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Alaska
Alaska () is the largest state of the United States by area. It is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait. Approximately half of Alaska's 698,473 residents live within the Anchorage metropolitan area. As of 2009, Alaska remains the least densely populated state of the U.S.
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Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860, is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
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Brooklyn
Brooklyn is New York City's most populous borough with approximately 2.5 million residents, and second largest in area.
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Capri
Capri (, pronounced in English) is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of Southern Italy. It has been a resort since the time of the Roman Republic.
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Galveston
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IRCAM
IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) is a European institute for science about music and sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organizationally linked with, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building has been designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
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Mills College
Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded in 1852 in Benicia as a young ladies' seminary. In 1865, Susan Tolman Mills and her husband Cyrus Mills bought the school, renamed it Mills College, and then moved it to Oakland in 1871. Mills received its charter in 1885 and introduced graduate programs for women and men in 1920.
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Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's collection offers an unparalleled overview in modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media.
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NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, ) is an Executive Branch agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's civilian space program and aeronautics and aerospace research. Since February 2006, NASA's self-described mission statement is to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
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Pomona College
Pomona College is a private, residential, liberal arts college located in Claremont, California. It has ranked in the top ten of liberal arts colleges nationally according to the U.S. News & World Report rankings since their inception and is currently ranked sixth. In 2009, Kiplinger ranked Pomona first among the liberal arts colleges in America. Founded in 1887 in Pomona, California, by a group of Congregationalists, the college moved to Claremont in 1889 to the site of a donated hotel, retaining its name. The school enrolls 1,548 students.
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Ramapo Mountains
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Seattle
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Seville
Seville ( ; see also ) is the artistic, cultural, and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of the autonomous community of Andalusia and of the province of Seville. It is situated on the plain of the River Guadalquivir, with an average elevation of above sea level. The inhabitants of the city are known as sevillanos (feminine form: sevillanas) or hispalenses, following the Roman name of the city, Hispalis. The population of the city of Seville was 703,206 as of 2009 (INE), ranking as the fourth largest city of Spain. The population of the metropolitan area (urban area plus satellite towns) was 1,493,416 as of 2009 (INE estimate).
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Wesleyan University
:This article is about Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA. For a list of other colleges and universities with names including "Wesleyan," see Wesleyan University (disambiguation).
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Yuma, Arizona
Yuma is a city in and the county seat of Yuma County, Arizona, United States. It is located in the southwestern corner of the state, and the population of the city was 77,515 at the 2000 census, with a 2008 Census Bureau estimated population of 90,041.
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Al Hansen
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Allan Kaprow
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Ananda Coomaraswamy
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André Breton
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Anton Webern
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Antonin Artaud
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Aphex Twin
Richard David James (born 18 August 1971), best known under the pseudonym Aphex Twin, is an electronic musician described by The Guardian newspaper in 2001 as "the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music." He founded the record label Rephlex Records in 1991 with associate, Grant Wilson-Claridge.
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Arnold Schoenberg
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Betty Freeman
Betty Freeman (June 3, 1921 – January 4, 2009) was an American philanthropist and photographer. She was best known as an arts patron, and was regarded as the most significant American sponsor of contemporary classical music of the second half of the 20th century.
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Charles Olson
Charles Olson (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970), was a second generation American modernist poet who was a crucial link between earlier figures like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, a rubric which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance. Consequently, many postmodern groups, such as the poets of the Language School, include Olson as a primary and precedent figure. Across the Atlantic, these various poetic movements have exerted a deep and ongoing influence on an important array of alternative and experimental writers, including Roy Fisher, Geoffrey Hill, JH Prynne and Edwin Morgan, behind whose works lurks Olson's ghost of language-driven inventiveness.
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Christopher Hobbs
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D. T. Suzuki
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David Tudor
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Demetrio Stratos
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Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins (March 15, 1938 – October 25, 1998) was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist. Higgins was born in Cambridge, England, but raised in the United States in various parts of New England, including Worcester, Massachusetts, Putney, Vermont, and Concord, New Hampshire.
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Douglas Kahn
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Earle Brown
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Edgard Varèse
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Erik Satie
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Frank Zappa
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Gary Rydstrom
Gary Roger Rydstrom (born 1959) is an American sound designer and director. He has won 7 Academy Awards for his work in sound for picture.
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George Brecht
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George Washington
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Grete Sultan
Grete Sultan (born Johanna Margarete Sultan) (June 21, 1906June 26, 2005) was a German-American pianist.
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Helmut Lachenmann
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Henning Lohner
Henning Lohner (born 17 July 1961) is a German born filmmaker and composer. His artistic output embraces diverse fields within the audio-visual arts. He is best known for film scores written as long-standing member of the Hollywood composers group founded by Hans Zimmer, as well as filmmaker/artist of the raw material media art projects.
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Henry Cowell
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Henry David Thoreau
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Igor Stravinsky
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Jackson Mac Low
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Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, sometimes struggling with alcoholism. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.
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James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark novel which perfected his stream of conciousness technique and combined nearly every literary device available in a modern re-telling of The Odyssey. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and his complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.
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Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. (born May 15, 1930) is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.
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Jean Erdman
Jean Erdman (born 20 February 1916) is a dancer and choreographer of modern dance as well as an avant-garde theater director.
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John Cage
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Johnny Cage
Johnny Cage, whose real name is John Carlton, is a main video game character from the Mortal Kombat fighting game series. The character was modeled after Jean-Claude Van Damme.
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Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 - January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and Surrealists. Patchen's ambitious body of work also foreshadowed literary art-forms ranging from reading poetry to jazz accompaniment to his late experiments with visual poetry (which he called his "picture poems").
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La Monte Young
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer and musician.
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Luciano Berio
Luciano Berio, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (October 24, 1925 – May 27, 2003) was an Italian composer. He is noted for his experimental work (in particular his 1968 composition Sinfonia for voices and orchestra and his series of numbered solo pieces titled Sequenza) and also for his pioneering work in electronic music.
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Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968; ) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.
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Margaret Leng Tan
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Mark Tobey
Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 – April 24, 1976) was an American abstract expressionist painter, born in Centerville, Wisconsin. Widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe, Tobey is the most noted among the "mystical painters of the Northwest." Senior in age and experience, Tobey had a strong influence on the others. Friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School.
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Marshall McLuhan
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Mary Bauermeister
Mary Hilde Ruth Bauermeister (born 7 September 1934 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German artist.
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Mauricio Kagel
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Max Ernst
Max Ernst (2 April 1891 – 1 April 1976) was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.
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Merce Cunningham
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Morton Feldman
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Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean-born American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist.
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Norman O. Brown
__NOTOC__
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Olivier Messiaen
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Oskar Fischinger
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Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.
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Paul Zukofsky
Paul Zukofsky (b. Brooklyn, New York, October 22, 1943) is an American violinist and conductor known for his work in the field of contemporary classical music.
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Pierre Boulez
Pierre Boulez () (born March 26, 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music and a conductor.
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Piet Mondrian
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Richard Buhlig
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Robert Rauschenberg
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Robin Maconie
Robin Maconie (born 22 October 1942 in Auckland, New Zealand) is a New Zealand composer, pianist, and writer.
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Sergei Rachmaninoff
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Supply Belcher
Supply Belcher (29 March 1751 – 9 June 1836) was an American composer, singer, and compiler of tune books. He was one of the members of the so-called First New England School, a group of mostly self-taught composers who created sacred vocal music for local choirs. He was active first in Lexington, Massachusetts, then eventually moved to Farmington, Maine. Like most of his colleagues, Belcher could not make music his main occupation, and worked as tax assessor, schoolmaster, town clerk, and so on; nevertheless he was considerably well-known for his musical activities, and even dubbed 'the Handell [sic] of Maine' by a local newspaper. Most of his works survive in The Harmony of Maine, a collection Belcher published himself in Boston in 1794.
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Tōru Takemitsu
was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre. He drew from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.
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Virgil Thomson
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Walt Whitman
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Walter Zimmermann
Walter Zimmermann (b. Schwabach, Germany, 1949) is a German composer.
http://wn.com/Walter_Zimmermann -
Witold Lutosławski
http://wn.com/Witold_Lutosławski
Cage, John Filmography
- Novembre (2010)
- Wednesdays at A's (2009)
- A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki (2006)
- Tentatives de se décrire (2005)
- Um Filme Sem História (2002)
- Sonic Acts: From Stockhausen to Squarepusher (1998)
- John Cage: From Zero (1995)
- John Cage: From Zero (1995)
- The Revenge of the Dead Indians (1993)
- Opus 20 Modern Masterworks: John Cage (1992)
- One 11 and 103 (1992)
- Film über Nichts (1992)
- Écoute (1992)
- 22708 Types (1992)
- Cage/Cunningham (1991)
- Peefeeyatko (1991)
- John Cage: Man and Myth (1990)
- Mr. Hoover and I (1989)
- Poema: Cidade (1986)
- Seven Portraits (1983)
- Four American Composers (1983)
- Sometimes It Works, Sometimes It Doesn't (1983)
- Poetry in Motion (1982)
- Robert Rauschenberg: Retrospective (1979)
- C'est la vie, Rose (1977)
- Global Groove (1973)
- American Art in the 1960s (1972)
- End of the Art World (1971)
- Sound?? (1966)
- John Cage (1966)
- Works of Calder (1950)
- Horror Dream (1948)
- Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
- At Land (1944)
- An Optical Poem (1937)
Cage, John Filmography
RELEASE
ALBUMS
- Harmonielehre: Part I.
