Author: Martin Iddon Publisher: ISBN: 0190938471 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
Looking at one of the twentieth century's most notorious musical masterpieces, John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra examines Cage's compositional process, its infamous performance history, and its influence on philosophical ideas of what music actually is.
Author: Martin Iddon Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190938498 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 481
Book Description
John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra is one of the seminal works of the second half of the twentieth century, and the centerpiece of the middle period of Cage's output. It is a culmination of Cage's work up to that point, incorporating notation techniques he had spent the past decade developing - techniques which remain radical to this day. But despite Cage's vitality to the musical development of the twentieth century, and the Concert's centrality to his career, the work is still rarely performed and even more rarely examined in detail. In this volume, Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas provide a rich and critical examination of this enormously significant piece, tracing its many contexts and influences - particularly Schoenberg, jazz, and Cage's own compositional practice - through a wide and previously untapped range of archival sources. Iddon and Thomas explain the Concert through a reading of its many histories, especially in performance - from the legendary performer disobedience and audience disorder of its 1958 New York premiere to a no less disastrous European premiere later the same year. They also highlight the importance of the piano soloist who premiered the piece, David Tudor, and its use alongside choreographer Merce Cunningham's Antic Meet. A careful examination of an apparently bewildering piece, the book explores the critical response to the Concert's performances, re-interrogates the mythology surrounding it, and finally turns to the music itself, in all its component parts, to see what it truly asks of performers and listeners.
Author: Mark Doffman Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190947292 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 617
Book Description
Music represents one of humanity's most vivid contemplations on the nature of time itself. The ways that music can modify, intensify, and even dismantle our understanding of time's passing is at the foundation of musical experience, and is common to listeners, composers, and performers alike. The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music provides a range of compelling new scholarship that examines the making of musical time, its effects and structures. Bringing together philosophical, psychological, and socio-cultural understandings of time in music, the chapters highlight the act of 'making' not just as cultural construction but also in terms of the perceptual, cognitive underpinnings that allow us to 'make' sense of time in music. Thus, the Handbook is a unique synthesis of divergent perspectives on the nature of time in music. With its focus on contemporary music (while paying attention to some of the generative temporalities of the nineteenth century), the volume establishes the richness and complexity of so much current music-making and in the process overcomes historic demarcations between art and popular musics.
Author: David Tudor Publisher: A-R Editions, Inc. ISBN: 198720302X Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 403
Book Description
When I think of music, I think of you and vice-versa, John Cage told David Tudor in the summer of 1951. Looking back years later, Cage said that every work he composed in the ensuing two decades was composed for Tudoreven if it was not written for the piano, Tudors nominal instrument. The collaboration of Cage and Tudor reached an apex in the Solo for Piano from Cages Concert for Piano and Orchestra (195758). None of Cages previous works had employed more than a single type of notation. In contrast, the Solo for Piano consists of eighty-four notational types, ranging from standard line-and-staff notation to extravagant musical graphics. The notational complexity of the Solo for Piano led Tudor to write outor realizea performance score, from which he played at the premiere of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra in May 1958. The next spring, when Cage requested music to complement his ninety-minute lecture Indeterminacy, Tudor created a second realization, for which he devised a new temporal structure to implement Cages notations. This edition of Tudors second realization of the Solo for Piano presents Tudors performance score in the spatial-temporal layout of its proportional notation. An introductory essay discusses the early collaborations of Cage and Tudor, as well as the genesis, creative process, and performance history of the Solo for Piano. The critical commentary examines each of Tudors methods of realization; which notations from Cages score Tudor selected and why; how Tudor interpreted Cages often ambiguous performance instructions; how Tudor distributed the resulting sounds temporally; and the ways in which Tudors realization fulfills, transcends, and sometimes contravenes the instructions of Cages score.
Author: John Cage Publisher: Wesleyan University Press ISBN: 0819575925 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 673
Book Description
This annotated selection of more than five hundred letters by the groundbreaking composer and avant-garde icon covers every phase of his career. This volume reveals the intimate life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham. They shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Written in Cage’s singular voice—by turns profound, irreverent, and funny—these letters reveal Cage’s passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. They include correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among many others. Readers will enjoy Cage's commentary about the people and events of a transformative time in the arts, as well as his meditations on the very nature of art. This volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.
Author: John Cage Publisher: Hayward Gallery Publishing ISBN: Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
This book is published to accompany the first major UK retrospective of the visual art of the pioneering American composer and artist John Cage (1912ndash;1992). The use of chance operations, in particular the Chinese Book of Changes, or I Ching, was central to Cage's compositional method and his approach to his drawings, watercolours and prints, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. Cage's practice is explored in new interviews with key collaborators: printmaker Kathan Brown; Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust; artist Ray Kass; and Julie Lazar, curator of Cage's 1992 'composition for a museum', Rolywholyover: A Circus. Extracts from a 1966 interview between Cage and the critic Irving Sandler are also included. At the heart of the book is a 'Companion to Cage': a selection of quotations by Cage and notes on key themes and influences from 'Alphabet' to 'Zen', making it essential reading on this important figure of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Published to accompany the UK touring exhibition in 2010 ndash; 2011 at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; Kettle's Yard, Cambridge; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.
Author: Martin Iddon Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108480063 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 331
Book Description
The last - and largest - of Cage's most important formative exchanges of letters, discussing music criticism and questions of aesthetics.
Author: Martin Iddon Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107014328 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
Martin Iddon discusses one of the twentieth century's most provocative musical collaborations: between composer John Cage and pianist David Tudor.
Author: Martin Iddon
Author: Martin Iddon
Author: Mark Doffman
Author: David Tudor
Author: James Pritchett
Author: John Cage
Author: John Cage
Author: John Cage
Author: Martin Iddon
Author: Martin Iddon