John cage music biography writers

In his teens and twenties, John Cage b. Once he began focusing all his attention on music, he composed in a manner that demonstrated an interest in Arnold Schoenberg. A brief period of study under Schoenberg himself convinced Cage to move decisively away from pitch-based media to percussion, then an emerging medium offering new sonic possibilities.

Writing for percussion, he began to think of compositional materials as gamuts—unordered sets of sounds—that would be realized as music through the application of various types of durational structures. Such structures might be articulated by the sounding materials themselves, or they might remain unheard as abstract schemas of compositional design.

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In addition to music, Cage also made various kinds of texts and mostly from the late s nearly 1, works of visual art. His ideas about art resonated powerfully with the countercultural turn during the s, and they continue to inspire individuals from many backgrounds. Critical and scholarly writings concerning his work began to appear in the mids and began to intensify around ; in general, much of this work emphasizes the music made before , with less attention paid to texts and visual art and very little detail on any work after This article emphasizes this later period of scholarship and the development, in recent years, of new approaches to his work, including the analysis of the sounds in completed works, performance practice, and reception.

Tomkins presents important biographical material for the first time, though without sufficient documentation. Silverman and Larson include valuable context and employ more comprehensive research methods. Nicholls and Haskins offer short, critical introductions that point the reader toward other important secondary literature.