- Harmonielehre: Part II. The Anfortas Wound
- Harmonielehre: Part III. Meister Eckhardt and Quackie
- Three Canons for Ursula: I. Canon 5/7
- Three Canons for Ursula: II. Canon 6/9/10/15
- Three Canons for Ursula: III. Canon 2/3
- Three Dances: Dance No. 1
- Three Dances: Dance No. 2
- Three Dances: Dance No. 3
- Fontana Mix
- First Construction in Metal
- Music for Carillon, Part 1
- Williams Mix
- The City Wears a Slouch
- Music of Changes (Book III)
- Music of Changes (Book IV)
- Four⁶ (version for Amplified Saxophone Quartet)
- Cartridge Music / 11 Instruments
- Fontana Mix / Sextet for Low Woodwinds
- Fontana Mix (Electronic version)
- Party Pieces: I
- Party Pieces: II
- Party Pieces: III
- Party Pieces: IV
- Party Pieces: V
- Party Pieces: VI
- Party Pieces: VII
- Party Pieces: VIII
- Party Pieces: IX
- Party Pieces: X
- Party Pieces: Xi
- Party Pieces: XII
- Party Pieces: XIII
- Party Pieces: XIV
- Party Pieces: XV
- Party Pieces: XVI
- Party Pieces: XVII
- Party Pieces: XVIII
- Party Pieces: XIX
- Party Pieces: XX
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Melodies & Harmonies (feat. violin: Annelie Gahl, keyboard: Klaus Lang)
Released 2010
Released 2010
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 1
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 18 "Old North" (William Billings)
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 42 "Rapture" (Supply Belcher)
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 2
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 3
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 26 "Judea" (William Billings)
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 21 "Heath" (William Billings)
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 19 "New York" (Andrew Law)
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 5 "The Lord Descended" (William Billings)
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 11 "Wheeler's Point" (William Billings)
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 4
- Apartment House 1776: Harmony 14 "Brunswick" (James Lyon)
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 5
- Melodies for Violin and Keyboard: Melody 6
- Nocturne
- Ophelia
- For Aaron Copland
- Dream
- Piano Piece to Philip Guston
- Melodies N°5
- Melodies N°6
- Eight Whiskus
- In a Landscape
- The Viola in My Life III
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Works for Percussion, Volume 5 (1936 - 1991) (Amadinda Percussion Group)
Released 2008
Released 2008
- Six
- Quartet: I. Moderate
- Quartet: II. Very Slow
- Quartet: IV. Fast
- One⁴
- Dance Music (for EIfrid Ide, 1940): I. Fast
- Dance Music (for EIfrid Ide, 1940): II.
- Dance Music (for EIfrid Ide, 1940): III. With Spirit
- Three²
- Three: 1.
- Three: A.
- Three: B.
- Three: C.
- Three: D.
- Three: E.
- Three: F.
- Three: G.
- Three: H.
- Three: I.
- Three: 2.
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Six with Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine
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Complete Music for Prepared Piano (feat. piano: Giancarlo Simonacci)
Released 2006
Released 2006
- Bacchanale (1940)
- And the Earth Shall Bear Again (1942)
- Primitive (1942)
- In The Name Of The Holocaust (1942)
- Our Spring will come (1943)
- Totem Ancestor (1943)
- A Room (1943)
- Tossed as it is Untroubled (1943)
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 1
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 2
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 3
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 4
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 5
- The Perilous Night (1943-4) - 6
- Root of an Unfocus (1944)
- The Unavailable Memory of (1944)
- Spontaneous Earth (1944)
- Tripled Paced (version 2) (1944)
- A Valentine Out Of Season (1944) - 1
- A Valentine Out Of Season (1944) - 2
- A Valentine Out Of Season (1944) - 3
- Prelude For Meditation (1944)
- Mysterious Adventure (1945)
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Works for Percussion, Volume 4: 1940-1956 (Amadinda Percussion Group, Zoltán Kocsis, Zoltán Rácz, Zoltán Gavodi)
Released 2005
Released 2005
- 27' 10.554'' for a Percussionist
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: I. Axioms: A. The Pupil Is Eager to Learn
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: I. Axioms: B. The Pupil Is Constitutionally Lazy
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: I. Axioms: C. We Deal With the Total Child
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: II. A Short Historical Sketch: A. Reactionaries
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: II. A Short Historical Sketch: B. Revolutionaries - Pitched Battle
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: III. Vistas of the Future: A. Pessimist
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: III. Vistas of the Future: B. Optimist
- Four Dances: Dance I
- Four Dances: Dance II
- Four Dances: Dance III
- Four Dances: Dance IV
- Two³: 1.
- Two³: 2.
- Two³: 3.
- Two³: 4.
- Two³: 5.
- Two³: 6.
- Two³: 7.
- Two³: 8.
- Two³: 9.
- Two³: 10.
- Inlets
- Two⁴: I shō
- Two⁴: I violin
- Two⁴: II shō
- Two⁴: II violin
- Two⁴: III violin
- Two⁴: III shō
- Two⁴: IV violin
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Four Walls (feat. piano: Richard Bunger, voice: Jay Clayton)
Released 2003
Released 2003
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene I
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene II
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene III
- Four Walls: Act I: Dance
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene IV
- Four Walls: Act I: Dance
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene V
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VI
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VII
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VIII
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene IX
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene X
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XI
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XII
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XIII
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XIV
- Book 1: I
- Book 1: II
- Book 1: III
- Book 1: IV
- Book 1: V
- Book 1: VI
- Book 1: VII
- Book 1: VIII
- Book 2: IX
- Book 2: X
- Book 2: XI
- Book 2: XII
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Complete Piano Music, Volume 8: Hommage À Satie (feat. piano: Steffen Schleiermacher)
Released 2002
Released 2002
- Perpetual Tango
- In a Landscape
- Suite for Toy piano (version for piano): I.
- Suite for Toy piano (version for piano): II.
- Suite for Toy piano (version for piano): III.
- Suite for Toy piano (version for piano): IV.
- Suite for Toy piano (version for piano): V.
- Cheap Imitation: I.
- Cheap Imitation: II.
- Cheap Imitation: III.
- Dream
- Swinging
- Perpetual Tango
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene I
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene II
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene III: Dance
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene IV: Dance
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene V
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VI
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VII: Vocal Interlude
- Four Walls: Act I: Scene VIII
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene IX
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene X
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XI
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XII
- Four Walls: Act II: Scene XIII
- A Flower
- Experiences II
- She Is Asleep
- The Wondeful Widow of Eighteen Springs
- Nowth Upon Nacht
- Applaus
- Sonata 1
- Sonata 2
- Sonata 3
- Sonata 4
- First Interlude
- Sonata 5
- Sonata 6
- Sonata 7
- Sonata 8
- Second Interlude
- Third Interlude
- Sonata 9
- Sonata 10
- Sonata 11
- Sonata 12
- Fourth Interlude
- Sonata 13
- Sonata 14+15
- Sonata 16
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Works for Percussion, Volume 2: 1941-1950 (Amadinda Percussion Group)
Released 2000
Released 2000
- Third Construction
- Credo in Us
- Imaginary Landscape No. 3
- Imaginary Landscape No. 2
- The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
- Forever and Sunsmell
- Amores: I. Solo: Prepared Piano
- Amores: II. Trio: Nine Tom-Toms, Pod Rattle
- Amores: III. Trio: Seven Wood-Blocks
- Amores: IV. Solo: Prepared Piano
- She Is Asleep: I. For 12 Tom-Toms
- She Is Asleep: II. For Voice and Prepared Piano
- A Flower
- Sinfonie Nr. 1 in C-Dur, BWV 787 / Sinfonie Nr. 11 in g-Moll, BWV 797
- Call it a table
- Sonatas and Interludes: Sonatas I + II
- aus: "Vortrag über nichts": Halb intellektuell...
- Partita IV in D-Dur, BWV 828: Sarabande
- Gott du bist mein
- Sonatas and Interludes: Sonatas III + IV
- Vergänglichkeit der Schönheit
- Sinfonie Nr. 5 in Es-Dur, BWV 791 / Sinfonie Nr. 2 in c-Moll, BWV 788
- aus: "Vortrag über nichts": Ich weiß eine Geschichte...
- Sonatas and Interludes: First Interlude
- eulen
- Partita IV in D-Dur, BWV 828: Aria
- Sonatas and Interludes: Sonatas V + VI
- aus: "Der kleine Prinz"
- Sinfonie Nr. 7 in e-Moll, BWV 793 / Partita V in G-Dur, BWV 829: Tempo di Menuetto
- aus: "Vortrag über nichts": Langsam, während der Vortrag...
