff,Frederic Rzewski, Roman Haubenstock Ramati, Bo Nilsson,Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, and the Fluxus people are here as well, with the budding beginning of conceptual music, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik,David Tudor,Alison Knowles,George Brecht,Giuseppi Ciardi,and other Europeans Peter Maxwell Davies,Jean-Claude Eloy,Pierre Schaffer, Luc Ferrari,Pierre Henry,George Maciunes,, Jackson Maclow(poet not composer), Franco Evangelisti,Dieter Schnebel,Henry Cowell, Virgil Thompson, Ben Johnston, Lou Harrison. . . Gerhard Stabler has done an update of this book "Notations" with the younger generation of composers represented. ... Read more

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The place to start with Cage
This is THE place to begin with John Cage, easily one of the more intriguing creative minds of the 20th century.

Kostelanetz assembles a free-ranging portrait of the man - mostly varied essays and theories of composition and performance, but along the way Cage's more arcane influences also surface:his Buddhism, and fascination with chance, which was embodied in his fixation with the "I Ching," which became both a point of departure for theoretical meditations, and a most unusual compositional tool.

Cage was the quintessential modernist, and even when his music was daunting and intrepid, his ideas were never, ever stupid, ill-informed or socially disconnected.And Kostelanetz' anthology is great, affectionate, engaged and fascinating - it will turn you into an admirer.

-David Alston ... Read more

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Contributions by Joachim Kaak, Corinna Thierolf. ... Read more

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This book brings together for the first time Moira Roth's influential articles, lectures and interviews on the two men who embodied the very spirit of the avant-garde: Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.
Cage, who died in 1992, and Duchamp, who died in 1968, seemed to live on the permissive border of modernism, and later, of postmodernism. The artists have for almost thirty years fascinated, irritated, inspired, and daunted the author of these essays - Moira Roth.
At first they were an inspiration for her writing and teaching then, with their gradual transformation into 'classical' figures, she felt compelled to reconsider and re-evaluate them. ... Read more

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Great!
The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world!This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE" ... Read more

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The entire range of John Cage's work and thought, explored in three wide-ranging dialogues, which constitute his last unified statement on his art. ... Read more

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Excellent!!
If you are familiar with Cage's art, you will love this account of Cages views on art and life. Joan Retallack's compilation of interviews and thoughts are precious and informative, to those of us who are fond of Cage's work and thinking. Great writing. If you are not familiar with John Cage, where have you been?... Well, it is not late to start. Excellent book.

a valuable document
Joan Retallack, a long-time friend and colleague of John Cage, has done us the favor of publishing this series of conversations between the two of them.These conversations (for they lack any conventional formality that might render them 'interviews'), which took place not long before Cage's death in 1992, run the gamut of topics.Through their amiable banter, one gets a great sense of what was going on in the oft-misunderstood artist's mind--especially as regards his fixation on chance operations and the I Ching.The talks also give ample insight into Cage's writing and visual art, practices for which he is lesser known. When not provoking thought about Cage himself, the two (and I mean both of them equally; Retallack has a meticulously rich and compelling mind, and expresses many enlightening points-of-view herself) have revealing conversations about everything from Duchamp to Joyce, Buckminster Fuller to the Koran.

Perhaps the most interesting and rare aspect of the book is the pervasive inclusion of the environmental and more mundane details of the conversations.She is careful to note the frequent occasions when Cage laughed, what he might have been cooking that day, interactions with an artist who stopped by to fix a bookshelf as a favor to Cage and to Merce Cunningham. Especially valuable is the penultimate conversation, when we are made privy to the beginning of Cage's composition process, as he begins to write a new piece on the spot with cellist Michael Bach.These insights into Cage's daily domestic life are perhaps the most revealing aspects of the book into his personality and philosophies.

For those familiar with Cage, this is a must-read.If you are skeptical or confused about his work, these talks will clarify a lot for you. If you have yet to be exposed to Cage, I recommend this book highly as an accurate and exhaustive portrait.

good stuff from precious minds
Joan Retallack is immensely gifted.If you're familiar with John Cage,you'll like this book. If you're not too familiar with John Cage, well, Ihave someone I'd like you to meet.

This is entertaining, compelling,thought-provoking stuff. I can think of few other people who are so mindful of WORD USAGE, or in this case, I guess, WORD "USCAGE."Manyinsights in this book. I recommend it highly.

