"The sententious critic puts me to sleep. I would prefer a critic of imaginative scintillations. He would not be sovereign, nor dressed in red. He would bear the lightning flashes of possible storms." --Michel Foucault

Corbett seems to operate according to Foucault's injunction, and bears quite a few lightning flashes, due to his playful imagination and the imagination of the cutting edge artists he covers. "Extended Play" puts Cage and Clinton in the title, but actually focuses on free jazz/improvisation, not composition or funk. Corbett presents marvelous interviews with European free improvisers, including saxophonists Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann, guitarist Derek Bailey, and drummer Han Bennink, as well as Americans Sun Ra (composer and bandleader),and Anthony Braxton (composer and reed player). He profiles fellow Chicagoans Hal Russell, Fred Anderson, Von Freeman, and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (the latter three all tenor players), English bassist and bandleader Barry Guy, and Sainkho Namtchylak, the only female Siberian Tuva singer in the ranks of European free improv. He does interview John Cage, which I found uninteresting, and George Clinton, which is tremendous.

Whether despite or because of his poststructuralist leanings (I'm with Evan Parker, who, according to Corbett, "...knows I'm a Continental-philosophy kinda guy, which is something he's certain that he isn't."), Corbett takes a stance clearly on the side of "optimism concerning the possibility of resistance," resistance in the realm of popular music against the capitalist status quo.

Presently overseeing the Unheard Music series for Atavistic Records in Chicago -- free jazz/improv tapes buried in the vaults until now -- John Corbett is doing his part to keep ALL the signifiers free!

Like Greil Marcus and Robert Palmer, Corbett looks at (popular?) culture as both a product of and a determinant of culture at large. As a postmodernist, he delves into genres that are largely devoid of quality criticism as few are up to the task. Actually he's probably more of a Nat Hantoff or Frank Kofsky of our time in that he's quick to support what may commonly be refered to as music that tries its listeners patience and willingness to explore. I used this book as a reference for my thesis and have recommended it to several people.

John Cage was the first to introduce Pierre Boulez to the United States. In New York he took Boulez around visiting painters and musicians, this was the early Fifties. David Tudor(long a Cage friend) was performing Boulez's Second Piano Sonata for the first time. Bookstores were frequent stops and Boulez( we learn) never heard of the poet e.e.cummings, and bought a modest book of his poetry. Some thirty years later Boulez set a text of cummings for 22 unaccompanied voices. This correspondence was between two innovators coming from radically different places yet stopping at the same conceptual places. And it is a shame that this friendship fell out quickly,each going into radically different venues. Boulez although fascinated with chance procedures(which Cage had been working with the I Ching, Book of Changes at that time) Boulez was arrongantly fascinated by the aesthetic object,its history and attenuation, and has remained so since. This correspondence has frequent entries on the concept of indeterminacy, again Boulez comes to it via Mallarme, and aleatoric thinking, the throwing of the dice.Boulez sought a musical structure that contained the element of chance as in his Third Piano Sonata in the latter Fifties. Both however were at a creative place in modernity when the Western canon of structure and comprehensibility was falling itself.However it is odd for Boulez to this day thinks of his work as moments containing a "freedom" of something, when he conducts Mahler, he thinks of those passages that are freer than others,like a symphony is a dialogue between the two. Mahler's Sixth Symphony is the case in point. There are letters of Boulez to Cage, while in South America with the Barrault Theatre Company, one entry includes a description from Boulez that he is having a good time "milhauding" around, referring to Darius Milhaud the composer who frequently utilized folk elelments in his music by collecting them in volumes.Nattiez is a very sympathetic observer to this cause of modernity and the roots of things.

This book is a collection of interviews with John Cage, the late avant garde composer who was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. The interviews span nearly a half century and give a cogent idea of Cage's thought on music, art, education, politics, and social revision.

If you are curious about why a composer would write music that is "silent", why he would use chance, nonintention, and denounce music as communication, this is a good book to begin an overview of Cage's philosophy of art.

It also shows that Cage's musical thought was not monolithic, but changed several times in the course of his life, as did his music.

The more you read, the more you can enter into Duchamp's world! This one must definitly be one in your Duchamp's collection. Make yourself "READY MADE"

The various books, collections of pieces, essays, mesostics, cooking recipes,concert reports and performance works Cage had published throughout his long life have for many been more important than his music. (Cage never claimed) to have written music only/merely creating a more intense/extense hearing situation. He (himself when queried said) he never listens to music,recordings,but the sounds (as we all know now) that are all around us.Marvelous textures./ We simply need the committment to listen,to be committed to unitentionality,purposelessness. It is where divine intwervention/ inspiration or something similar an import which may or may not occur/possibly.

This rather large work "I - VI" is the summary/documentation of the prestigious Norton Lectures Series from 1988-89 at Harvard University. Time was when Cage was considered a joke by many, But now he is an American icon,honored/revered at every established citadel of academia.

