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Conversing with Cage PDF

341 Pages·2002·2.3 MB·English
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Conversing with CAGE Other works by RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Books Authored Installations My life in/of words The Theatre of Mixed Means (1968) Books Edited Master Minds (1969) The End of Intelligent Writing (1974) On Contemporary Literature (1964, 1969) I Articulations/Short Fictions (1974) Twelve from the Sixties (1967) Numbers: Poems & Stories (1975) The Young American Writers (1967) Openings & Closings (1975) Beyond Left & Right: Radical Thought for Our Times Portraits from Memory (1975) (1968) “The End” Appendix/“The End” Essentials (1979) Possibilities of Poetry (1970) Twenties in the Sixties (1979) Moholy-Nagy (1970, 1991) Metamorphosis in the Arts (1980) John Cage (1970, 1991) More Short Fictions (1980) Future’s Fictions (1971) Autobiographies (1981) Seeing through Shuck (1972) The Old Poetries and the New (1981) In Youth (1972) American Imaginations (1983) Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) The Grants-Fix (1987) Essaying Essays (1975) The Old Fictions and the New (1987) Younger Critics in North America (1976) On Innovative Music(ian)s (1989) Esthetics Contemporary (1978, 1989) The New Poetries and Some Olds (1991) Text-Sound Texts (1980) Politics in the African-American Novel (1991) The Yale Gertrude Stein (1980) On Innovative Art(ist)s (1992) American Writing Today (1981, 1991) A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (1993, 1999) The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature (1982) Wordworks: Poems New & Selected (1993) Gertrude Stein Advanced (1989) Minimal Fictions (1994) Merce Cunningham (1992) On Innovative Performance(s) (1994) John Cage: Writer (1993) An ABC of Contemporary Reading (199) Writings About John Cage (1993) Crimes of Culture (1995) Nicolas Slonimsky: The First One Hundred Years Fillmore East: Recollections of Rock Theater (1995) (1994) One Million Words of Booknotes, 1959–1993 (1995) A Portable Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Radio Writings (1995) Musicians (1995) John Cage Ex(plain)ed (1996) A B.B. King Companion (1997) Thirty Years of Critical Engagements with John Cage Writings on Glass (1997, 1999) (1996) A Frank Zappa Companion (1997) 3-Element Stories (1998) AnOther E.E.Cummings (1998) Vocal Shorts: Collected Performance Texts (1998) The Great American Person of Avant-Garde Letters: A Political Essays (1999) Gertrude Stein Reader (2002) 3 Canadian Geniuses (2001) Virgil Thomson: A Reader (2002) More Wordworks (2002) Books Coauthored and Edited Thirty-Five Years of Visible Writing (2002) The New American Arts (1965) Records and Compact Discs Performance Scripts Invocations (1981) Epiphanies (1980) Seductions (1981) Seductions (1986) Relationships (1983) Lovings (1991) New York City (1984) 1001 Contemporary Ballets (2001) A Special Time (1985) Films Coproduced and Directed Americas’ Game (1988) The Gospels Abridged (1990) Constructivist Fictions (1978) Kaddish (1990) Ein Verlorenes Berlin (1983) Videotapes A Berlin Lost (1985) Berlin Perdu (1986) Three Prose Pieces (1975) El Berlin Perdido (1987) Video Writing (1987) Berlin Sche-Einena Jother (1988) Invocations (1988) Epiphanies (1981–1993) The Gospels Abridged (1988) Holograms Kinetic Writing (1989) Kaddish (1990) On Holography (1978) America’s Game (2001) Antitheses (1985) Retrospective Exhibitions Hidden Meanings (1989) Wordsand (1978) iii RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Conversing with CAGE SECOND EDITION ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Copyright © 1987 and 2003 by Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage, and The John Cage Trust Design and typography: Jack Donner All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form o by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photo copying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 0-203-42703-3 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-43899-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-93791-4 (hb) ISBN 0-415-93792-2 (pb) Dedicated by RK & JC To Klaus Schöning Fanny & Nadja Contents Preface viii ONE: Autobiography 1 TWO: Precursors 37 THREE: His Own Music (to 1970) 57 FOUR: His Own Music (after 1970) 81 FIVE: His Performances 101 SIX: His Writings 133 SEVEN: Radio and Audiotape 155 EIGHT: Visual Arts 169 NINE: Dance 193 TEN: Successors 201 ELEVEN: Esthetics 211 TWELVE: Pedagogy 245 THIRTEEN: Social Philosophy 263 Coda 293 Acknowledgments 295 Bibliography 301 Some of the Interviewers 307 Index 313 Preface Few artists of his eminence or his conversational brilliance were as generous with interviews as John Cage, who honored requests from undergraduate newspapers with attention and grace equal to those from slick magazines; and these interviews have appeared all over the world. Since they were individually incomplete, while most had elements lacking in others, it seemed appropriate to select exemplary passages, and from these selections to compose a sort of extended ur-interview that Cage ideally might have given. I decided to gather his choicest