Charming, delightful, thought-provoking
I know nothing about music, but I loved this book! Cage's conversations brim with humor, wisdom, and amazing insights into every subject under the sun. It's an enormous pleasure to spend a few hours "in hiscompany" by reading this book. ... Read more

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Sadly tedious
It is difficult to describe how disappointing this book is or why the information is presented in such a repititious way.It appears to be a blend of interviews from many previous sources (including the author's) and this makes for a confusing read.When answers to specific questions about the performances of Cage's music include different recollections from various interviews within the same paragraph, you end up feeling like your reading a term paper rather than an insightful treatise.After 100 pages of this confusion and constant repetition, I gave up.I know Cage is compelling but you would not know it from this book. ... Read more

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Cage's contribution to Harvard's prestigious Norton Lecture Series in 1988-89.More like performances than lectures, these six mesotics - a complex horizontal arrangement of text to form vertical letter sequences that spell out key word- a kind of meticulously choreographed anarchy in which choce and chance join to redefine the concepts of meaning and meaningfulness. ... Read more

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peRformAnce coMbusTiOns of fragments,WoRdS
The various books, collections of pieces, essays, mesostics, cooking recipes,concert reports and performance works Cage had published throughout his long life have for many been more important than his music. (Cage never claimed) to have written music only/merely creating a more intense/extense hearing situation. He (himself when queried said) he never listens to music,recordings,but the sounds (as we all know now) that are all around us.Marvelous textures./ We simply need the committment to listen,to be committed to unitentionality,purposelessness. It is where divine intwervention/ inspiration or something similar an import which may or may not occur/possibly.

This rather large work "I - VI" is the summary/documentation of the prestigious Norton Lectures Series from 1988-89 at Harvard University. Time was when Cage was considered a joke by many, But now he is an American icon,honored/revered at every established citadel of academia.

Mesostics(which is the primary pages here)(pages 9 to 420) is(are) a kind of writing(of poetry)(esSays)(performance), it is as close the (English language) can get to Japanese,reading verticaly as well as horizontally. And that is what you need to do here most of the time,for sometimes a key word will run like a spine down the center of the page making some(or not) coherence with the remaining fragments you may(or may not) encounter. These (six(VI) sections) are like a performance (work),read in any order and any amount of it/ I found myself reading the particles of and complete words aloud for pleasure, skipping, letting (my eye) wander freely across the page, for non-meaning, or simply a combination and admixtures,combustions and consonant explosions which I've never encountered before. Whether (that is the correct) way is beside the point, for if you are looking for discrete meanings, well you will find it in bleak,cold fragmentariness. There are passages on the very bottom of each page, the question and answer section, where you may learn particular ways of playing Cage's sometimes rather difficult music. You never (improvise in) Cage, actually there is very little performing freedom. Once you understand a performing corridor or process you cannot digress from it. I found myself instantly at the bottom of the page most of the time,for Cage is an interesting storyteller, and a way of highlighting (actual) experiences from life.

There is an (orange) CD that accompanies this book A reading of mesostic(by John Cage)number 4/ IV. Cage speaks/recites in a frail baritone/ rich voice/ committed to the cause.

WriTings drawn from WitTgenstein( a laTe interest),Thoreau,Joyce,McCluhan and daily newspapers are combined in fifteen compositional meThods/strucTurs/intenTion/discipline/noTation/indeTterminacy/interpeneTraion/imiTationT/all this comes at the end and can be read lefT to riGht. ... Read more

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The experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) is best known for his works in percussion, prepared piano, and electronic music, but he is also acknowledged to be one of the most significant figures in 20th century theatre. In Cage's work in theatre composition there is a blurring of the distinctions between music, dance, literature, art and everyday life. Here, William Fetterman examines the majority of those compositions by Cage which are audial as well as visual in content, beginning with his first work in this genre in 1952, and continuing through 1992.
Much of the information in this study comes from previously undocumented material discovered among the unpublished scores and notes of Cage and his frequent collaborator David Tudor, as well as author's interviews with Cage and with individuals closely associated with his work, including David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Bonnie Bird, Mary Caroline Richards, and Ellsworth Snyder. ... Read more

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The writings gathered here span more than fifty years of Cagean thought and creativity, from the late 30s to the early 90s. ... Read more