John Cage (1912–1992)

'Diary' registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world. He used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation, and-- in the case of Part show more Three, originally published by Something Else Press-- color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence. While Cage used chance operations to expandthe possibilities of creating and shaping his work beyond the limitations of individual taste, 'Diary' nonetheless accumulates into a complex reflection of Cage's sensibilities as a thinker and citizen of the world, illuminating his social and political awareness, as well as his idealism and sense of humor: it becomes an oblique but indelible portrait of one the most influential figures of the 20th-century American avant-garde. This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition, with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most important, an addendum that includes many facsimile pages of Cage's handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress, bringing the reader into compelling proximity to Cage's process and the raw material from which 'Diary' was made. show less

The entire range of John Cage's work and thought, explored in three wide-ranging dialogues, which constitute his last unified statement on his art.

"I was obliged to find a radical way to work ― to get at the real, at the root of the matter," John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition show more of art ― with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention―earned him a reputation as one of America's most influential contemporary artists.

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 multimedia 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 20th century. show less

The longest thing here is "Empty Words" itself, a four-part text derived from Thoreau's Journals. The language is minced increasingly finely through the parts, but even at the start it is non-syntactical (introduction: "Syntax: arrangement of the army (Norman Brown). Language free of syntax: demilitarization of language"). I don't know what to think about it because I don't now how to read it. I know how to listen to it: there are recordings of Cage reading it, and I have heard several of show more them, and I like them very much. Cage's voice is attractive (deep, quiet, calm) and you hear it as a piece of non-intentional, chance-determined music; on a number of recordings (notably one made in Milan in 1977), you also hear shouts of protest from the audience, which connects the piece to the world and makes listening to it a social and historical experience as well as a musical one. Listening to "Empty Words" is fine. Reading it is a different matter. It is alright reading other non-syntactical texts - Kurt Schwitters, say, or Bob Cobbing - because they take sounds and phonemes as the basis for a new and unfamiliar but coherent language analogous to that used in other poetry or in music. But the chance procedures that Cage has used to make his text make it difficult to get any kind of grip on it. There are no patterns. Should I read it through slowly, taking in each sound (should I read it out loud or silently?)? Or should I read it quickly, getting an impression of it and not worrying about the detail? Or should I let my eye move around each page horizontally and vertically, like a text of combined English, Arabic and Japanese? Or should I just take each page as a whole, treat it more like a work of visual art than a work of literature? Scattered through the text are drawings by Thoreau, which presumably (like the original text which Cage transforms) signifify something, but they are so pared down that shorn of their context they just look like abstract shapes; some could be letters from an undiscovered language. In some ways the text resembles scores by Cage like Winter Music or parts of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra where scraps of notation are dotted around the page; but with his scores the notation is directed towards a particular end, which is to make sound, and if you know the rules by which one is transformed into the other then you read it according to those rules, or at least bearing those rules in mind, conscious of sometimes breaking them. Here I don't know what the rules are, or if there are any rules. I don't think Cage's own readings give all the answers, I feel that (like any performance of a fixed score) they limit the text, pin it down by ruling out other possibilities. I can't remember who it was that said in Mallarmé's poetry the words react to one another not syntactically but chemically. I feel something similar might is happening hear, but on the level of the letter rather than the word. And perhaps the work that "Empty Words" most closely resembles is Un coup de dés. But that is made from sentences, and that is a big difference.

I have seen works of visual art that have surprised and confused me, but I don't remember ever seeing one that I felt I didn't know how to look at; sometimes it has later turned out that I didn't know, but that's another thing. Not knowing how to look at this piece of writing (a form where "looking" is not usually an issue at all) indicates success. The rest of the book is relatively more conventional. The other long pieces are the second Writing through Finnegans Wake and the Series re Morris Graves, which is largely anecdotal. The short piece How the Piano Came to be Prepared is an important source of Cage biography. And it is written in conventional, militarized, English. But as a whole, this is the volume where Cage comes closest to his idea of "book as music". show less

I read this years ago, the affecting musings of a "compleat" composer essayist on art and such joie de vivre topics as mushroom collecting. Three things particularly stay with me over the years :

1. his ordering that it's good to listen to music, better to play it, best to create it via composition. this urges me to someday become capable on some instrument and also create something, maybe my own book if not a tune

2. cage in a silencing anechoic chamber, an experiment I duplicated in a show more semi-anechoic chamber at General motors. there's no silence for the living. you hear 2 distinct and low volume tones: the high pitch of the nervous system and the low pitch of the circulatory system.

3. This sanguine philosophy: "The composer whose works were being performed had provided program notes. One of these notes was to the effect that there is too much pain in the world. After the concert I was walking along with the composer and he was telling me how the performances had not been quite up to snuff. So I said, 'Well, I enjoyed the music, but I didn't agree with that program note about there being too much pain in the world.' He said, 'What? Don't you think there's enough?' I said, 'I think there's just the right amount.' show less