Mesostics(which is the primary pages here)(pages 9 to 420) is(are) a kind of writing(of poetry)(esSays)(performance), it is as close the (English language) can get to Japanese,reading verticaly as well as horizontally. And that is what you need to do here most of the time,for sometimes a key word will run like a spine down the center of the page making some(or not) coherence with the remaining fragments you may(or may not) encounter. These (six(VI) sections) are like a performance (work),read in any order and any amount of it/ I found myself reading the particles of and complete words aloud for pleasure, skipping, letting (my eye) wander freely across the page, for non-meaning, or simply a combination and admixtures,combustions and consonant explosions which I've never encountered before. Whether (that is the correct) way is beside the point, for if you are looking for discrete meanings, well you will find it in bleak,cold fragmentariness. There are passages on the very bottom of each page, the question and answer section, where you may learn particular ways of playing Cage's sometimes rather difficult music. You never (improvise in) Cage, actually there is very little performing freedom. Once you understand a performing corridor or process you cannot digress from it. I found myself instantly at the bottom of the page most of the time,for Cage is an interesting storyteller, and a way of highlighting (actual) experiences from life.

There is an (orange) CD that accompanies this book A reading of mesostic(by John Cage)number 4/ IV. Cage speaks/recites in a frail baritone/ rich voice/ committed to the cause.

WriTings drawn from WitTgenstein( a laTe interest),Thoreau,Joyce,McCluhan and daily newspapers are combined in fifteen compositional meThods/strucTurs/intenTion/discipline/noTation/indeTterminacy/interpeneTraion/imiTationT/all this comes at the end and can be read lefT to riGht.

These are a collection of marvelous essays Marjorie Perloff has edited. The scope of Cage is seemingly immense, the implications of his work has touched varigated corners and crevices,abandoned places: the music world, the world of poetry,conceptual art, performance art, mushroom enthusiasts,opera, and other synergistic art forms we have no label for yet. Perloff herself chooses the influence of Duchamp to discuss, the ends of things of the Western canon was a frightening yet fascinating point in the last century. And Cage always had done everything,like Duchamp with an element of the lighthearted at work. There are analysis here as well as seasoned music essayist Jann Pasler's discussion on Cage's "Composition in Retrospect" a 1981 mesostic text. Pasler helps explain what this figuritivly complex yet disarmingly word play composition means. Cage wrote many of his most important works in this structural form. And his own "Overpopulation and Art" is included here, asa a guiding means of response to these participants. This is as close as Cage gets to social and political/environmental reflection, you will not recognize Cage here. Herbert Lindenberger is a well known writer in the cloistered world of Opera and he admirably reflects on Cage's one and only Opera "Europeras" and the Aesthics that may emit itself from that varigated and multidimensional work. Although aesthtics in its traditionally bound demeanor was always and remained a by-product of the Cage edifice, here in this opera he lets other impart their aesthtic desires by allowing singers to choose their own arias to perform. Also Cage scholar Joan Retallack(who has also an impressive series of interviews with Cage) speaks here on "Poetics of a Complex Realism", and this refers to the American dimension of Cage, a topic seldom discussed. This refers to the Trancendentalists tradition of social rebellion although quite passive in retrospect. Writers like Thoreau were important to Cage. Cage activism points in mysterious and undramatic ways. The making of meaning through performance and collaboration was what Cage had valued and he contributed that legacy to the last century. Artifacts of art need continuous nurturing,scholarly explication, regular performance and tried and tested aesthetic canons to be attenuated. Rather within this insecure world, Cage's hope was to nurture a tradition of performers,of communicators equipped with a conceptual fredom of expressive means through a varied and interdisciplinary world which didn't seem to depend on any one particular discipline or technique, as the rigours of composition or, playing the violin, or writing symmetrical verse.

I read this book many years ago and do not know if it is even still in print. I saw that no-one had reviewed it and felt duty bound to add my little bit in the hope it might persuade someone else to go to the trouble of seeking out this book. It is one of THOSE books, a true giant of a thing - not just for the ideas and insights it contains but for the wonderful way that it is written. Cage's music was years ahead of its time (still is probably), the book is the same. Brilliant, challenging, rambling, inspirational and utterly engrossing; it's the nearest any of us will ever get to being inside the mind of a genius. I can not recommend this book highly enough, but it is especially good if you are feeling like doing something new in your life and haven't quite got the nerve. This guy had guts!

this is really just transcripts of radio conversations between morton feldman and john cage in the 60's, not intended for publication. however, it may be because of that that it is so amazing. much is written about the friendship between cage and feldman, but here you get a glimpse of their relationship in action, shedding light on both the men and their music. a must read. (still available new, as a matter for fact; published by musiktexte in germany)

When Michael Nyman first published this work in the 70s, it was the only book of its kind to discuss some of the most cutting-edge stuff going around. Most musical texts avoided discussing the Fluxus group as "music," but Nyman integrates these radicals easily, and provided the first discussion of the Scratch Orchestra (Cardew et al), and related topics. The book still contains some of the clearest discussions of these topics around. It's great to have it back in print, though too bad Nyman couldn't be bothered to provide updates on some of the folks discussed, like Hugh Skempton.

