Introduction

Otto Luening was born in Milwaukee in 1900 and died in New York City in 1996. His father was a graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory and later was director of the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In childhood he studied piano and flute and was largely self-taught until he went to the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Munich. In Zurich he played the flute professionally, studied with Feruccio Busoni, made his debut as a conductor, and was an actor and stage manager for James Joyce's English Players Company. Luening returned to Chicago in 1920, established himself as a conductor, and held various university posts.

His output as a composer is extremely varied, often involving amateurs or students in the community. He was a pioneer in electronic music—his first works date from 1952, and several were collaborations with Vladimir Ussachevsky. Together they established what became known as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center at Columbia University. During a remarkably active career Luening either founded or supported many leading American music organizations and received many honors. His pupils included some prominent American composers.

Interview

By permission of the Otto Luening Trust

PD Was Cage a bolt from the blue, or is there a context for him in American music?

OL There is a certain sequence in the avant-garde and the futurist movement represented here. The first man I think of was Leo Ornstein. In 1910 or 1911 he was the enfant terrible with Wild Man's Dance and other pieces that were sensational at the time. Then he calmed down and became a good piano teacher in Philadelphia but continued composing. He was an avant-gardist who didn't carry it out all his life but moved into another area. I came across him when I went over to Europe as a boy.

The next thing was the Dada movement in Zurich with Tristan Tzara. I ran into that when I was at the Academy in Munich, but when America entered the war I was kicked out as an enemy alien and had to get to Switzerland. There were many refugees there, including the Dadaists.

Introduction

Kurt Schwertsik, one of Austria's leading composers, was born in Vienna in 1935 and studied composition and horn at the Vienna Music Academy. He became a professional horn player and in 1958 started, with Friedrich Cerha, the new music ensemble Die Reihe. In the years 1959–62 he studied with Stockhausen in Darmstadt and Cologne, but in 1965 he cofounded the Salonkonzerte “to liven up the stifling academicism of new music” and attacked aspects of the avant-garde, for which he was ostracized by Darmstadt as he moved toward Dada under the influence of Cage. Since then he has had a steady stream of international commissions and has taught at the Vienna Conservatory, the Vienna Hochschule, and in California. In 1987 he said: “I believe the function of art is to denounce seriousness. It should be fun. There’s a halo of awe around modern music. You achieve more if you’re not serious.” Photographs of Schwertsik in youth and maturity look remarkably like Erik Satie, whose work and philosophy he has admired for many years. His Strenger Engel was included in Cage's Notations (1969).

Interview

Approved by Kurt Schwertsik

PD Do you remember when you first came across Cage's work?

KS It was a concert by David Tudor—I think it was 1957 in Vienna—with all the beautiful features of that time, such as a drumstick in the piano and all sorts of sounds. People were flabbergasted. Tudor was very nice; we didn't speak very good English then. [laughs] It was the first listening experience I had with the music of Cage and, of course, Feldman and Christian Wolff too. I also saw Cage at Darmstadt where he gave three lectures, including the “Lecture on Nothing” where he has those beautiful pauses. And he gave another lecture during which he lit cigarettes. Each one was somehow handled differently—smoked once, twice, not at all, or smoked to the butt. [laughs]

He also gave a course where he explained what he had published in the periodical Die Reihe about his Music for Piano, where you take a sheet of paper and you mark the points and the irregularities on the paper according to the number you got from the I Ching and then you draw the lines over these little points.

Introduction

David Tudor was born in Philadelphia in 1926 and died in New York in 1996. He studied piano and organ from childhood and studied composition with Stefan Wolpe. From his early teens he held traditional posts as an organist, finally at Swarthmore College until 1948, and he then taught piano at the Contemporary Music School, New York, and at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Immediately after he gave the American premiere of Boulez's Sonata No. 2 in 1950, he was much in demand as the preeminent virtuoso pianist of the avant-garde, which included Stockhausen and many others as well as Cage, with whom he had a long partnership. Tudor was involved with the first happening at Black Mountain College in 1952; he lived at Stony Point with Cage and other artists and spent over forty years with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded in 1953. He taught at various institutions, including the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. From the late 1960s onward he developed as a composer in the medium of live electronics, designing his own equipment. Some of his works were presented as collaborations with other composers, including Cage.

