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John Cage: Composed in America

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These are a collection of marvelous essays Marjorie Perloff has edited. The scope of Cage is seemingly immense, the implications of his work has touched varigated corners and crevices,abandoned places: the music world, the world of poetry,conceptual art, performance art, mushroom enthusiasts,opera, and other synergistic art forms we have no label for yet. Perloff herself chooses the influence of Duchamp to discuss, the ends of things of the Western canon was a frightening yet fascinating point in the last century. And Cage always had done everything,like Duchamp with an element of the lighthearted at work. There are analysis here as well as seasoned music essayist Jann Pasler's discussion on Cage's "Composition in Retrospect" a 1981 mesostic text. Pasler helps explain what this figuritivly complex yet disarmingly word play composition means. Cage wrote many of his most important works in this structural form. And his own "Overpopulation and Art" is included here, asa a guiding means of response to these participants. This is as close as Cage gets to social and political/environmental reflection, you will not recognize Cage here. Herbert Lindenberger is a well known writer in the cloistered world of Opera and he admirably reflects on Cage's one and only Opera "Europeras" and the Aesthics that may emit itself from that varigated and multidimensional work. Although aesthtics in its traditionally bound demeanor was always and remained a by-product of the Cage edifice, here in this opera he lets other impart their aesthtic desires by allowing singers to choose their own arias to perform. Also Cage scholar Joan Retallack(who has also an impressive series of interviews with Cage) speaks here on "Poetics of a Complex Realism", and this refers to the American dimension of Cage, a topic seldom discussed. This refers to the Trancendentalists tradition of social rebellion although quite passive in retrospect. Writers like Thoreau were important to Cage. Cage activism points in mysterious and undramatic ways. The making of meaning through performance and collaboration was what Cage had valued and he contributed that legacy to the last century. Artifacts of art need continuous nurturing,scholarly explication, regular performance and tried and tested aesthetic canons to be attenuated. Rather within this insecure world, Cage's hope was to nurture a tradition of performers,of communicators equipped with a conceptual fredom of expressive means through a varied and interdisciplinary world which didn't seem to depend on any one particular discipline or technique, as the rigours of composition or, playing the violin, or writing symmetrical verse.

This book explores John Cage from all aspects of his life and work. In my opinion, the most valuable essay is Thomas S. Hines' biographical study of the young Cage as he begins to grope towards a definition of himself that includes artist and inventor as well as his role as a gay man in straight society. We see that Cage's experimental roots were clearly evident in his relationship with his gifted, albeit wayward, father, and his rather mysterious mother. Everything was in place well before Cage's dramatic encounter with Suzuki's version of Zen, and it could be argued that Cage would have been Cage even without it. There's lots to read and think about in this volume and I continue to return to it to understand this great American gadfly of the 20th century.

This book of essays marks the begginig of a new era on John Cage studies. Less romantic, more scientific, less partisan, more academical. Everybody who wants to learn about Cage have to read this book.