Search results for ""Author John Cage""

These early letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham will be revelatory for many. While the two are widely known as a dynamic, collaborative duo, the story of how and when they came together has never been fully told. In the 39 letters of this collection, spanning 1942 46, Cage shows himself to be a man falling deeply in love. When they first met at the Cornish School in Seattle in the 1930s, Cage was 26 to Cunningham's 19, their relationship was purely that of teacher and student, and Cage was also very much married.It was in Chicago that their romantic relationship would begin. Cage was teaching at Moholy-Nagy's School of Design when Cunningham passed through town as a dancer with the Martha Graham Company on March 14, 1942. The letters begin in January, but a week after Cunningham's performance, the essential correspondence begins. Cage's letters to Cunningham are passionate, distraught, romantic and confused, occasionally containing snippets of poetry and song. They are also more than love letters, with intimations that resonate with our experience of the later John Cage.Love, Icebox takes its shape from these letters transcribed, chronologically ordered and in some instances reproduced in facsimile. Laura Kuhn, Cage's assistant from 1986 to 1992 and now longtime director of the John Cage Trust, adds an introduction, postscript and running commentary. Photographic illustrations of their final 18th St loft, as well as personal and household objects left behind, remind us of the substance and rituals of a long-shared life.

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Now available in an expanded paperback edition, 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 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 expand the 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.Collecting all eight parts into a single volume, co-editors Joe Biel and Richard Kraft also used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of the red and blue (used by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles for Part Three) as well as to apply a single set of 18 fonts to the entire work. In the editors' note, Kraft and Biel elucidate the procedure of chance operations and demonstrate its application, giving readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition, with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most important, with a significant 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.

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Ben Johnston is an American composer internationally known for his work with extended just intonation. This is a critical-analytical study of his early compositions, his studies with Harry Partch and John Cage, and his experiments with just intonation, serialism, indeterminacy, jazz, and finally, extended just intonation. Pieces are analyzed and biographical material is included. The main emphasis of the text, however, is on examining Johnston's research about tuning and scalar theory as it relates to just intonation. For a long time Johnston worked in isolation; few people understood why someone would want to change the standard pitch system. But gradually, as his music began to be heard, especially his string quartets, performers and audiences experienced for themselves the kind of clarity and beauty that is possible with just intonation. This book is written for readers of varying musical backgrounds. Thos interested in studying and performing Johnston's music will find the book helpful in understanding his notational system and learning how to listen for just intervals. Many examples and figures document the musical analyses, which explain his compositional techniques. With a foreword by John Cage, a catalog and discography of Johnston's music, and a bibliography of the composer's writings.

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