For his own solo performances Tudor frequently made fastidious realizations of indeterminate scores, which led to interpretations of unique authority and distinction. Cage's debt to Tudor was incalculable. In 1965 he discussed the different tempos in Music of Changes: “David Tudor learnt a form of mathematics which he didn't know before in order to translate those tempo indications into actual time. It was a very difficult process and very time-consuming for him.” In 1973 Cage admitted: “Most of the music I’ve written has been for individuals who have developed a virtuosity, who’ve devoted themselves to this work in a way that involved them in discovery and such things as stamina. The perfect example, of course, is David Tudor.” And finally, in 1992 Cage said, “He's a very important musician and a very striking one” and referred to Tudor's remarkable ear and his independent career as a composer.

Interview

By permission of the David Tudor Trust

PD What's your first recollection of anything to do with Cage?

DT I recall that one of my teachers remarked that she had gone to a concert of his music for prepared piano—I think it was the Sonatas and Interludes—and she simply remarked that she found it very unusual and interesting.

Introduction

The British response to Cage's first visit since 1966, when Music Now billed him as “the most influential living composer,” cannot have been encouraging. Hugo Cole went to hear Cage and Tudor read and talk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on May 10, 1972. He reported that Cage emphasized that he used the I Ching merely as a utility “to become free of my likes and dislikes,” but Cole was perplexed because Cage apparently said he didn’t particularly want to compose but people kept asking him for works, adding: “My favorite music is no music at all; I enjoy the sounds round me.” Cole interviewed Cage and wrote a sympathetic article as a preview to The Royal Albert Hall concert on May 22. Each half of the concert consisted of a simultaneous performance of a work by Tudor and one by Cage: Tudor’s Rainforest with Cage's Mureau, and Tudor's Untitled with Cage's Mesostics re Merce Cunningham.

Peter Stadlen, the Vienna-born British pianist and critic associated with the Second Viennese School who had given the premiere of Webern's Piano Variations in 1937, gained some satisfaction over the poor attendance in the vast Royal Albert Hall in spite of the publicity and added, “What was actually heard, in a darkened hall with two shadowy figures crouching over the usual apparatus, might have been mistaken by the un-Tudored ear (sorry about that) for two low-voiced drunks, making their way home, to the steady accompaniment of high-pitched tinnitus, such as will result from chronically inflamed Eustachian tubes and taking all of an hour over it.” The musicologist and editor of The New Grove Dictionary, Stanley Sadie, went even further by asking how one could judge something that “conscientiously avoids all points of reference to artistic experience” and “professedly has no standards.” Sadie concluded: “The pieces given at the Cage-Tudor concert are not designed as musical experiences which embody planning and organization (built-in or spontaneous), but are actively nihilistic in intention. As far as I was concerned, they were successful: my senses were numbed, my mind left blank.” Cage himself was dissatisfied and told Eric Mottram a few days later:

Introduction

At the start of a new millennium John O’Mahony was able to say: “Merce Cunningham is, without doubt, the world's greatest living choreographer. His name stands alongside Martha Graham and George Balanchine in the pantheon of mercurial figures that transformed twentieth-century dance, though his work arguably reaches further and deeper, celebrating sheer movement for its own stark, austere sake.”

Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington, on April 16, 1919, the second son of Clifford D. and Marion Cunningham. His father was a lawyer of Irish descent, and his mother was a teacher. In his teens he took classes in ballroom and tap dancing, and after graduating from high school in 1936 he went to George Washington University, D.C., before attending the Cornish School in Seattle the following year. As Bonnie Bird explains in her interview (chapter 3), he joined her class in 1937, met Cage in 1938, and in 1939 went to the Bennington Summer School for Dance held at Mills College, where he met Martha Graham. This was a crucial encounter, since she was immediately impressed, and as a result Cunningham left the Cornish School and joined her company in New York. He made his debut with a lead in her Every Soul Is a Circus on Broadway.

