Begin again : a biography of John Cage
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Bibliographic Information
Begin again : a biography of John Cage
Northwestern University Press, 2012
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. [415]-424
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A man of extraordinary and seemingly limitless talents—musician, inventor, composer, poet, and even amateur mycologist—John Cage became a central figure of the avant-garde early in his life and remained at that pinnacle until his death in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman gives us the first comprehensive life of this remarkable artist. Silverman begins with Cage’s childhood in interwar Los Angeles and his stay in Paris from 1930 to 1931, where immersion in the burgeoning new musical and artistic movements triggered an explosion of his creativity. Cage continued his studies in the United States with the seminal modern composer Arnold Schoenberg, and he soon began the experiments with sound and percussion instruments that would develop into his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. Cage’s unorthodox methods still influence artists in a wide range of genres and media. Silverman concurrently follows Cage’s rich personal life, from his early marriage to his lifelong personal and professional partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as his friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers.
Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the enormous archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs, facsimiles of musical scores, and Web links to illustrative sections of his compositions, Silverman gives us a biography of major significance: a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.
Table of Contents
1 Comes Up Famous
2 The Art of Noise
3 East and West
4 Music of Changes
5 The Ten Thousand Things
6 Indeterminacy
7 Fractures
8 Hpschd
9 Empty Words
10 Apartment House
11 Changes And Disappearances
12 Time Brackets
13 Europeras
14 Anarchic Harmony
15 1992
Documentation
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Track Credits
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
