Conversing with Cage

341 Pages·2002·2.3 MB·English

by  Richard Kostelanetz

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