John Cage: A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, composing, electronic music, literature, music, painting, performance, sound recording
Collection of John Cage‘s essays, lectures and journal entries from 1961–1967. Includes “How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” and “Juilliard Lecture”.
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 1967
ISBN 0819560022, 9780819560025
167 pages
Review: Virgil Thomson (New York Review of Books, 1970).
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Comments (2)Peter Dickinson (ed.): CageTalk. Dialogues with & about John Cage (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · biography, composing, music, music history, sound recording
John Cage was one of America’s most renowned composers from the 1940s until his death in 1992. But he was also a much-admired writer and artist, and a uniquely attractive personality able to present his ideas engagingly wherever he went. As an interview subject he was a consummate professional.
The main source of CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage is a panoply of vivid and compulsively readable interviews given to Peter Dickinson in the late 1980s for a BBC Radio 3 documentary. The original BBC program lasted an hour but the full discussions with Cage and many of the main figures connected with him have remained unpublished until now.
CageTalk also includes earlier BBC interviews with Cage, including ones by the renowned literary critic Frank Kermode and art critic David Sylvester. And the editor Peter Dickinson contributes little-known source material about Cage’s Musicircus and Roaratorio as well as a substantial introduction exploring the multiple roles that Cage’s varied and challenging output played during much of the twentieth century and continues to play in the early twenty-first.
Apart from the long interview with Cage himself, there are discussions with Bonnie Bird, Earle Brown, Merce Cunningham, Minna Lederman, Otto Luening, Jackson Mac Low, Peadar Mercier, Pauline Oliveros, John Rockwell, Kurt Schwertsik, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Virgil Thomson, David Tudor, La Monte Young, and Paul Zukovsky. Most of the interviews were given to Peter Dickinson but there are others involving Rebecca Boyle, Anthony Cheevers, Michael Oliver, and Roger Smalley.
Published by University of Rochester Press, 2006
Volume 38 of Eastman studies in music
ISBN 1580462375, 9781580462372
294 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)
Comment (1)John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961–) [EN, HU, CZ, RU, CN]
Filed under book | Tags: · composing, composition, experimental music, music, music history, poetry
Silence is a collection of essays and lectures Cage wrote during the period from 1939 to 1961.
“In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching.”
Publisher Wesleyan University Press, October 1961
ISBN 0819560286, 9780819560285
276 pages
Review: Virgil Thomson (New York Review of Books, 1970).
Silence: Lectures and Writings (English, 1961, updated on 2012-8-3)
Silence: Lectures and Writings (English, 1973, 43 MB, no OCR, added on 2018-11-4)
A csend: válogatott írások (Hungarian, partial, includes 7 essays, trans. Kata Weber, 1994, 28 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Silence: přednášky a texty (Czech, trans. Jaroslav Šťastný, Radoslav Tejkal, and Matěj Kratochvíl, 2010, 6 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Tishina: lektsii i stati (Russian, trans. Grigorij Durnovo, et al., 2012, 12 MB, added on 2020-5-7)
Chen mo: Wu shi zhou nian ji nian ban (Chinese, trans. Jingying Li, 2013, 65 MB, added on 2020-5-7)