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The Roaring Silence

John Cage: A Life

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

John Cage has been described as the most important composer of our time. He combined classical European training with Eastern spirituality to produce an American amalgam of such vitality and originality that it continues to define what we mean by avant-garde. His influence has touched generations of artists, including Philip Glass, David Byrne, and his longtime collaborator Merce Cunningham. His work and ideas have influenced not only the world of music but also dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry.
The Roaring Silence documents his life in unrivaled detail, interweaving a close account of the evolution of his work with an exploration of his aesthetic and philosophical ideas, while placing these in the greater perspective of American life and letters. Paying due attention to Cage's inventions, such as the prepared piano, and his pioneering use of indeterminate notation and chance operations in composition (utilizing the I Ching), David Revill also illuminates Cage the performer, printmaker, watercolorist, expert amateur mycologist, game show celebrity, political anarchist, and social activist.
Arnold Schoenberg once called Cage "not a composer, but an inventor—of genius." This revised edition presents never-before-seen correspondence between Cage and other luminaries of his day, as well as new analysis into his legacy. The Roaring Silence celebrates the life and work of this true American original.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 8, 1993
      In this sympathetic biography, the late avant-garde composer John Cage is acclaimed as ``a man of joyous integrity'' who leaned toward the ascetic and the transcendent. Photos.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 31, 1992
      In this sympathetic biography, composer John Cage, who has devised scores for percussion ensembles, radios tuned at random, electrical instruments and pianos ``prepared'' with objects attached to the strings, is acclaimed as ``a man of joyous integrity'' who leans towards the ascetic and the transcendent. Revill, a music critic for the Times of London and the Guardian , seeks to show that Cage's life, work and ideas are all of a piece. His astute analyses of individual compositions are occasionally clarified by his discussion of Cage's dabblings in Zen, Eastern philosophy, anarchism, ecology and social thought. Although Revill had Cage's cooperation, his portrait of the avant-garde composer/painter/ poet as a sunny, spontaneous radical individualist seems strangely impersonal. Accounts of Cage's relations with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Arnold Schonberg, Pierre Boulez, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and other luminaries round out this study of the composer's continually evolving ideas. Photos.

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  • OverDrive Read
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  • English

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