- Sonatas and Interludes: Sonatas VII + VIII
- Betrachtung der Zeit / aus den "Geistreichen Sinn- und Schlußreimen"
- Sinfonie Nr. 9 in f-Moll, BWV 795 / Sinfonie Nr. 10 in G-Dur, BWV 796
- The Ford
- Sonatas and Interludes: Second Interlude
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 1
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 2
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 3
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 4
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Interlude No. 1
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 5
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 6
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 7
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 8
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Interlude No. 2
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Interlude No. 3
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 9
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 10
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 11
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 12
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Interlude No. 4
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 13
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 14
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 15
- Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Sonata No. 16
- Music of Changes: Book I
- Music of Changes: Book II
- Music of Changes: Book III
- Music of Changes: Book IV
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Litany for the Whale (Theatre of Voices feat. conductor: Paul Hillier)
Released 1998
Released 1998
- Litany for the Whale
- Aria No. 2
- Five
- The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
- Solo for Voice 22, from Songbooks
- Experiences No. 2
- 36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp
- Aria
- The Year Begins to Be Ripe
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Introduction
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Opening Stroll (rehearsal #1)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Holdup (rehearsal #4)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Nightclub (rehearsal #7)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Passersby (rehearsal #8)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Along the River (rehearsal #10)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Phone Call (rehearsal #11)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Streetfight (rehearsal #12)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Up in the Sky (rehearsal #14)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Woman in the Rain (rehearsal #15)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Kidnapping (rehearsal #16)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Mirthogram (rehearsal #17)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Street Poetry (rehearsal #18)
- The City Wears a Slouch Hat: Off in the Ocean (rehearsal #20)
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: The Pupil Is Eager to Learn
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: The Pupil Is Constitutionally Lazy
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: We Deal With the Total Child
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: Reactionaries
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: Revolutionaries/Pitched Battle
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: Pessimist
- Fads and Fancies in the Academy: Optimist
- A Chant With Claps
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Music for Eight (Ensemble Avantgarde / Salome Kammer / Leipziger Streichquartett)
Released 1996
Released 1996
- Music for Eight
- Five (1st version)
- Aria
- Five (2nd version)
- Quietly Flowing Along
- Slowly Rocking
- Nearly Stationary
- Quodlibet
- Book Three: Etude 17
- Book Three: Etude 18
- Book Three: Etude 19
- Book Three: Etude 20
- Book Three: Etude 21
- Book Three: Etude 22
- Book Three: Etude 23
- Book Three: Etude 24
- Book Four: Etude 25
- Book Four: Etude 26
- Book Four: Etude 27
- Book Four: Etude 28
- Book Four: Etude 29
- Book Four: Etude 30
- Book Four: Etude 31
- Book Four: Etude 32
- Book 1: Etude #1
- Book 1: Etude #2
- Book 1: Etude #3
- Book 1: Etude #4
- Book 1: Etude #5
- Book 1: Etude #6
- Book 1: Etude #7
- Book 1: Etude #8
- Book 2: Etude #9
- Book 2: Etude #10
- Book 2: Etude #11
- Book 2: Etude #12
- Book 2: Etude #13
- Book 2: Etude #14
- Book 2: Etude #15
- Book 2: Etude #16
- Litany for the Whale
- Aria No. 2
- Five
- The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
- Solo for Voice 22
- Experiences no. 2
- 36 Mesostics re and not re Marcel Duchamp
- Aria
- The Year Begins to Be Ripe
- Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, Part One (To Line 220)
- Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, Part Two (To Line 406)
- Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, Part Three (To Line 594)
- Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, Part Four (To End)
- Laughtears
- Dence/Sicductor/Once/In/Premise/On/Gy/Short/Stead/Mucon
- Dance/Lus/Een/(Anthe/Which/Calrition/Girl/French/Cepatexgel)/Mi
- Mir/The/Pre/Crown/We
- Otsecadmy/Move/Lyilarsim.)/Charia/Movement
- Comex/Could,/An/Plorplexing,/Time/Stone/Tiongain./Rhyth/Allowaa/Tempt
- Miror/Ex/Rath/Escribrori/Ies
- Mix/Lyjectiveob/Wrong/Ack,/Suite
- Morning/Life/World/Crossing/Less
- Specralcle/Muu/Natsicta/Plants,/Is/Man/Legs/Forth/Was/Sum
- Com/Well/Muer/Othsic,/Weight
- From/Zen/Works/Ac/Be
- Jump/Have/Courts,/Danc/Ningeve
- Com/Dur/Now/Conuntor/I/And/Ducgulant!/With/What/Man
- Maroningi/Re/Either/Dancchi/Time
- Mon/Ten/Three/Sicords/Posreimble
- Monga/We/Tried/Ic/Er
- Gym/Get/Tionnerfi/Speciismman/Read
- From/Soablute,/Er/Con/Space
- Feelcreasin/Out/Walksubround/Ne/Piece/Maliation/Inging/Should/Charts/My
- Space/Logue/And/Know/Tive/Une/Yranged/Pho/Janperaru/Arformed
- Sim/Channels,/Ure/Chi/Pose
- Action./Muceed/Sicteen/Prosixings/Swift/Ances,/Leg/Throw/Bar/Mind
- Ams/Seaphytes/Arturesons/(Which/Gesthro
- Harmpomu/Beicom/Sapertionimsusi/Call/Ingless
- Cambery)/Qui/Ons/Anre/Trier/Dances/Amongst/The/Danc/Amemo
- Tiescor/You/Posbilten/Forpened/Isidehapgot/Dan/Large/Hoop/Start/Mimes
- Ma/Becoming,/Her;/Can/The
- Dance./Though,/Run/On/Nir/Num/Rhiguage/Huge/Has/Lanzome
- Warmth./Movement/There's/Seconds,/Clue
- Im/Rooted/Run/Dicartiony/Ple
- Facts/Your/Find/Proments/T'ai/Persons/Movegram/Each/A/Mak
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Works for Piano, Toy Piano & Prepared Piano, Volume III (1944-1960)
Released 1991
Released 1991
- Suite for Toy Piano: I.
- Suite for Toy Piano: II.
- Suite for Toy Piano: III.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: I.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: II.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: III.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: IV.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: V.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: VI.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: VII.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: VIII.
- The Seasons / Ballet in One Act: IX.
- Music for Amplified Toy Pianos
- A Book of Music: I.
- A Book of Music: II.
- Suite for Toy Piano: I.
- Suite for Toy Piano: II.
- Suite for Toy Piano: III.
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Nocturne - Six Melodies - Amores - A Valentine Out of Season - Music for Marcel Duchamp
Released 1980
Released 1980
- Nocturne For Violin And Piano
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Untitled
- Solo For Prepared Piano
- Trio - 9 Tomtoms, Pod Rattle -
- Trio - 7 Woodblocks, Not Chinese -
- Solo For Prepared Piano
- A Valentine Out Of Season
- Music For Marcel Duchamp
- All Day
- Distant Saxophones
- Rhapsody Spaniel
- Experience No.1
- Experience No.1
- The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs
- Forever and Sunsmell
- In a Landscape
- Sonnekus² 1
- Sonnekus² 2
- Sonnekus² 3
- Sonnekus² 4
- Cabaret Chansons - Je te veux
- Cabaret Chansons - Tendrement
- Cabaret Chansons - La Diva de l`Empire
- Part 1 (Version IV, 15./16.12.2003, 12.00 PM / 00.00 AM)
- Part 2 (Version III, 15.12.2003, 6.00 PM)
- Part 3 (Version II, 15.12.2003, 6.00 AM)
- Part 4 (Collage Of Versions I-IV)
- Part 5 (Version III)
- Part 6 (Version IV)
- Part 7 (Version II)
- Part 8 (Version I, 14.12.2003, 6.00 PM)
- Part 9: Repetition Of Part 5 (Version I)
- Four (live: 2004-06-26: Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Cheap Imitation (live: 2003-02-14: Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Atlas Eclipticalis (live: 2003-02-14: Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Prelude for 6 Instruments in a Minor (live: 2005-02-23: Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Living Room Music, for Percussion and Speech Quartet: Movement 1 (For Household Objects) (live: 2007-12-29: Klap op de Vuurpijl 1997, Werkteater, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Living Room Music, for Percussion and Speech Quartet: Movement 2: Once Upon a Time the World Is Round (Gertrude Stein), Dedicated to Xenia (live: 2007-12-29: Klap op de Vuurpijl 1997, Werkteater, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Living Room Music, for Percussion and Speech Quartet: Movement 3 (Solo) (live: 2007-12-29: Klap op de Vuurpijl 1997, Werkteater, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Living Room Music, for Percussion and Speech Quartet: Movement 4 (For Household Objects) (live: 2007-12-29: Klap op de Vuurpijl 1997, Werkteater, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Concert for Piano and Orchestra (live)
- Freeman Etudes n. 1
- Freeman Etudes n. 2
- Freeman Etudes n. 3
- Freeman Etudes n. 4
- Freeman Etudes n. 5
- Dream (version for piano and contrabass)
- Ryoanji for Contrabass and Tape
- Radio Music for 5 Radio Performers (live)
- Music for Marcel Duchamp
- Music for Amplified Toy Pianos
- Radio Music
- 4:33 (In Tre Parti: 0:30/2:23/1:40)
- Sixty-Two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham (Frammenti)
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Works for Piano & Prepared Piano, Volume II (piano: Joshua Pierce & Dorothy Jonas, violin: Frank Almond)
- Mysterious Adventure, For Prepared Piano (1945)
- TV Koeln, For Piano (1958)
- Daughters Of The Lonesome Isle, For Prepared Piano (1945)
- Dream, For Piano (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.1 (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.2 (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.3 (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.4 (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.5 (1948)
- The Perilous Night, For Prepared Piano: No.6 (1948)
- Nocturne, For Violin & Piano (1947)
- Three Dances, For Two Prepared Pianos: No.1 (1944-45)
- Three Dances, For Two Prepared Pianos: No.2 (1944-45)
- Three Dances, For Two Prepared Pianos: No.3 (1944-45)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 1)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 2)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 3)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 4)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 5)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 6)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 7)
- Four Walls (Act 1 part 8)
- Four Walls (Act 2 part 1)
- Four Walls (Act 2 part 2)
- Four Walls (Act 2 part 3)
- Four Walls (Act 2 part 4)
- Four Walls (Act 2 part 5)
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
- Series re Morris Graves
Born: 1912-09-05
Died: 1992-08-12
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John Cage: "Dream"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:32
- Published: 23 Oct 2008
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
John Cage: "Dream" (1948) Piano solo performed by Stephen Drury
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Dream
John Cage - Water Walk
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:22
- Published: 04 May 2007
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
John Cage performing "Water Walk" in January, 1960 on the popular TV show I've Got A Secret. via WFMU: blog.wfmu.org "At the time, Cage was teaching Experimental Composition at New York City's New School. Eight years beyond 4:33, he was (as our smoking MC informs us) the most controversial figure in the musical world at that time. His first performance on national television was originally scored to include five radios, but a union dispute on the CBS set prevented any of the radios from being plugged in to the wall. Cage gleefully smacks and tosses the radios instead of turning them on and off. While treating Cage as something of a freak, the show also treats him fairly reverentially, cancelling the regular game show format to allow Cage the chance to perform his entire piece. "
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Water_Walk
John Cage playing amplified cacti and plant materials with a feather
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:07
- Published: 03 Aug 2009
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
John Cage performing on Nam June Paik's TV special called 'Good Morning Mr. Orwell' from 1984. In the beginning, we see that Cage is joined by Takehisa Kosugi and one other unidentified person. perhaps they were performing a composition or improvisation that they would have done during a Merce Cunningham dance. there is also a cut away to a Joseph Bueys piano performance art piece. more info here: en.wikipedia.org
http://wn.com/John_Cage_playing_amplified_cacti_and_plant_materials_with_a_feather
John Cage 4'33
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:22
- Published: 24 Mar 2006
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
a silent performance by John Cage. Watch (and hear) for yourself.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_4'33
John Cage - 4'33" by David Tudor
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:48
- Published: 21 Sep 2006
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
..................