Cunningham eventually became impatient with the narrative aspects of Graham's approach to dance and left her company, encouraged by Cage after he arrived in New York in 1942. David Vaughan, archivist at the Cunningham Dance Foundation, has said, “Movement itself is the principal subject matter of his dances: neither narrative nor musical form determines their structure.” Landmarks in the fifty-year Cunningham-Cage collaboration were Credo in US (1942), with choreography by Cunningham and Jean Erdman and music by Cage, given at Bennington College, Vermont, on August 1, 1942; and their first full New York program on April 5, 1944, with Triple-Paced, Root of an Unfocus, Tossed as It Is Untroubled, The Unavailable Memory of, Totem Ancestor, and Spontaneous Earth. In 1948 Cunningham joined the faculty of the School of American Ballet, but he and Cage gave recitals of solo dance and piano music at colleges and other venues in the United States through the 1940s and 50s. In 1949 they both went to Paris.

Introduction

John Milton Cage was born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, and died in New York City on August 12, 1992. He often mentioned his impressively named paternal grandfather, Gustavus Adolphus Williamson Cage, who took a first degree at CU-Boulder and did postgraduate work at the University of Denver. After that, Cage's grandfather became a dogmatic and rather intolerant minister in the Methodist Episcopalian Church, and he was apparently suspicious of music. Cage's father, an engineer and inventor who worked in various fields with limited success, was also named John Milton Cage (1886–1964), and his wife, Lucretia Harvey (1885–1968), was the pianist at the local church. Later, she took part in the activities of women's clubs and reported on them for the Los Angeles Times. Cage took up the story of his family background and his first musical influences and training through his aunts. Significantly, he came across the work of Gertrude Stein when he was at Pomona College—and subsequently became a dropout.

But Cage returned to academic institutions later. In 1948 and 1952 he taught at Black Mountain College, North Carolina; in 1956 and 1959 he gave classes at the New School for Social Research in New York City; and he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1960 and again in 1970. He was composer in residence at the University of Cincinnati, was artist in residence at the University of California at Davis, was elected University of California Regents Lecturer at San Diego, and became Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1988–89. From the 1960s onward he increasingly received international commissions and awards, and his work in the visual arts was widely exhibited. This recognition moved to a climax with plans toward his eightieth birthday, which he did not live to see.

Interview

PD I’m interested in the background of musicians from their earliest times. Somehow it all fits. Your father was an inventor?

JC Right.

PD But on your mother's side there were professional musicians?

JC My mother's sisters were. My Aunt Phoebe was a singer, pianist, and piano teacher. Aunt Marge had a contralto voice.

BBC Radio 3, The Barbican, London, January 16–18, 2004

January 16.

Concert 1: Schuman, New England Triptych; Cage, The Seasons; Cowell,

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Antheil, A Jazz Symphony; Ives, Central

Park in the Dark; Copland, El Salón México; Cage, 4_33_

BBC Symphony Orchestra/Lawrence Foster, Philip Mead (piano)

Concert 2: Feldman, Piano; Wolff, Bread and Roses; Schoenberg, Piano Pieces

Op. 33a & b; Cage, Solo for Piano

Nicholas Hodges (piano)

January 17.

Concert 3: Cage, String Quartet in Four Parts; Four

Duke Quartet

Concert 4: Varèse, Amériques; Cage, Aria; Satie, Parade; Ruggles, Sun-Treader;

Cage, Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music and Cartridge Music

BBC Symphony Orchestra/David Porcelijn, Loré Lixenberg (soprano),

John Tilbury (piano), Sound Intermedia (sound design)

Concert 5: Cage, Imaginary Landscape No. 3; Construction in Metal No.1; Living

Room Music; Credo in US; Child of Tree; Tudor, Rainforest; Garland, The Three

Strange Angels; Cowell, Ostinato Pianissimo; Cage, Construction in Metal No. 3

January 18.

