The Cambridge Companion to John Cage

by David Nicholls (Editor)

American composer John Cage (1912-1992) was without doubt one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century music. He spent much of his career in pursuit of an unusual goal--"giving up control so that sounds can be sounds", as he put it. As well as composing around 300 works, he was also a prolific performer, writer, poet, and visual artist. This Companion celebrates the richness and diversity of Cage's achievements and provides readers with a fully rounded portrait of a fascinating figure.

Genres: Music

287 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2002

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name.

David Nicholls is a British musicologist and composer. Since August 2000 he has been Professor of Music at the University of Southampton. From 1987 to 2000 he was Professor of Music and Research Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Keele University. Between 1984 until 1987 Nicholls was based at Selwyn College, Cambridge as a Keasbey Fellow in American Studies.

http://www.soton.ac.uk/music/staff/Pe...

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole, this is a very strong anthology in the Cambridge Companion series. Divided into three parts (Aesthetic contexts; Sounds,words, images; Interaction and Influence), the book investigates the different facets of Cage's life and career using a wide variety of methodologies. There are surveys of his contributions in a particular area such as Kathan Brown's essay "Visual Art" (Ch. 7) and most notably, David Patterson's "Words and Writings," which, for my money, is one of the best examples of a bibliographic essay I've seen. For the most part, the language and content is accessible, although there are a few instances of "insider's club" name-dropping without description or annotation. For those heavily invested in analysis of Cage's music, it would be a good idea to have The Music of John Cage by James Pritchett close at hand, as it is one of the most often cited sources in the anthology. David Bernstein's "Cage and High Modernism" essay gives a necessarily simplified and succinct explanation of Cage's use of the I Ching, which is useful as many sources simply gloss over it. William Brooks, in his contribution "Music II: from the late 1960s" traces threads from Cage's own descriptions of materials, method, structure, and form (see Cage's "Defense of Satie" (1948), parsing it into a discussion of works with a haiku-based structure, works that use graphic materials, works that use ambient sounds, and those works that alternate sound and silence. Leta Miller's "Cage's Collaborations" provides a nuanced examination of the different ways in which Cage "collaborated" and the questions (and some answers) that arise regarding artistic collaboration as a whole. John Holzaepfel examines one of Cage's most famous collaborations ("Cage and Tudor"), illuminating the mostly symbiotic relationship and how Tudor's involvement shaped both the works and the reception thereof.

Some of the repeated information is cross-referenced and acknowledged, some of it is not. The redundancies are only mildly troubling (in terms of reading experience) should you read it cover to cover. Overall, David Nicholls did a fine job of editing the book and most of the essays seem to have a consciousness of the whole. Helpful too is the "Chronology" on pp. xii - xiii, especially since, as many of the essays note, a chronological discussion is not always the best approach to examining Cage.

[Fraser Kinnear · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not the intro to Cage that I was hoping for. Also, I was surprised by how much content wasn't about specific compositions. I probably would have appreciated this more had I read some of Cage's own writing, or seen his visual stuff.