http://wn.com/John_Cage_4'33_by_David_Tudor
John Cage: "In A Landscape"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:50
- Published: 23 Oct 2008
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
John Cage "In A Landscape" (1948) Piano solo performed by Stephen Drury
http://wn.com/John_Cage_In_A_Landscape
John Cage about silence
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:17
- Published: 14 Jul 2007
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
cage
http://wn.com/John_Cage_about_silence
Listen : John Cage - in love with another sound -01
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:58
- Published: 18 Feb 2007
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
documentary film (1992) director: miroslav sebestik featured: john cage, luciano berio, knud victor...etc in the spirit of john cage's historic and revolutionary composition 4'33''--which challenges the boundaries of traditional music through four and a half minutes of intentional silence--
http://wn.com/Listen_John_Cage_in_love_with_another_sound_-01
JOHN CAGE SPEECH RADIO5
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:08
- Published: 19 Mar 2006
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
LIVE
http://wn.com/JOHN_CAGE_SPEECH_RADIO5
John Cage: Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:36
- Published: 03 Mar 2011
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
John Cage (1912-1992): Music for Marcel Duchamp, per pianoforte preparato. Scritto per la sequenza di Duchamp nel film di Hans Richter "Dream that Money can buy" (1947). Juan Hidalgo, pianoforte preparato. Photo: Marcel Duchamp. **** The music published in our channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. This within a program shared to study classic educational music of the 1900's (mostly Italian) which involves thousands of people around the world. If someone, for any reason, would deem that a video appearing in this channel violates the copyright, please inform us immediately before you submit a claim to Youtube, and it will be our care to remove immediately the video accordingly. Your collaboration will be appreciated.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Music_for_Marcel_Duchamp_1947
John Cage: "Imaginary Landscape No. 4" for 12 radios (1951)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:43
- Published: 07 Dec 2008
- Updated: 25 Sep 2012
As performed by students of Hunter College (NYC) in Prof. Joachim Pissarro's + Geoffrey Burleson's "Cage Class" 12/5/08. 2 players per radio - 1 for frequency tuning, the other for volume, tone, and page-turning of the score.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Imaginary_Landscape_No_4_for_12_radios_1951
Opus 20 Modern Masterworks: John Cage - Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:08
- Published: 20 Mar 2007
- Updated: 27 Sep 2012
#01: Biography "Opus 20 Modern Masterworks: John Cage" documentary film (Uplink Factory, Japan, 2006) music by John Cage, Ingo Metzmarcher, Hermann Ktetzschmar, David Tudor, Ensemble modern film by Klaus Lindemann presented by the Alte oper Frankfurt
http://wn.com/Opus_20_Modern_Masterworks_John_Cage_Part_1
John Cage "Bacchanale, for prepared piano"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:12
- Published: 28 Jan 2007
- Updated: 27 Sep 2012
My music video for John Cage's "Bacchanale, for prepared piano" (with Stephen Drury).
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Bacchanale,_for_prepared_piano
John Cage - 4'33" (BBC)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:23
- Published: 01 Oct 2010
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
John Cage's most famous musical composition is called 4'33". Will it be number 1 on christmas this year? It consists of the pianist going to the piano, and not hitting any keys for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. (He uses a stopwatch to time this.) In other words, the entire piece consists of silences -- silences of different lengths, they say. (c) John Cage
http://wn.com/John_Cage_4'33_BBC
John Cage: Six Melodies (1950)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:38
- Published: 20 Mar 2011
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
John Cage (1912-1992): Six Melodies, for violin and Keyboard (1950). Dedicato a Josef e Anni Albers. Melody 1 Melody 2 Melody 3 Melody 4 Melody 5 Melody 6 Annelie Gahl, violino Klaus Lang, piano elettrico (Fender Rhodes). Cover image: painting by Blinky Palermo. This is another composition with melodic lines without accompaniment, using single tones. Interval are played requiring onr or both of the instruments for their production. The music is very simple and the atmosphere of it is similar to that of the String Quartet in four parts. In fact, in one of his letters to Pierre Boulez, Cage calls the Six Melodies a postscript to the Quartet, even with the use of the same gamut of sounds. The rhythmic structure is 3½, 3½, 4, 4, 3, 4. (fonte web). **** The music published in our channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. This within a program shared to study classic educational music of the 1900's (mostly Italian) which involves thousands of people around the world. If someone, for any reason, would deem that a video appearing in this channel violates the copyright, please inform us immediately before you submit a claim to Youtube, and it will be our care to remove immediately the video accordingly. Your collaboration will be appreciated.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Six_Melodies_1950
John Cage: Music of Changes - Book I
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:12
- Published: 05 Feb 2010
- Updated: 26 Sep 2012
pf: David Tudor
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Music_of_Changes_Book_I
John Cage's 4'33"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:45
- Published: 15 Dec 2010
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
A performance by William Marx of John Cage's 4'33. Filmed at McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, CA. Composer John Adams wrote the following in The New York Times review of Mr. Cage's new biography, "The Zen of Silence" : "John Cage....prodded us to reevaluate how we define not only music but the entire experience of encountering art." Read the complete review of Kenneth Silverman's book: www.nytimes.com
http://wn.com/John_Cage's_4'33
Chance Conversations: An Interview with Merce Cunningham and John Cage
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 32:06
- Published: 27 Jul 2009
- Updated: 27 Sep 2012
In the spring of 1981, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage sat down to discuss their work and artistic process. As frequent collaborators, Cage and Cunningham pioneered a new framework of performance. Their novel approach allowed for mediums to exist independently, or rather cohabitate, within a performance, thus abandoning the co-dependent model of dance and music. Cage and Cunningham go on to discuss the methodology and motivations behind chance operations, a term used to describe artistic decisions based on unpredictability. Wanting to free himself of his likes and dislikes, Cage describes how Zen Buddhism influenced his work, leading him to use tools of chance. These new methods, adopted by both Cunningham and Cage, overturned a whole foundation of thought around music, movement, and the process of creating art.
http://wn.com/Chance_Conversations_An_Interview_with_Merce_Cunningham_and_John_Cage
John Cage - 1/7
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:28
- Published: 28 Jan 2008
- Updated: 16 Sep 2012
Documentary about the composer John Cage and his works/performances. Directed by Peter Greenaway, part of the "Four American Composers" series (1983).
http://wn.com/John_Cage_1_7
John Cage - Sonata II For Prepared Piano
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:30
- Published: 29 Jul 2009
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
Sonata II perfromed by Boris Berman taken from the Naxos recording of John Cages Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Sonata_II_For_Prepared_Piano
John Cage: Thirteen Harmonies (1985)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 43:19
- Published: 20 Mar 2011
- Updated: 29 Sep 2012
John Cage (1912-1992): Thirteen Harmonies, for violin and keyboard (1985). A selction of 13 out of a total of 44 Harmonies from Apartment House 1776. Roger Zahab made the selection and created a version for violin and keyboard. The selected Harmonies are: 1. Nr.18 - Old North (William Billings) 2. Nr.42 - Rapture (Collection Belcher) 3. Nr.26 - Judea (William Billings) 4. Nr.21 - Heath (William Billings) 5. Nr.19 - New York (Andrew Law) 6. Nr.5 - The Lord Descended (William Billings) 7. Nr.11 - Wheeler's Point (William Billings) 8. Nr.14 - Brunswick (James Lyon) 9. Nr.15 - Bellingham (William Billings) 10. Nr.28 - Greenwich (Andrew Law) 11. Nr.35 - Framingham (William Billings) 12. Nr.38 - The Lord is Ris'n (William Billings) 13. Nr.44 - Bloomfield (Andrew Law) Annelie Gahl, violino Klaus Lang, pianoforte elettrico (Fender Rhodes). Cover image: painting by Blinky Palermo. **** The music published in our channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. This within a program shared to study classic educational music of the 1900's (mostly Italian) which involves thousands of people around the world. If someone, for any reason, would deem that a video appearing in this channel violates the copyright, please inform us immediately before you submit a claim to Youtube, and it will be our care to remove immediately the video accordingly. Your collaboration will be appreciated.
