Bøger af John Cage

Foraging for mushrooms with John Cage: writing, art, photography and ephemera from an idiosyncratic chapter in the composer's lifeImagined as an extended mushroom-foraging expedition, John Cage: A Mycological Foray gathers together Cage's mushroom-themed compositions, photographs, illustrations and ephemera. Indeterminacy Stories and other writings by Cage are interwoven throughout the first volume within a central essay examining Cage's enduring relationship with mycology. Also included is a transcript of Cage's 1983 performance, MUSHROOMS et Variationes. The second volume is the inaugural reproduction of Cage's 1972 portfolio, Mushroom Book, authored in collaboration with illustrator Lois Long and botanist Alexander H. Smith. Readers are thus drawn through the landscape of Cage's mycologically centred oeuvre and interests, discovering assorted works, images, compositions, philosophies and ephemera, as one might encounter assorted fungi and flora while foraging. John Cage: A Mycological Foray constitutes a new, idiosyncratic chapter in Cage's oeuvre, a departure from the composer's more established narrative. American composer and music theorist John Cage (1912-92) was a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music and a leading figure of the postwar avant-garde. His influence extended to the realms of dance, poetry, performance and visual art.

In the 39 letters of this collection, spanning 1942-46, Cage shows himself to be a man falling deeply in love. These letters have been transcribed, chronologically ordered, and in some instances reproduced in facsimile.

Special edition of the book that revolutionized our understanding of how we make and experience art

Following the success of English and German editions of Cage: Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter, a French-language edition is now available, translated by Christian-Martin Diebold. The Cage Paintings were conceived as a single coherent group, and displayed for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Their titles pay homage to the American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912 1992). In his "Lecture on Nothing," Cage famously declared "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it." Richter is equally suspicious of ideologies and prefers to allow viewers and critics to make up their own minds. Leading critic Robert Storr considers the importance of The Cage Paintings within Richter's practice and within the wider context of abstract art. A series of extraordinary, detailed photographs document the development of each painting, day by day, and show the artist at work on these monumental canvases, giving unique insight into his working methods.

John Cage (1912, Los Angeles - 1992, New York) gilt als einer der einflussreichsten Musiker der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Sein vielschichtiges Werk hat unsere Vorstellung von künstlerischer Avantgarde entscheidend mitgeprägt - nicht nur in der Musik, sondern auch in der Literatur und der bildenden Kunst, einschließlich Performances und Happenings. Cage war 1930 für anderthalb Jahre nach Europa gegangen, hatte Architekturgeschichte und Klavier in Paris studiert und die neuesten Entwicklungen in der europäischen Avantgarde kennengelernt. Zurück in den USA nahm er u.a. Privatunterricht bei Arnold Schönberg und gründete ein Percussion-Ensemble, in dem zeitweilig Merce Cunningham und Laszlo Moholy-Nagy mitspielten. Seine engen Verbindungen zu emigrierten Bauhaus-Künstlern, die Freundschaft mit Max Ernst und Peggy Guggenheim und seine Lehrtätigkeit u.a. am legendären Black Mountain College erweiterten die Kontakte, die Cage zeit seines Lebens auch zur bildenden Kunst pflegte. Der Dadaismus, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys und die Fluxus-Bewegung waren für seine experimentellen Kompositionen ähnlich wichtige Bezugspunkte wie die intensive Beschäftigung mit dem Zen-Buddhismus. Als er 1962 anlässlich einer Performance von Yoko Ono den antiken Ryoan-ji Garten in Kyoto besuchte, verarbeitete er dieses Erlebnis nicht nur musikalisch, sondern auch in einer Reihe graphischer Blätter, den sogenannten Ryoanji-Zeichnungen. Die komplette Serie von Bleistiftzeichnungen, die Konturen von fünfzehn Steinen wiedergeben, veröffentlichen wir hier als Band I des Catalogue Raisonné von John Cages künstlerischen Arbeiten erstmals in Buchform.

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 ... 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.

Written between the late '30s and the early '90s, these pieces by John Cage here acquire the permanence they deserve. Some have never been published before. Many appeared only in magazines, journals, and catalogues; others in concert programs and on record covers. Also included are the texts of lectures and - of crucial importance to the appreciation of his music - Cage's notes on the performance of his compositions, courtesy of his music publisher, C.F. Peters.

A major American thinker of the 20th century muses on anarchism.

Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including 'How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)' and 'Juilliard Lecture.'

Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters which reflect on their own music and the music and culture of the time. This correspondence, together with a further letter from 1962 and various other relevant documents, have been edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and appear here for the first time completely in English.

John Cage's poetical statement on indeterminacy, Duchamp, art, life and more Written in his characteristic "mesostics" (lines of prose poetry linked by a central vertical acrostic), Composition in Retrospect is a statement of methodology in which composer John Cage examines the central issues of his work: indeterminacy, imitation, variable structure and contingency. Finished only shortly before his death in 1992, Composition in Retrospect completes the documentation of Cage's thought that began with his classic book Silence (1961), but it is an introduction and invitation to his work as much as a summary or conclusion. Also included in this volume (at Cage's request) is "Themes and Variations," a piece written in 1982 about friends and heroes such as Jasper Johns, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp and Erik Satie. Together these pieces form a book that is both a testament to the artists Cage admired and a clear statement of his own ars poetica.