Concert 6: Cage, Variations 1 for Stephen Montague; Choral music by Billings,

Virgil Thomson, Hovhaness, Ives, Randall Thompson; Cage: prepared piano

works

BBC Symphony Chorus/Stephen Jackson, Rolf Hind (prepared piano),

Deborah Miles-Johnson (mezzo-soprano)

Concert 7: Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week; Cage, Concerto for

Prepared Piano; Wolff, Spring (UK premiere); Brown, Centering; Cage,

Apartment House 1776 (UK premiere of original version)

London Sinfonietta/David Porcelijn, Clio Gould (violin), Ralph van Raat

(prepared piano)

Concert 8: Cage, Song Books, songs and piano pieces; Harrison, Symphony

No. 4; Feldman, Cello and Orchestra; Cage, 101 (UK premiere)

BBC Symphony Orchestra/Pierre-André Valade, Rolf Hind (piano), Frances

M. Lynch, Nicole Tibbels (sopranos), Paul Watkins (cello), Annilese

Miskimmon (director)

The three-day festival also included performances of Cage's Musicircus,

Satie's Vexations, and several films and discussions.

Most of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake was serialized in the avant-garde literary magazine transition. The issue numbers of the periodical are given, with pages, followed by the equivalent passages in the full text of Finnegans Wake. This table shows that when Cage was in Paris in 1930 he could have seen all of Part I, all of Part III, and a passage from Part II.

The first installment was headed Opening Pages of a Work in Progress, and most of the subsequent ones were called Continuation of a Work in Progress. These appearances were a major part of the avant-garde scene for a decade, controversial but strongly supported by most of the transition writers. Gertrude Stein appeared regularly in the same period. Richard Budd in his Catalog 87 (September 2005) described transition as “the most important of the American expatriate magazines, it lasted longer, published more influential writers, and had a wider readership than any other journal edited abroad by an American,” and he offered a complete set for sale at £4,500.

• 1. April 1927, pp. 9–30 [FW 3–29]

• 2. May 1927, pp. 94–107 [FW 30–47]

• 3. June 1927, pp. 32–50 [FW 48–74]

• 4. July 1927, pp. 46–65 [FW 75–103]

• 5. August 1927, pp. 15–31 [FW 104–25] (part reprinted from the Criterion)

• 6. September 1927, pp. 87–106 [FW 126–68]

• 7. October 1927, pp. 34–56 [FW 169–95] (appeared in earlier form in This Quarter, No. 1)

• 8. November 1927, pp. 17–35 [FW 196–216] (concludes Part I)

• 9. and 10. Nothing by Joyce who was ill

• 11. February 1928, pp. 7–18 [FW 282–304] (Part III was not ready, so Joyce “consented to detach pages from Part II” for this contribution)

• 12. March 1928, pp. 7–27 [FW 403–28] (this is now Part III)

• 13. Summer 1928, pp. 5–32 [FW 429–73] transition is now described as “An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment”

• 14. Nothing by Joyce

• 15. February 1929, pp. 197–238 [FW 474–554]

• 16–17. June 1929, nothing by Joyce

• 18. November 1929, pp. 211–36 [FW 555–90]

• 19–20. Nothing by Joyce

• 21. Transition 1932.

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 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:

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.

Introduction

Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1896 and died in New York City in 1989. His upbringing centered on the Baptist Church and its musical heritage. He was an organist and, after a period of army training, he entered Harvard in 1919. There he began a lifetime devotion to French music, accompanied the Harvard Glee Club, encountered the music of Erik Satie and the writings of Gertrude Stein—he said they changed his life— and began to compose. He spent a year in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger; then, back at Harvard in 1923, he gave the American premiere of Satie's Socrate, which would influence Cage. In 1925 he returned to Paris, where he lived until 1940.

Thomson met Gertrude Stein in 1926 and immediately started setting her words to music. Their two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All, were pioneering examples of the nonnarrative musical theater developed later by Philip Glass and others. In view of the impact Stein had on Cage and some of his colleagues such as Earle Brown and the writer Jackson Mac Low, it is worth noting that Thomson said, “It was … the discipline of spontaneity, which I had come into contact with through reading Gertrude Stein, that made my music simple.” I took this parallel further, with the composer's approval: “Thomson comes closer than any other composer to reflecting the literary techniques of Stein in music by means of the same short-circuiting from poetry to music which she herself had experienced earlier from painting to writing.”

During his years in Paris, Thomson began writing documentary film scores, anticipating Copland in this medium, and he perfected his own type of musical portraits actually composed in front of the sitter. On returning to New York he became highly influential as chief music critic of the Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, the period when he met and supported Cage. In an obituary tribute I wrote: “Virgil Thomson was a composer and writer of originality, courage and wit formed by a unique mixture of American and French influences… . He came from a generation of American composers which had to find its own way without benefit of university patronage. In that kind of free market he thrived and survived—and so will the best of his music.”

