John Cage Book of Days 2012

by John Cage, Laura Diane Kuhn (Editor)

Few twentieth-century artists have been as quotable as the composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist John Cage, and his aphorisms have become mantras of fans the world over. Celebrating his gift for playful, concise wisdom, and published on the centenary of Cage's birth amid a huge wave of renewed interest in his life and work, The John Cage Book of Days 2012 is a pocket calendar that brings together the composer's words with noteworthy historical events in his life. This year we celebrate his great love of food, drawing upon his anecdotally rich text entitled "Where Are We Eating? and What Are We Eating?" (first published in Empty Words: Writings '73-'78, in 1978). With little thumbnail images drawn from Cage's favorite cookbooks and a soft cover sporting one of his extraordinary edible drawings ("No. 1, 1990" ) made entirely of lemon, sesame seeds and mushrooms, everything in this calendar conspires to make even the mundane task of managing a life pleasurable, fresh and delicious.

120 pages, Paperback

Published July 31, 2011

About the author

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the 20th century. Another famous creation of Cage's is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music and coincidentally their shared love of mushrooms, but Cage's major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".