http://wn.com/John_Cage_Thirteen_Harmonies_1985
David Greilsammer - John Cage - "prepared piano"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:12
- Published: 07 Jan 2008
- Updated: 28 Sep 2012
David Greilsammer prepares the piano for a performance of John Cage's Sonatas for "Prepared Piano"
http://wn.com/David_Greilsammer_John_Cage_prepared_piano
Stereolab - John Cage Bubblegum
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:57
- Published: 02 Jan 2007
- Updated: 26 Sep 2012
Stereolab - John Cage Bubblegum
http://wn.com/Stereolab_John_Cage_Bubblegum
AP / Seth Wenig
Photo: AP / Chris Pizzello
28 Sep 2012
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Celebrate John Cage in books, exhibits, concerts
17 Sep 2012
The Examiner
Related topics NYC booksJohn Cage Advertisement As every lover of the contemporary classical music knows, this month marks the centennial of the birth of composer, writer and artist John Cage, America's preeminent avant-garde pioneer. Cage, who died in 1992, is known to have influenced a host of...(size: 7.7Kb)
John Cage Is Still Rattling the Bars at 100
17 Sep 2012
The Guardian
John Cage: fan of...(size: 0.1Kb)
Institute of Musical Research Fellow Richard Bernas presents BBC Radio 3 programme on John Cage
13 Sep 2012
noodls
Thursday 13 September 2012 In a special Sunday Feature programme for BBC Radio 3 - John Cage: Beyond Silence - Richard Bernas, a Fellow of the Institute of Musical Research, looks at the influence of composer John Cage beyond music. Richard Bernas, a conductor, pianist and Cage-collaborator, talks...(size: 5.5Kb)
Review: John Cage, the Erik Satie connection
11 Sep 2012
The Los Angeles Times
When it comes to Erik Satie's "Vexations," I have thus far been a grazer. On the several opportunities I have had to experience a performance of the work, which entails repeating the same page of mystically unstable music 840 times, a 24-hour proposition give or take a couple of hours depending upon...(size: 34.8Kb)
Performances to honor composer John Cage
11 Sep 2012
noodls
NATCHITOCHES - The Mrs. H.D. Dear Sr. School of Creative and Performing Arts at Northwestern State University will commemorate the life and work of composer John Cage with two performances on Tuesday, Sept. 11. Admission to each event is free and open to the public. Cage, who...(size: 1.8Kb)
In honor of John Cage, silent tra-la-la
10 Sep 2012
San Francisco Chronicle
On the 100th birthday of the late composer John Cage last week, homage was paid at Tom Marioni's Society of Independent Artists gathering. Participants were warned by Marioni, who presides over the group, that the performances were to be greeted with respect, implying that no wisecracks would be...(size: 4.2Kb)
The Washington Post
The John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington, which has its final performances and events Monday, has been a fine example of an all-too-rare endeavor: classical music’s answer to the blockbuster museum show. Its approach has been high-church. To Do Homage to a Great Man, in the time-honored...(size: 5.7Kb)
The Washington Post
The composer Ernst Krenek diagnosed the problem of modernism in the 1950s. As translated into English a decade later, he wrote: “Performances of new music take place in an atmosphere dominated by specialists . . . [who] do not go to an art-work for a total emotional experience;...(size: 3.4Kb)
The Los Angeles Times
Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of John Cage's birth, and the world celebrated in ways large and small. The New Yorker magazine declared the 20th century "the John Cage century." Washington, D.C., got into full Cagean swing with an eight-day festival. New York took notice. So did Berlin, Vienna,...(size: 35.0Kb)
For the character, see Johnny Cage.
File:John Cage Laugh.png
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.[5][6]
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[7][8] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. The best known of these is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).[9]
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.[clarification needed] The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".[10]
Contents |
Life[link]
1912–31: Early years[link]
Cage was born in Los Angeles. His father John Milton Cage, Sr. (1886–1964) was an inventor, and his mother Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1885–1969) worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times.[11] The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned "[George] Washington in the surveying of Virginia".[12] Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy",[13] while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine,[11] others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe.[n 1] John Milton Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.[14]
Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition.[15] By 1928 Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. That year he graduated from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian[16] and enrolled at Pomona College, Claremont. In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer"[17] after an incident described in the 1991 autobiographical statement:
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.[13]
Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies.[18] He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris.[19] Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it.[17] He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.
After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent.[20] Cage started travelling, visited various places in France, Germany and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing.[21] His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulae, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left.[22] Cage's association with theatre also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."[23]
1931–36: Apprenticeship[link]
Cage returned to the United States in 1931.[22] He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as pianist Richard Buhlig (who became his first teacher[24]) and arts patron Galka Scheyer.[17] By 1933 Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained.[17] In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter",[25] in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.[26] Cowell mentioned, that before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil.[27]
Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School.[24] He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA.[28] Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am.[28][29] Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg.[n 2] He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.[30]
Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at USC and then at UCLA, as well as privately.[24] The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him",[31] particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer.[29] The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave.[32] Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, "In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony." I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."[33]
Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "[...] When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music."[31] Although Schoenberg never complimented Cage on his compositions during these two years, in a later interview he said that none of his American pupils were interesting, except Cage: "Of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius."[31]
At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in a relationship with Don Sample when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.[34]
1937–49: Modern dance and Eastern influences[link]
See also: Works for prepared piano by John Cage
The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades, then moved to Hollywood.[35] During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at UCLA. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe.[36] It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects.[36][37]
In 1938, with help from a fellow Cowell student Lou Harrison, Cage became a faculty member at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further.[36] After several months he left and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between the strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met a number of people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham. The latter was to become Cage's lifelong partner and collaborator.
Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design. The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942.
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Performed in 1958 by Arline Carmen (voice) and John Cage (closed piano). This is one of the rare recordings of Cage performing his own instrumental music.
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In New York, the Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. Through them, Cage met numerous important artists such as Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband. Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio.[38]
Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with the idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy.[39] Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki's lectures on Zen Buddhism,[40] and read the works of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.[24] The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences".[41]
Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941.[42] They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano (Cage) and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her.
1950s: Discovering chance[link]
Sonatas and Interludes were received well by the public. After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic Orchestra concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony, op. 21, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason.[43] The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school."[44][45]
In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching[46]—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination, but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the I Ching; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation":[47][48] his lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don't need sound to talk to me.[49]
Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51),[50] the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor,[51] whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death.[n 3] Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on electronic music. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951.
Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment, at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946) his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that, while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death.[52] Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures, performances, etc. In 1952–53 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music, which Earle Brown helped to put together.[53] Also in 1952, Cage wrote down the piece that became his most well-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience.[54] The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, i.e. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.[55]
From 1953 onwards, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things. In Summer 1954 he moved out from New York and settled in a cooperative community in Stony Point, New York. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and during 1956–58 he also worked as an art director of a typography.[56] Among the works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).
1960s: Fame[link]
Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. At the University, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.[citation needed] In 1960 the composer was appointed a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan,[57] where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book.[n 4] He went on to publish five more. Silence remained his most widely read and influential book.[24] In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation. Walter Hinrichsen, the president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalogue of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962.[56]
Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence, led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death.[58] But by mid-1960s Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances, that he was not able to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; Subsequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant.[24] After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of 0′00″, completed in 1962, originally comprised a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments or sounds.
Many of the Variations and other 1960s pieces were in fact "happenings", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from the classes include George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds.[59] As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.[citation needed]
In 1967, Cage's A Year from Monday was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964,[60] and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death.[61]
1969–87: New departures[link]
Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.[citation needed]
Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it."[62] Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, Cheap Imitation marked a major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation, which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975).
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Performed by the composer in 1976, shortly before he had to retire from performing.
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Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform.[63] Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s,[64] before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry (mesostics). M was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors, constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press.
1987–92: Final years and death[link]
See also: Number Pieces
In 1987, Cage completed a piece called Two, for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such pieces, one of the last being Eighty (1992, premiered in Munich on 28 October 2011), usually employing a variant of the same technique; together, these works are known as Number Pieces. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces, was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures;[24] the music has been linked to Cage's anarchic leanings.[65] One11 (i.e. the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film.
Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title Europera, in 1987–91. Europeras I and II require greater forces than III, IV and V, which are on a chamber scale.
Already in the course of the eighties, Cage's health worsened progressively: he suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He suffered a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet.[66] Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to incorporate in his visual work in 1985 is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered another stroke. He was taken to the nearest hospital, where he died on the morning of August 12.[67]
According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated, and the ashes scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York,[68] the same place where Cage scattered the ashes of his parents, years before.[61] The composer's death occurred only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in Frankfurt by the composer Walter Zimmermann and the musicologist Stefan Schaedler was due to take place. The event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern.[2] Merce Cunningham lived another 17 years, dying of natural causes in July 2009.[69]
Music[link]
See also: List of compositions by John Cage
Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony[link]
Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power."[70] Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint. Around the same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows.[71] After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).
Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives.[72] Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I, for example),[73] or A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously.[74]
In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony.[24] Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns.[24] The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards.[75]
Chance[link]
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Chart system was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, and the I Ching was used to determine the methods of sound production, or the rhythms, etc.[76] A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching, to star charts: Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978).[77] Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views: the difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"[78]—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible.[79] Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau.[n 5]
Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow the rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches.[80] Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15″ and 1′45″, and to anywhere from 2′00″ to 2′30″).[81]
Cage's method of using the I Ching was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation, the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these:
- Which of the seven modes, if we take as modes the seven scales beginning on white notes and remaining on white notes, which of those am I using?
- Which of the twelve possible chromatic transpositions am I using?
- For this phrase for which this transposition of this mode will apply, which note am I using of the seven to imitate the note that Satie wrote?[82]
In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes, the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from the chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand.[77][83]
Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents the performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system, in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc.[84] Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra, Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present the performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0'00" (1962; also known as 4'33" No. 2) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.[85]
Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera became the first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on 3 March 2012 at the London Colliseum.[86]. The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House.[87]
This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake, and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland. The piece was based on James Joyce's famous novel, Finnegans Wake, which was one of Cage's favorite books, and one from which he derived texts for several more of his works.
Improvisation[link]
Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) the performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of the pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, as is the musical output; the performers had no knowledge of the instruments. In Inlets (1977) the performers play large water-filled conch shells – by carefully tipping the shell several times, it is possible to achieve a bubble forming inside, which produced sound. Yet, as it is impossible to predict when this would happen, the performers had to continue tipping the shells – as a result the performance was dictated by pure chance.[88]
Visual art, writings, and other activities[link]
File:Cage-variations-iii-14-small.jpg
Variations III, No. 14, a 1992 print by Cage from a series of 57.
Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different typefaces, all governed by chance operations.[89]
From 1978 to his death Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing series of prints every year. The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. This was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage drew with his eyes closed, but which conformed to a strict structure developed using chance operations. Finally, Thoreau's drawings informed the last works produced in 1978, Signals.[90]
Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a number of large series of prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were the last works in which he used engraving.[91] In 1983 he started using various unconventional materials such as cotton batting, foam, etc., and then used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to create his visual works.[92] In 1988–1990 he produced watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The only film Cage produced was one of the Number Pieces, One11, commissioned by composer and film director Henning Lohner who worked with Cage to produce and direct the 90-minute monochrome film. It was completed only weeks before his death in 1992. One11 consists entirely of images of chance-determined play of electric light. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, accompanied by the live performance of the orchestra piece 103.
Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1959), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry—Cage's mesostics.
Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist: he co-founded the New York Mycological Society with four friends,[56] and his mycology collection is presently housed by the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Reception and influence[link]
Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim: the Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized him for "adoption of a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masks a basic weakness in compositional technique."[93] Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were similarly hostile towards Cage: for Xenakis, the adoption of chance in music was "an abuse of language and [...] an abrogation of a composer's function."[94]
An article by teacher and critic Michael Steinberg, Tradition and Responsibility, criticized avant-garde music in general:
The rise of music that is totally without social commitment also increases the separation between composer and public, and represents still another form of departure from tradition. The cynicism with which this particular departure seems to have been made is perfectly symbolized in John Cage's account of a public lecture he had given: "Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen." While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.[95]
Cage's aesthetic position was criticized by, among others, prominent writer and critic Douglas Kahn. In his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Kahn acknowledged the influence Cage had on culture, but noted that "one of the central effects of Cage's battery of silencing techniques was a silencing of the social."[96]
While much of Cage's work remains controversial,[citation needed] his influence on countless composers, artists, and writers is notable.[citation needed] After Cage introduced chance,[clarification needed] Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, yet all adopted chance procedures in some of their works (although in a much more restricted manner); and Stockhausen's piano writing in his later Klavierstücke was influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor.[97] Other composers who adopted chance procedures in their works included Witold Lutosławski, Mauricio Kagel, and many others.[citation needed] Music in which some of the composition and/or performance is left to chance was labelled aleatoric music—a term popularized by Pierre Boulez.[citation needed] Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's work with extended techniques.[98]
Cage's rhythmic structure experiments and his interest in sound influenced a number of composers, starting at first with his close American associates Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff (and other American composers, such as La Monte Young), and then spreading to Europe.[citation needed] For example, almost all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence[citation needed]: Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White,[99] Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly,[100] and Howard Skempton. [101] The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu has also cited Cage's influence.[102]
Cage's influence was also acknowledged by rock acts such as Sonic Youth (who performed some of the Number Pieces[103]) and Stereolab (who named a song after Cage[104]), composer and rock and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa,[105] and various noise music artists and bands: indeed, one writer traced the origin of noise music to 4′33″.[106] The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: in the mid-1970s Brian Eno's label Obscure Records released works by Cage.[107] Prepared piano, which Cage popularized, is featured heavily on Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs.[108] Cage's work as musicologist helped popularize Erik Satie's music,[109][110] and his friendship with Abstract expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into visual art. Cage's ideas also found their way into sound design: for example, Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage's work as a major influence.[111]
Archives[link]
- The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.[1].
- The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works.
- The John Cage Papers are held in Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. They contain manuscripts, interviews, fan mail, and ephemera. Other material, including clippings, gallery and exhibition catalogs, a collection of Cage's books and serials, posters, objects, exhibition and literary announcement postcards, and brochures from conferences and other organizations
- The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois contains the composer's correspondence, ephemera, and the Notations collection.
Footnotes[link]
- ^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1–2. Cage mentions a working model of the universe that his father had built, and that the scientists who saw it could not explain how it worked and refused to believe it.
- ^ Different sources give different details of their first meeting. Pritchett, in Grove, implies that Cage met Schoenberg in New York City: "Cage followed Schoenberg to Los Angeles in 1934". In a 1976 interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 5, Cage mentions that he "went to see him [Schoenberg] in Los Angeles."
- ^ Recent research has shown that Cage may have met Tudor almost a decade earlier, in 1942, through Jean Erdman: Gann, Kyle (2008). "Cleaning Up a Life". an ARTSJOURNAL weblog. http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2008/09/cleaning_up_a_life.html. Retrieved August 4, 2009.
- ^ Technically, it was his second, for Cage previously collaborated with Kathleen Hoover on a biographical volume on Virgil Thomson, which was published in 1959.
- ^ Cage self-identified as an anarchist in a 1985 interview: "I'm an anarchist. I don't know whether the adjective is pure and simple, or philosophical, or what, but I don't like government! And I don't like institutions! And I don't have any confidence in even good institutions." John Cage at Seventy: An Interview by Stephen Montague. American Music, Summer 1985. Ubu.com. Accessed May 24, 2007.
Notes[link]
- ^ Pritchett, Grove: "He has had a greater impact on music in the 20th century than any other American composer."
- ^ a b "John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies". New York Times. August 13, 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0905.html. Retrieved July 21, 2007. "John Cage, the prolific and influential composer whose Minimalist works have long been a driving force in the world of music, dance and art, died yesterday at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 79 years old and lived in Manhattan."
- ^ Leonard, George J. (1995). Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. University of Chicago Press. p. 120 ("...when Harvard University Press called him, in a 1990 book advertisement, "without a doubt the most influential composer of the last half-century," amazingly, that was too modest."). ISBN 978-0-226-47253-9.
- ^ Greene, David Mason (2007). Greene's Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers. Reproducing Piano Roll Fnd.. p. 1407 ("[...] John Cage is probably the most influential ... of all American composers to date."). ISBN 978-0-385-14278-6.
- ^ Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 93.
- ^ Bernstein, Hatch, 2001, 43–45.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 69–70
- ^ Reviews cited in Fetterman 1996, 69
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 80: "Most critics agree that Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) is the finest composition of Cage's early period."
- ^ Cage 1973, 12.
- ^ a b Nicholls 2002, 4.
- ^ Cage quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 1. For details on Cage's ancestry, see, for example, Nicholls 2002, 4–6.
- ^ a b Cage, John (1991). "An Autobiographical Statement". Southwest Review. http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
- ^ Recording and notes: John Cage – Complete Piano Music Vol.7: Pieces 1933–1950. Steffen Schleiermacher (piano). MDG 613 0789-2.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 2.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 21.
- ^ a b c d Kostelanetz 2003, 4.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 8.
- ^ Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 79.
- ^ Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 80.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 22.
- ^ a b Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 81.
- ^ Cage quoted in Perloff, Junkerman, 1994, 81.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i Pritchett, Grove.
- ^ Cage quoted in Nicholls 2002, 24.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 61.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 24.
- ^ a b Kostelanetz 2003, 7.
- ^ a b Pritchett 2003, 9.
- ^ This conversation was recounted many times by Cage himself: see Silence, p. 261; A Year from Monday, p. 44; interviews quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, pp. 5, 105; etc.
- ^ a b c Kostelanetz 2003, 6.
- ^ Cage interview quoted in Kostelanetz 2003, 105.
- ^ Cage 1973, 260.
- ^ For details on Cage's first meeting with Xenia, see Kostelanetz 2003, 7–8; for details on Cage's homosexual relationship with Don Sample, an American he met in Europe, as well as details on the Cage-Kashevaroff marriage, see Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 81, 86.
- ^ Perloff, Junkerman, 86
- ^ a b c Revill 1993, 55.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 43.
- ^ Reinhardt, Lauriejean. John Cage's "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs", 7. Available online.
- ^ Cage 1973, 127.
- ^ Revill 1993, 108.
- ^ Cage 1973, 158.
- ^ Bredow 2012.
- ^ Revill 1993, 101.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 105.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 101.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 68.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 97.
- ^ Revill 1993, 91.
- ^ John Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. From: Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 71.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 78.
- ^ Revill 1993, 142.
- ^ Revill 1993, 143–149.
- ^ Revill 1993, 166.
- ^ Revill 1993, 174
- ^ a b c Emmerik, Paul van (2009). "A John Cage Compendium". Paul van Emmerik. http://www.xs4all.nl/~cagecomp/. Retrieved August 6, 2009.
- ^ "Guide to the Center for Advanced Studies Records, 1958 – 1969". Wesleyan University. http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/schome/FAs/ce1000-137.html. Retrieved September 4, 2010.
- ^ "The Many Views of Betty Freeman: Betty Freeman's Commissions". NewMusicBox. 2000. http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=846. Retrieved August 8, 2009.
- ^ Alex Ross (December 4, 1992). "S.E.M. Evokes John Cage as Teacher". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/24/arts/review-music-sem-evokes-john-cage-as-teacher.html. Retrieved October 6, 2010.
- ^ Revill 1993, 208.
- ^ a b Revill 1993, 228.
- ^ Pritchett, James. 2004. "John Cage: Imitations/Transformations". In James Pritchett, Writings on John Cage (and others). (Online resource, accessed June 5, 2008)
- ^ Revill 1993, 247.
- ^ Fetterman 1996, 191.
- ^ Haskins 2004.
- ^ Revill 1993, 295.
- ^ Kostelanetz, Richard. 2000. John Cage: Writer: Selected Texts, xvii. Cooper Square Press, 2nd edition. ISBN 978-0-8154-1034-8
- ^ "John Cage (1912–1992) – Find A Grave Memorial". January 1, 2000. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1461. Retrieved August 3, 2009.
- ^ "Dance great Cunningham dies at 90". BBC News. July 28, 2009. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8171036.stm. Retrieved September 3, 2009.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 6.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 7.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 71–74.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 29–33.
- ^ Notes in the score: A Flower. Edition Peters 6711. Copyright 1960 by Henmar Press.
- ^ Pritchett, James. 1988. "From Choice to Chance: John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano." Perspectives of New Music 26, no. 1 (Fall): 50–81.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 94.
- ^ a b Nicholls 2002, 139.
- ^ Perloff, Junkerman 1994, 140.
- ^ Pritchett, James. 1994a. "John Cage: Freeman Etudes", CD liner notes to: John Cage, Freeman Etudes (Books 1 and 2) (Irvine Arditti, violin), Mode 32. (Accessed August 14, 2008)
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 197.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 200.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 84.
- ^ Kostelanetz 2003, 92.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 136.
- ^ Pritchett 1993, 144–146.
- ^ http://classical-iconoclast.blogspot.com/2012/01/eno-presents-john-cage-musicircus.html
- ^ http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?&itemid=2007
- ^ Kostelanetz 2004, 92–96.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 112–113.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 113–115.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 115–118.
- ^ Nicholls 2002, 118–122.
- ^ Boulez, Pierre. 1964. Alea. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn – Winter, 1964), 42–53
- ^ Bois, Mario, and Xenakis, Iannis. 1980. The Man and his Music: A Conversation with the Composer and a Description of his Works, 12. Greenwood Press Reprint.
