LITMIR.BIZ

<P>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.</P>

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<P>John Cage is the outstanding composer of avant-garde music today. The Saturday Review said of him: «Cage possesses one of the rarest qualities of the true creator- that of an original mind- and whether that originality pleases, irritates, amuses or outrages is irrelevant.» «He refuses to sermonize or pontificate. What John Cage offers is more refreshing, more spirited, much more fun-a kind of carefree skinny-dipping in the infinite. It's what's happening now.» –;The American Record Guide</P><P>"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."</P>

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<P>"I was obliged to find a radical way to work – to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art – with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention—earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists.</P><P>Joan Retallack's conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage's comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world – with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies – was a source of music, Cage once claimed, «There is no noise, only sounds.» As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was «dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.» Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction – a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.</P>

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