RFI John Cage

I also really like one of the dances for prepared piano. You might like the Third Construction for Percussion, which is more rhythmic and uses a lot of metal objects. I have HPSCHD, which is good, but I don't play it that much. It's nothing like the Sonatas and Interludes though. It's like layered tape fragments of Mozart with electronic noise. Was the "Fontana Mix" the one where he used quotes from Joyce with sounds of Dublin city life and Celtic music samples? That was a good piece.

His electronic music is by and large wow, but I could never get into Cage's pieces with "real" instruments, like the prepared piano works. Sure, it reeks of Indonesia and it's a good thing too, but once the shock of recognition faded away it seemed kinda dreary.

I think in a way you are better off not knowing too much about his musical theories. I understand your being curious and wanting to read about him, of course, but I find his idea of trying to transcend ego by going beyond aesthetic like and dislike, and his dismissal of the intentional expression of emotion in music, and some of his disparaging comments on other forms of music (like jazz) a big turn-off. I feel that I am not "permitted" to listen to his music the way I would any other music. Still, if you are going to read something by him, "Silence" is probably a good place to start; and his essay on the future of music in "Empty Words" is kind of interesting. (This essay would be a good source for names of "related musicians.") I think (and this could maybe be filed under "say something boring about John Cage") that historically, he opened things up for a lot of composers trained in the academic classical tradition, even though they may have rejected much of his philosophy. Compared to the iron grip of serialism, his approach was a breath of fresh air.

the function of serialism was to produce the same kind of "unmelodified" listening as cage's randomism: what he realised was that the technical intricacy that went into serialist composition was diverting all the attention to stuff you couldn't hear (and weren't meant to be listening to) and that knowledge of randomism produced the effect much more cleanly

his line on absolutely blank-slate listening is a bit daft as an ideal, since it's only obtainable by zen masters who prolly don't download mp3s

he was the first "classical" composer to recognise the degree to which recording and tape edit had demoted stave composition and paper-based analysis (actually you can sort of make a case for webern as his precursor here)

Silence is a great, entertaining book, as is the Conversations With… mark s mentioned above. If you like some of the vignettes in Silence, Cage reads many of them on the Interdeterminacy record, with noise/musical accompaniment by David Tudor.

Also worthwhile is Cage e(x)plained by Richard Kostelenatz, which has some good introductory essays on Cage's work & ideas. He didn't own a record player or radio of any kind, which I found interesting (he liked to listen to the street.) And there's a fun book called New Voices that compiles interviews from various contemporary classical composers (Reich, Glass, Adams, L. Anderson, Lucier, many more) and uses Cage as a jumping-off point for each conversation.

Finally, if Merce Cunningham's dance company comes through your town, check it out. He usually does a repertory piece with music by Cage, and hearing one of those pieces loud is incredible (when I saw him, Jim O'Rourke was part of the pit orchestra, tweaking oscillators and whatnot!)

Cage I listen to most these days, besides his electronic stuff, is Grete Sultan performing his "Etude Australes".

will go for $200-$250 easy. great cuts too. seek it out on the finer slsking progs out there.

He was born one hundred years ago today.

Love him.