Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Cage and Friends
- Part II Colleagues and Criticism
- Part III Earlier Interviews
- Part IV Extravaganzas
- Appendix I Finnegans Wake
- Appendix II John Cage Uncaged
- Selected Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Works by John Cage
- Eastman Studies in Music
5 - Jackson Mac Low: Interview with Peter Dickinson, New York City, July 2, 1987
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Cage and Friends
- Part II Colleagues and Criticism
- Part III Earlier Interviews
- Part IV Extravaganzas
- Appendix I Finnegans Wake
- Appendix II John Cage Uncaged
- Selected Bibliography
- General Index
- Index of Works by John Cage
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
Introduction
Jackson Mac Low was born in Chicago in 1922 and died in New York in 2004. Around 1986 Cage compared him with the New England writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), whose account of his two years living in a cabin beside Walden Pond, near Concord, from 1845 to 1847 has become a classic. Cage was attracted by Thoreau's advocacy of civil disobedience.
Mac Low's Thoreau: he gives exact attention. No added flavor: just it. His poetry sets us ecstatic, though he insists we speak it “soberly and clearly (as in serious conversation.)” Bells ring (Stein, Whitman): others will (Joyce, Ancient Chinese). He was ringing them before we were able to hear. Musician, he introduced poetry to orchestra without syntax. Poet, he “sets all well afloat.” That's why his poetry, even though it looks like it, is poetry.
Mac Low returned the compliment by writing about Cage's literary work. Jerome Rothenberg, in a preface, written in 1980, to Mac Low's Representative Works, says:
Mac Low stands with John Cage as one of two major artists bringing systematic chance operations into our poetic and musical practice since the Second World War. The resulting work raises fundamental questions about the nature of poetry and the function of the poet as creator. For raising such and other questions, Mac Low like Cage has sometimes met with strong rejection and … has found less public recognition for work that's often sensed as “abstract” and that seems, by setting “chance” over “choice” in the making of poems, to act against the projection of personality usually associated with “the poet.” Still he's widely influential and recognized by many (Cage among them) as the principal experimental poet of his time.
Rothenberg goes on to explain how he found ways into admiring Mac Low's work through performing it—a link with Cage's writings—and Cage himself wrote an appreciation of Mac Low in 1980. Rothenberg stressed Mac Low's musical studies in early childhood—piano, harmony, violin—and later lessons in New York with various piano teachers, including Grete Sultan, for whom Cage wrote his Etudes Australes. Mac Low attended Cage’s classes in experimental composition at the New School for Social Research from 1957 to 1960, and Cage provided music for Mac Low's play The Marrying Maiden.
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- Information
- CageTalkDialogues with and about John Cage, pp. 93 - 101Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006