Introduction

Frank Kermode was born in 1919 and has held professorships in modern English literature at University College, London, and at Cambridge. He was Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard in 1977–78. A contributor to many magazines and journals, Kermode was coeditor of Encounter and editor of the Fontana Masterguides and Modern Masters series. His books include Romantic Image (1957); John Donne (1957); Oxford Anthology of English Literature (1973); Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (1975); An Appetite for Poetry (1989); Uses of Error (1991); The Oxford Book of Letters (1995); his memoirs, Not Entitled (1996); Shakespear's Language (2000); Pieces of my Mind (2003); and The Age of Shakespeare (2004). A Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Arts Council from 1968 to 1971, Kermode was knighted in 1991. He has approved the use of this material.

Preface by Frank Kermode (1970)

When we speak of art, we assume that there is a long historical interrelation between “high” art and its audience: the audience understands the language, or the code, and the artist presumes on this understanding to enlarge the language in the confidence that there exists an audience that will undertake to scan the new thing. This power to scan the new thing is learned, of course, from existing art, so there is a continuity both of the audience and of the forms of art. Occasionally, there are changes more violent than usual, and the thread is broken or seems to be, but in the long run both continuities are reestablished: the languages of art persist, and so does a public.

But many people would now call such views wrong, including some artists. People who think this way may not simply agree that their acceptance of present art depends in some measure on a past of which they may know nothing. They would not even be interested to know that their opinion was first voiced, with a different intonation but very forcibly, more than fifty years ago by the Dadaists. Their program—more than any other—is now being given an extensive trial. The abolition of the past and of the artist, the violation of codes and expectations—these belong now to a new world where there are new media and new interpretations of what goes on in these media.

Introduction

Pauline Oliveros was born in 1932 in Houston, Texas, where her mother and grandmother were piano teachers. As a child she preferred noises to concerts, but she came into her own playing the accordion. She attended the University of Houston and San Francisco State College and was a cofounder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In 1966 she became director of the Tape Music Center when it moved to Mills College, but the following year she moved to the University of California, San Diego. In 1985, having left the academic world, she became director of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. She is now Distinguished Research Professor at Rensselar Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Initially, she investigated tape and electronic music; but in the 1970s, feeling the need for calming activities, she became involved with meditation, ceremony, and ritual using a technique she developed called Deep Listening. In 1989 Cage said: “Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is… . It's about the pleasure of making music.” Like Cage, she has been concerned to integrate music with the spiritual and social needs of mankind, as John Rockwell recognized: “On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level.”

Interview

Approved by Pauline Oliveros

PD When did you first come across Cage?

PO I was aware of John's work by the mid-fifties through the grapevine, so to speak, and through Radio KPFA-FM. I was living in San Francisco at the time—from 1952—and there was a lot of controversy in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley, with a polarity between Cage and Schoenberg. In 1960 La Monte Young, a friend of mine who was in a seminar at Berkeley, went to Darmstadt. He was very interested at that time in Stockhausen, and when he came back he could only talk about John [laughs], and so a lot of Cage's ideas became apparent through La Monte's interest. In 1963 I met David Tudor in San Francisco and within a year we had planned a festival, which I organized at the San Francisco Tape Center where I was. In that festival we performed a number of John's works as well as others by Lucier, Ichiyanagi, and so on.

Introduction

Minna Lederman was born in 1896 and died in New York in 1995. Her parents were German-speaking Jewish immigrants who became prosperous. She studied music, dance, and drama—graduating from Barnard College in 1919—and worked as a journalist. She married Mell Daniel, a painter of the Syncronist school who eventually went into business and returned to painting in retirement.

Lederman became the publicist for the International Composers’ Guild and in 1923 helped to form the League of Composers and to launch its journal, which became known as Modern Music. With remarkable generosity she edited the journal on a voluntary basis from 1924 to 1946. In its pages she presented American and some European composers, writing about the latest developments in serious music at a time when there was very little discussion of this kind elsewhere. When the journal ceased publication, Virgil Thomson wrote: “My own debt to her is enormous. Her magazine was a forum for all the most distinguished world figures of creation and of criticism; and the unknown bright young were given their right to speak up among these, trained to do so without stammering and without fear.” In 2005 Wilfrid Mellers recalled, “I’d hazard that it was the liveliest and bestwritten music magazine ever issued.”