comments under several rubrics, and then order those comments as though they were parts of a continuous conversation similar to, say, Pierre Cabanne’s Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (1967). While these rubrics may violate the style and content of Cage’s thinking, they nonetheless serve the convenient function of organizing what he did not organize himself. Indeed, such structuring is perhaps a principal difference between talk and print. Though remarks as such may not be literature, conversation as provocative and elegant as Cage’s, so full of important ideas, often attains the quality we call classic. Admittedly, someone else could have chosen different nuggets from the same verbal mine, assembling them in wholly different ways. (And if they did, that result would be a book I’d like to read.) Even though I have been identified as this book’s “editor” (sometimes by academics who should have known better), I consider myself its Composer, for Cagean reasons expressed in the third epigraph to this book, and thus its Author. Since we were making a new book, it was decided not to draw from interviews in previous books wholly devoted to Cage’s work: his own books, which are now over a dozen; my own documentary monograph, John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970; London: Allen Lane, 1971; New York: Da Capo, 1991), which also appeared in German (Köln: Dumont, 1973) and Spanish (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1974); Daniel Charles’ Pour les oiseaux (Paris: Belfond, 1976), which at last count has been translated into English (For the Birds [Boston and London: Marion Boyars, 1981]) and German (Für die Vogel [Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1984]); Klaus Schöning’s Roaratario (Konigstein, Germany: Athenäum, 1982), which is bilingual; The John Cage Reader (New York: C.F.Peters, 1982), compiled by Peter Gena and ix Jonathan Brent; and Joan Retallack’s Musicage (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University, 1996). To these, as well as Cage’s work in general, this new book is both an introduction and a supplement. For some of its readers, it may, over a period of years, perhaps function as both. Conversing would not have been completed without the cooperation of John Cage, who, perhaps because he saved so little paper, gave me the right and freedom to put his thoughts together and then checked the manuscript for errors and infelicities, to my gratitude, putting his own addenda between ostentatious dingbats (while mine appear between more-familiar brackets). Those recalling his meticulousness will be amused to know that he proofread the final text three times, trying to find a passage he thought dupli-cated. Eventually, he located it: It was the third epigraph—a quote from a Cage interview that also appears within this book—which I mentioned in this preface! This book depended as well on the cooperation of numerous interviewers, who kindly sent me their manuscripts and extended their permissions. Their names are printed at the ends of all passages drawn from their texts with the year identifying the date of original publication (unless the conversation happened long before); all questions are theirs, unless brack-eted. As no effort was made to change present tense to past, look to the end of the excerpt to ascertain when Cage was speaking. Further information about the interviews and interviewers is given in the appendices at the back of the book. My fingers did the initial transcribing for the 1988 first edition on my Kaypro 2 computer; and just as J.S.Bach learned from copying his pre- decessors’ scores, so the experience of having Cage’s conversation pass through my hands was generally an instructive pleasure. (Thanks to ever more efficient text-scanning technology, it’s probably a pleasure no one will have again.) I thank Richard Carlin for commissioning this new edition for the fifteenth anniversary of the original publication (and Cage’s ninetieth birthday, had he lived; now a decade after his death). Given the choice between seeing a book sell a million copies before a precipitous disappearance and seeing it reprinted more than a decade later, I prefer the latter. Josh Carr assisted in selecting material for this new edition as well as helping in the copyediting chain. Marc Dachy sent me additional passages that he incorporated into his Conversations Avec John Cage (Paris, 2000). Initially in French, these appear here in English with credit to their interviewers. Stephen Dekovich prepared a new index (based on Larry Solomon’s earlier version) in addition to proofreading the typeset pages. Formal acknowledgments appear in an appendix as an extension of the copyright page. Richard Kostelanetz New York, New York, 14 May 1986; 14 May 2002

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Conversing with Cage draws on over 150 interviews with John Cage conducted over four decades to draw a full picture of his life and art. Filled with the witty aphorisms that have made Cage as famous as an esthetic philosopher as a composer, the book offers both an introduction to Cage's way of think
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