- ^ Steinberg, Michael. 1962. Tradition and Responsibility. Perspectives of New Music 1, 1962, 154–159.
- ^ Kahn, Douglas. 1999. Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, 165. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- ^ Maconie, Robin. 1976. The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, with a foreword by Karlheinz Stockhausen, 141–144. London and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-315429-3
- ^ Ryan, David. 1999. Interview with Helmut Lachenmann, p. 21. Tempo, New Ser., No. 210. (Oct., 1999), pp. 20–24.
- ^ Michael Parsons. 1976. Systems in Art and Music. The Musical Times, Vol. 17, No. 1604. (Oct., 1976), 815–818.
- ^ "Gavin Bryars biography etc". Gavin Bryars' Official Web-site. http://www.gavinbryars.com/Pages/bio_fr.html. Retrieved September 12, 2009.
- ^ Potter, Keith. "Skempton, Howard", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed March 12 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
- ^ Burt, Peter. 2001. The Music of Toru Takemitsu, 94. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78220-1.
- ^ Lopez, Antonio (December 1999 / January 2000). "Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore: On punk music, staying fresh, amd the strange bridge between art and rock". Thirsty Ear Magazine. http://www.thirstyearfestival.com/interviews/sonic.html. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
- ^ Morris, Chris (August 17, 1997). "Hold The Ketchup On That Stereolab". Yahoo! Music. http://www.music.yahoo.ca/read/interview/12052849. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
- ^ Lowe, Kelly Fisher (2006). The Words and Music of Frank Zappa. Praeger Publishers. p. 57. ISBN 0-275-98779-5.
- ^ Paul Hegarty, Full With Noise: Theory and Japanese Noise Music, pp. 86–98 in Life in the Wires (2004) eds. Arthur Kroker & Marilouise Kroker, NWP Ctheory Books, Victoria, Canada
- ^ Jack, Adrian (1975). ""I Want to be a Magnet for Tapes" (interview with Brian Eno)". Time Out. http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/timeo75a.html. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
- ^ Worby, Robert (October 23, 2002). "Richard Aphex, John Cage and the Prepared Piano". Warp Records. http://warp.net/records/aphex-twin/richard-aphex-john-cage-and-the-prepared-piano. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
- ^ Orledge, Robert (1990). Satie the Composer. Cambridge University Press. p. 259. ISBN 978-0-521-35037-2.
- ^ Shlomowitz, Matthew. 1999. Cage's Place In the Reception of Satie. Part of the PhD at the University of California at San Diego, USA. Available online.
- ^ LoBrutto, Vincent (1994). Sound-on-Film: Interviews With Creators of Film Sound. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 241–42. ISBN 978-0-275-94443-8.
References[link]
- Bernstein, David W., and Hatch, Christopher, eds. 2001. Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-04407-6
- Boulez, Pierre, and Cage, John. 1995. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Edited by Robert Samuels and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Robert Samuels. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-48558-4
- Bredow, Moritz von. 2012. "Rebellische Pianistin. Das Leben der Grete Sultan zwischen Berlin und New York." (Biography). Schott Music, Mainz, Germany. ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9
- Brown, Kathan. 2001. John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind. Crown Point Press. ISBN 1-891300-16-4, ISBN 978-1-891300-16-5
- Cage, John. 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan University Press Paperback (first edition 1961). ISBN 0-8195-6028-6
- Eldred, Michael 1995/2006 Heidegger's Hölderlin and John Cage www.arte-fact.org
- Eldred, Michael 2010 The Quivering of Propriation: A Parallel Way to Music, Section II.3 New Music is the Other Music (Cage) www.arte-fact.org
- Fetterman, William. 1996. John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. Routledge. ISBN 3-7186-5643-4
- Haskins, Rob. 2004. "An Anarchic Society of Sounds": The Number Pieces of John Cage. PhD dissertation, Musicology, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.
- Kostelanetz, Richard. 2003. Conversing with John Cage, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93792-2
- Nicholls, David (ed.). 2002. The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-78968-0
- Nicholls, David. 2007. John Cage. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-03215-2
- Patterson, David W. (ed.). John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-8153-2995-4
- Perloff, Marjorie, and Junkerman, Charles. 1994. John Cage: Composed in America. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-66057-5
- Pritchett, James. 1993. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56544-8
- Pritchett, James, and Kuhn, Laura. "John Cage", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed December 15 2006), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
- Revill, David. 1993. The Roaring Silence: John Cage – a Life. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-220-6, ISBN 978-1-55970-220-1
- Taruskin, Richard. 2005. Oxford History of Western Music, The. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxford UP, Inc. Indeterminacy pp. 55–101.
External links[link]
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Book: John Cage |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Cage |
General information and catalogues[link]
- Official Website
- John Cage Database, includes a complete catalogue of Cage's music with details on individual compositions, as well as a discography, a bibliography and a list of forthcoming performances of Cage's work.
- A John Cage Compendium, website by Cage scholar Paul van Emmerik, in collaboration with performer Herbert Henck and András Wilheim. Includes exhaustive catalogues and bibliography, chronology of Cage's life, etc.
- Larry Solomon's John Cage Pages, a complete catalogue of Cage's music and a filmography, as well as other materials.
- James Pritchett: Writings, articles on Cage's music in HTML and PDF form by Cage scholar James Pritchett.
- Edition Peters: John Cage Biography and Works, Cage's principal publisher since 1961.
- Guide to the John Cage Mycology Collection
- Silence/Stories: related texts and poems by, among others, Lowell Cross, AP Crumlish, Karlheinz Essl, Raymond Federman, August Highland, George Koehler, Richard Kostelanetz, Ian S. Macdonald, Beat Streuli, Dan Waber, Sigi Waters and John Whiting
- A Project by John Cage called ORGAN2/ASLSP is the longest concert ever created.
- Works by or about John Cage in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- (French) A biography of John Cage, from IRCAM's website.
- Artist Biography and a list of video works by and about John Cage at Electronic Arts Intermix eai.org.
Link collections[link]
Specific topics[link]
- Kasper, Ulrike. "Sounds Visions, The Work of Jacques Pourcher, Perspectives on John Cage", essay on the exhibition "John Cage and Jacques Pourcher, Works on Paper", Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA.
- The Music of Chance, article from the UK Guardian newspaper, quotes from various people who knew Cage.
- ORGAN2/ASLSP: As Slow as Possible – John-Cage-Orgelprojekt Halberstadt, Web site about a current ongoing performance of As Slow As Possible, which began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years
- 'Silence and Change / Five Hanau Silence': Articles and documents on a project of John Cage, Claus Sterneck and Wolfgang Sterneck in benefit of a squated culture center in Hanau (Germany) in 1991, (English / German).
Listening[link]
- In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 1
- In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 2
- In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 3
- In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 4
- In Conversation with Morton Feldman, 1966, Part 5
- Excerpts from sound archives of Cage's works.
Media[link]
- John Cage at UbuWeb: historical, sound, film.
- John Cage's etchings at the Crown Point Press website
- Art of the States: John Cage, six works by the composer
- Indeterminacy, Cage's short stories taken from various publications and accessed in random order.
- FontanaMixer: computer program by Karlheinz Essl which generates a realtime version of John Cage's "Fontana Mix" (1958)
- Other Minds Archive: John Cage interviewed by Jonathan Cott, streaming audio
- Other Minds Archive: John Cage and David Tudor Concert at The San Francisco Museum of Art (January 16, 1965), streaming audio
- 27, 2002 Suite for Toy Piano (1948) performed by Margaret Leng Tan at the Other Minds Music Festival in 1999 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.
- 1982 performance of Speech for 5 radios and reel (1955) on YouTube
- Water Walk on YouTube from Cage's appearance on the game show I've Got a Secret in January 1960.
- The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art (2009) a lecture by Julia E. Robinson on occasion of Cage's exhibition at the MACBA, Barcelona
- Notes towards a re-reading of the “Roaratorio” the work of John Cage and his special relationship to radio at Ràdio Web MACBA
- The Rest isn't Silence... it doesn't exist! Analytical material and recordings going back to the first rehearsal and performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4 in 1951.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Cage, John |
| Alternative names | Cage, John Milton, Jr. |
| Short description | Composer, philosopher, printmaker, writer |
| Date of birth | September 5, 1912 |
| Place of birth | Los Angeles, United States |
| Date of death | August 12, 1992 |
| Place of death | New York City, United States |
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| David Tudor | |
|---|---|
Playing with John Cage at Shiraz Arts Festival in 1971 |
|
| Background information | |
| Born | January 20, 1926 |
| Origin | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Died | August 13, 1996 |
| Occupations | Professional Musician, Composer |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Associated acts | John Cage |
David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.
Contents |
Biography[link]
Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the first American performance of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez in 1950, and a European tour in 1954 greatly enhanced his reputation. Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated his Klavierstück VI (1955) to Tudor. Tudor also gave early performances of works by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and La Monte Young.
The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated is John Cage. He gave the premiere of Cage's Music of Changes, Concerto For Piano and Orchestra and the notorious 4' 33". Cage said that many of his pieces were written either specifically for Tudor to perform or with him in mind, once stating "what you had to do was to make a situation that would interest him. That was the role he played.”[1] The two worked closely together on many of Cage's pieces, both works for piano and electronic pieces, including for the Smithsonian Folkways album: Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1992).
After a stint teaching at Darmstadt from 1956 to 1961, Tudor began to wind up his activities as a pianist to concentrate on composing. He wrote mostly electronic works, many commissioned by Cage's partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham. His homemade musical circuits are considered landmarks in live electronic music and electrical instrument building as a form of composition. One piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross features a chess game, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.
Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Among many works created for the company, Tudor composed Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994), the electronic component of Ocean, which was conceived by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, with choreography by Merce Cunningham, orchestral music by Andrew Culver, and design by Marsha Skinner.
Tudor died in Tomkins Cove, New York at the age of 70.