In 1992 Cage remembered his debt as a contributor:

In 1983 Lederman chronicled her editorial experience in an anthology and recognized that the eighty-nine issues of Modern Music had admirably fulfilled their purpose. She also recorded her impressions of Cage on the occasion of his seventieth birthday: “I believe that his impact on our time … has been wide and deep—even on those who once accepted but now reject him; who out of fear of the unknown may never have faced up to him; who, furiously irritated—‘he always steals the show’—wish he would fade away never to return.”

Cage's Musicircus is an event based on the simultaneous presentation of many concerts under the same roof at the same time, exemplifying Cage’s utopian ideas about freedom in society. The first performance was November 17, 1967, at the University Stock Pavilion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where another Cage spectacular, HPSCHD, would premiere at Assembly Hall on May 16, 1969. The second production of Musicircus was at Macalester College Fieldhouse, St. Paul, Minnesota, on April 11, 1970. The European premiere, with Cage cited as director, was during the Journées de musique contemporaine at the Halles de Baltard, Pavillon 9, Paris, on October 27, 1970.

Cage told Daniel Charles: “In a Musicircus you have the right to bring together all kinds of music, which are ordinarily separated. We’re no longer worried about what there is to be heard, so to speak. It's no longer a question of aesthetics.” In the same series of interviews he commented on the two American productions where “each group really worked in an independent manner. No one worried about his neighbor. The result was amazing. But if you stick to concentrated attention, or if you retain the principle of discourse, musicircuses may not be of any interest at all.” Cage regretted that the Paris production had not included film, and he found the performing and auditorium spaces so cramped that the audience could barely move.

The British premiere was in The Great Hall, University of Birmingham, on November 24, 1972, followed by a London performance at The Round House on December 17, presented by the Park Lane Group. My students were involved in both occasions, and the director was Jocelyn Powell. I was anxious to know what Cage had in mind for his Musicircus, so I met him in London on May 20, 1972, and took notes about his recommendations. These are the points he made:

• 1. There are serious differences between societies, such as the United States and Germany, so Musicircus gets various receptions. The first American performance made the composer Herbert Brün livid, but the audience liked it.

• 2. In Minneapolis it was good—the organizer was Sue Weil at the Walker Art Center.

• 3. There should be food and drink, as in a real circus. Ideally, all the senses should be employed.

Introduction

John Rockwell was born in Washington, D.C., in 1940 and was raised in San Francisco. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in German history and literature and received a PhD in cultural history from the University of California at Berkeley. After working as a classical music and dance critic for the Oakland Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he began writing about music of all kinds in increasingly influential capacities at the New York Times in 1972. From 1974 to 1980 he was the chief rock music critic and then became the classical music editor. He was director of New York's Lincoln Center Festival during 1994–96 and then rejoined the New York Times as Sunday arts editor, later becoming an arts columnist and currently serving as chief dance critic. He is a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. His books include All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (1983) and Sinatra: An American Classic (1984); with Thomson he edited A Virgil Thomson Reader (1981); and he has written articles on a remarkable range of topics.

Interview

Approved by John Rockwell

PD Charles Hamm has claimed that Cage has had “a greater impact on world music than any other American composer of the twentieth century.” Your own approach in All American Music is very broad, but would you agree?

JR Probably, yes. My instinct is to start casting about among nonclassical composers to see if Little Richard could make that claim or Chuck Berry, but I don't think they could because there were so many early rock pioneers, and then the English wave arrived in the sixties. There are those who claim Duke Ellington was America's greatest composer, but I don't think he had a decisive influence. Cage's influence as a symbol of liberation for classical composers, overlapping to some extent into the art-jazz and art-rock scenes as well, has really been enormous. Even if you regard him as a symbol rather than a direct cause of change, as a philosophical stimulus rather than a model to be copied, the influence is huge and I think Hamm's statement could be sustained.