The Selected Letters of John Cage

John Cage

Oct 2013 · Wesleyan University Press

About this ebook

This annotated selection of more than five hundred letters by the groundbreaking composer and avant-garde icon covers every phase of his career.
 
This volume reveals the intimate life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important 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. They shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde.
 
Written in Cage’s singular voice—by turns profound, irreverent, and funny—these letters reveal Cage’s passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. They include correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among many others.
 
Readers will enjoy Cage's commentary about the people and events of a transformative time in the arts, as well as his meditations on the very nature of art. This volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

About the author

JOHN CAGE (1912–1992) was an American composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced twentieth-century music. He was an early proponent of aleatoric music (music where some elements are left to chance), used instruments in nonstandard ways, and was an electronic music pioneer. LAURA KUHN (Millbrook, NY) is the John Cage Professor of Performance Art at Bard College and director of the John Cage Trust.