In this work originally published in 1974, Nyman discusses the work of composers and performers who shifted the boundaries of music as regards notation, time, space, and the roles of the composer, performer and audience. The author seeks to identify and explain a whole body of musical work that existed outside the classical tradition and the avant-garde orthodoxies that flowed from it. He thus explores the Anglo-American musical tradition loosely associated with John Cage. Since 1974 this book has been considered the classical work on the radical alternative to the mainstream avant-garde as represented by Berio, Boulez and Stockhausen. Many of the current popular composers like Glass and Reich trace their root to this experimental school. The most fascinating chapter to me is "Minimal Music, Determinacy And The New Tonality" in which the Theatre Of Eternal Music (Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marion Zazeela and John Cale) as well as the work of Terry Riley is discussed. Photographs, illustrations and musical notations enliven the text and the book concludes with a selected source bibliography, a discography of experimental music and a bibliography of publications since 1974. Brian Eno has contributed an interesting foreword to this edition. The text can get a bit technical for the non-musician, but it remains a detailed work on a radical musical direction that has borne great fruit in the years since it was first analysed in this thorough and scholarly work.

Nyman's 1974 classic is here reprinted sans revisions. Brilliant! It captures a moment -- as Nyman concludes his preface, "Thank goodness I wrote it when I did." EM is not a survey of 20th century avant-garde music. It focuses on one trend, inaugurated by Cage, Wolff, Feldman and Brown in the 1950s, a trend which explicitly attempted to overturn the traditional avant-garde then marching under the banner of total serialism. Nyman contrasts Wolff to Stockhausen, then a leading serialist: "Stockhausen is speaking of an unwanted situation needing to be remedied by his intervention, Wolff of a situation he is quite happy to accept, leaving sounds to go their own way." (27) As Cage says in his "Silence,"

"Not an attempt to understand... Just an attention to the activity of sounds."

One of the great strengths of Nyman's short book is his careful attempt to define experimental music before he moves on to discuss the artists and their music. To summarize and paraphrase, he says experimental composers are excited by creating "a process of generating action," involving situations or fields delineated by compositional rules, but leaving them open to the performers. (4)

Experimental music is uncompromisingly radical, and represents an ongoing influence on creative music, but has certainly not become any sort of popular movement. So for instance, while the early "minimalists" Young and Riley were arguably part of the experimental tendency, as were Reich's early phase patterns, (and hence are included here by Nyman), the later works of Reich, and especially Glass, are no longer open and experimental. And while Eno and recent techno/ambient artists have been influenced, their innovations have been more technical than conceptual by comparison.

My recommendation if this sounds intriguing -- check out anything by the English free-improv group AMM, which is nowadays constituted by Eddie Prevost on percussion, Keith Rowe on guitar and electronics, and John Tilbury on piano!

Joan Retallack, a long-time friend and colleague of John Cage, has done us the favor of publishing this series of conversations between the two of them. These conversations (for they lack any conventional formality that might render them 'interviews'), which took place not long before Cage's death in 1992, run the gamut of topics. Through their amiable banter, one gets a great sense of what was going on in the oft-misunderstood artist's mind--especially as regards his fixation on chance operations and the I Ching. The talks also give ample insight into Cage's writing and visual art, practices for which he is lesser known. When not provoking thought about Cage himself, the two (and I mean both of them equally; Retallack has a meticulously rich and compelling mind, and expresses many enlightening points-of-view herself) have revealing conversations about everything from Duchamp to Joyce, Buckminster Fuller to the Koran.

Perhaps the most interesting and rare aspect of the book is the pervasive inclusion of the environmental and more mundane details of the conversations. She is careful to note the frequent occasions when Cage laughed, what he might have been cooking that day, interactions with an artist who stopped by to fix a bookshelf as a favor to Cage and to Merce Cunningham. Especially valuable is the penultimate conversation, when we are made privy to the beginning of Cage's composition process, as he begins to write a new piece on the spot with cellist Michael Bach. These insights into Cage's daily domestic life are perhaps the most revealing aspects of the book into his personality and philosophies.

For those familiar with Cage, this is a must-read. If you are skeptical or confused about his work, these talks will clarify a lot for you. If you have yet to be exposed to Cage, I recommend this book highly as an accurate and exhaustive portrait.

i consider my entire college education as a necessary a tool for understanding every detail of this book, and that use alone would make it worth the time and money i've spent on it :). it embraces every detail of postmodern theory, ancient philosophy, and avant-garde art. it makes the world a more vivid and better place to live in. the best case for anarchism i have read.

Joan Retallack is immensely gifted. If you're familiar with John Cage, you'll like this book. If you're not too familiar with John Cage, well, I have someone I'd like you to meet.

This is entertaining, compelling, thought-provoking stuff. I can think of few other people who are so mindful of WORD USAGE, or in this case, I guess, WORD "USCAGE." Many insights in this book. I recommend it highly.