MUSICAGE: CAGE MUSES ON WORDS ART MUSIC - Softcover

"As glimpses of Cage near his career's end, MUSICAGE is invaluable . . . To people familiar only with Cage's music, the interviews devoted to his writing and visual art will be most revealing . . . The longest interview is devoted to music, and it has an absorbing addendum in which cellist Michael Bach joins the conversation. These parts of the discussion are the most explicit and technical and provide some of the most detailed insights available into Cage's thinking about the bearing of traditional instruments' acoustic capacities on the possibilities of composition. No less useful, though, are passing remarks that seem to illuminate the whole terrain of Cage's work." --San Francisco Chronicle "Cage's constant amusement, his endless curiosity, his insistence on seeing life and art always in a new way, emerge vividly. The result is in effect a study of his thought in motion as he sometimes playfully but always seriously responds to Retallack's informed and sympathetic questioning . . . A highly accessible and personal introduction to a remarkable if elusive artist."--Publishers Weekly "The two friends plumb some fascinating depths that reveal the unbuttoned landscape of Cage's mind . . . The intellectual level is quite high, and even Cage's detractors will find themselves stimulated by many of the ideas presented on these pages."--Library Journal "This compendium of Cagean thought . . . will baffle those unversed in his unique mixture of Zen Buddhism, American pragmatism, and Utopian anarchism . . . Cage, as always, is good company, a master aphorist who has an endless supply of pithy sayings . . . [his] thoughts that will surely knot your brow."--Kirkus Reviews

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 multi-media 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 twentieth century.