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ Holzaepfel, John. "David Tudor and Gordon Mumma". Liner note essay. New World Records.
External links[link]
- http://www.davidtudor.org
- The Art of David Tudor, Getty Research Institute
- Lovely Music Biographies: David Tudor
- Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music Album Details at Smithsonian Folkways
Interviews[link]
- David Tudor interview by Bruce Duffie (April 7, 1986)
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Tudor, David |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | January 20, 1926 |
| Place of birth | |
| Date of death | August 13, 1996 |
| Place of death | |
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"Duchamp" redirects here. For other uses, see Duchamp (disambiguation).
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| Marcel Duchamp | |
|---|---|
| 250px Marcel Duchamp playing chess in 1952. (Kay Bell Reynal photo in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.) |
|
| Birth name | Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp |
| Born | (1887-07-28)28 July 1887 Blainville-Crevon, France |
| Died | 2 October 1968(1968-10-02) (aged 81) Neuilly-sur-Seine, France |
| Nationality | French, became a U.S. citizen in 1955 |
| Field | Painting, sculpture, film |
| Movement | Dada, Surrealism |
| Works | Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) Fountain (1917) The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) Etant donnés (1946–66) |
Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃]) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century,[1][2][3][4][5] Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.[6]
Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions. He famously dubbed a urinal art and named it Fountain, though in a 1917 letter to his sister Duchamp indicates that a female friend, possibly the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, conceived of the urinal as sculpture and sent it to him under the pseudonym Richard Mutt.[7] Duchamp produced relatively few artworks, while moving quickly through the avant-garde circles of his time.
- The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp[8]
Life[link]
File:DuchampBrothers.jpg
Three Duchamp brothers, left to right: Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon in the garden of Jacques Villon's studio in Puteaux, France, 1914, (Smithsonian Institution collections.)
Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Haute-Normandie region of France, and grew up in a family that enjoyed cultural activities. The art of painter and engraver Emile Nicolle, his maternal grandfather, filled the house, and the family liked to play chess, read books, paint, and make music together.
Of Eugene and Lucie Duchamp's seven children, one died as an infant and four became successful artists. Marcel Duchamp was the brother of:
- Jacques Villon (1875–1963), painter, printmaker
- Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876–1918), sculptor
- Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889–1963), painter.
As a child, with his two older brothers already away from home at school in Rouen, Duchamp was close to his sister Suzanne, who was a willing accomplice in games and activities conjured by his fertile imagination. At 10 years old, Duchamp followed in his brothers' footsteps when he left home and began schooling at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille, in Rouen. For the next 7 years, he was locked into an educational regime which focused on intellectual development. Though he was not an outstanding student, his best subject was mathematics and he won two mathematics prizes at the school. He also won a prize for drawing in 1903, and at his commencement in 1904 he won a coveted first prize, validating his recent decision to become an artist.
He learned academic drawing from a teacher who unsuccessfully attempted to protect his students from Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and other avant-garde influences. However, Duchamp's true artistic mentor at the time was his brother Jacques Villon, whose fluid and incisive style he sought to imitate. At 14, his first serious art attempts were drawings and watercolors depicting his sister Suzanne in various poses and activities. That summer he also painted landscapes in an Impressionist style using oils.
Duchamp was throughout his adult life a passionate smoker of Habana cigars[9]
Early work[link]
Duchamp's early art works align with Post-Impressionist styles. He experimented with classical techniques and subjects, as well as with Cubism and Fauvism. When he was later asked about what had influenced him at the time, Duchamp cited the work of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, whose approach to art was not outwardly anti-academic, but quietly individual.
He studied art at the Académie Julian from 1904 to 1905, but preferred playing billiards to attending classes. During this time Duchamp drew and sold cartoons which reflected his ribald humor. Many of the drawings use visual and/or verbal puns. Such play with words and symbols engaged his imagination for the rest of his life.
In 1905, he began his compulsory military service, working for a printer in Rouen. There he learned typography and printing processes – skills he would use in his later work.
Due to his eldest brother Jacques' membership in the prestigious Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture Duchamp's work was exhibited in the 1908 Salon d'Automne. The following year his work was featured in the Salon des Indépendants. Of Duchamp's pieces in the show, critic Guillaume Apollinaire--who was to become a friend—criticized what he called "Duchamp's very ugly nudes." Duchamp also became lifelong friends with exuberant artist Francis Picabia after meeting him at the 1911 Salon d' Automne, and Picabia proceeded to introduce him to a lifestyle of fast cars and 'high' living.
In 1911, at Jacques' home in Puteaux, the brothers hosted a regular discussion group with other artists and writers including Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Roger de la Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, and Alexander Archipenko. The group came to be known as the Puteaux Group, and the artists' work was dubbed Orphic cubism. Uninterested in the Cubists' seriousness or in their focus on visual matters, Duchamp did not join in discussions of Cubist theory, and gained a reputation of being shy. However, that same year he painted in a Cubist style, and added an impression of motion by using repetitive imagery.
During this period Duchamp's fascination with transition, change, movement and distance became manifest, and like many artists of the time, he was intrigued with the concept of depicting a "Fourth dimension" in art.
Works from this period included his first "machine" painting, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911), which he gave to his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon. The Coffee Mill shows similarity to the "grinder" mechanism of the Large Glass he was to paint years later.
In his 1911, Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) there is the Cubist overlapping frames and multiple perspectives of his two brothers playing chess, but to that Duchamp added elements conveying the unseen mental activity of the players. (Notably, "échec" is French for "failure".)
File:Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase.jpg
Marcel Duchamp. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912). Oil on canvas. 57 7/8" x 35 1/8". Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Nude Descending a Staircase No.2[link]
Main article: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
Duchamp's first work to provoke significant controversy was Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) (1912). The painting depicts the mechanistic motion of a nude, with superimposed facets, similar to motion pictures. It shows elements of both the fragmentation and synthesis of the Cubists, and the movement and dynamism of the Futurists.
He first submitted the piece to appear at the Cubist Salon des Indépendants, but jurist Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or to paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. Duchamp's brothers did approach him with Gleizes' request, but Duchamp quietly refused. Of the incident Duchamp later recalled, "I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that."[10]
He later submitted the painting to the 1913 "Armory Show" in New York City. The exhibition was officially named the International Exhibition of Modern Art, displayed works of American artists, and was also the first major exhibition of modern trends coming out of Paris. American show-goers, accustomed to realistic art, were scandalized, and the Nude was at the center of much of the controversy.
Leaving "retinal art" behind[link]
At about this time, Duchamp read Max Stirner's philosophical tract, The Ego and Its Own, the study of which he considered another turning point in his artistic and intellectual development. He called it "...a remarkable book ... which advances no formal theories, but just keeps saying that the ego is always there in everything."[citation needed]
While in Germany in 1912, he painted the last of his Cubist-like paintings and he started "Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors" image, and began making plans for The Large Glass – scribbling short notes to himself, sometimes with hurried sketches. It would be over 10 years before this piece was completed. Little else is known about the two-month stay in Germany except that the friend he visited was intent on showing him the sights and the nightlife.
The same year, Duchamp also attended a performance of a stage adaptation of Raymond Roussel's 1910 novel, Impressions d'Afrique which featured plots that turned in on themselves, word play, surrealistic sets and humanoid machines. He credited the drama with having radically changed his approach to art, and having inspired him to begin the creation of his The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as The Large Glass. Work on The Large Glass continued into 1913, with his invention of inventing a repertoire of forms. He made notes, sketches and painted studies, and even drew some of his ideas on the wall of his apartment.
Towards the end of 1912, he traveled with Picabia, Apollinaire and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia through the Jura mountains, an adventure that Buffet-Picabia described as one of their "forays of demoralization, which were also forays of witticism and clownery ... the disintegration of the concept of art.".[11] Duchamp's notes from the trip avoid logic and sense, and have a surrealistic, mythical connotation.
Duchamp painted few canvases after 1912, and in those he did, he attempted to remove "painterly" effects, and instead to use a technical drawing approach.
His broad interests led him to an exhibition of aviation technology during this period, after which Duchamp said to his friend Constantin Brâncuşi, "Painting is washed up. Who will ever do anything better than that propeller? Tell me, can you do that?".[11] Brâncuşi later sculpted bird forms, which U.S. Customs officials mistook for aviation parts and for which they attempted to collect import duties.
In 1913, Duchamp withdrew from painting circles and began working as a librarian in the Bibliotèque Sainte-Geneviève to be able to earn a living wage while concentrating on scholarly realms and working on his Large Glass. He studied math and physics – areas in which exciting new discoveries were taking place. The theoretical writings of Henri Poincaré particularly intrigued and inspired Duchamp. Poincaré postulated that the laws believed to govern matter were created solely by the minds that "understood" them and that no theory could be considered "true." "The things themselves are not what science can reach..., but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality",Poincaré wrote in 1902.[12] Reflecting the influence of Poincaré's writings, Duchamp tolerated any interpretation of his art by regarding it as the creation of the person who formulated it, not as truth.[13]
Duchamp's own art-science experiments began during his tenure at the library. To make one of his favorite pieces, 3 Standard Stoppages (3 stoppages étalon), he dropped three 1-meter lengths of thread onto prepared canvases, one at a time, from a height of 1 meter. The threads landed in three random undulating positions. He varnished them into place on the blue-black canvas strips and attached them to glass. He then cut three wood slats into the shapes of the curved strings, and put all the pieces into a croquet box. Three small leather signs with the title printed in gold were glued to each of the "stoppage" backgrounds. The piece appears to literally follow Poincaré's School of the Thread, part of a book on classical mechanics.
In his studio he mounted a bicycle wheel upside down onto a stool, spinning it occasionally just to watch it. It is often assumed that the Bicycle Wheel represents Duchamp's first of his "Readymades", this particular installation was never submitted for any art exhibition, and was eventually lost. However, initially, the wheel was simply placed in the studio to create atmosphere: "I enjoyed looking at it just as I enjoy looking at the flames dancing in a fireplace."[14]
After World War I was declared in 1914, with his brothers and many friends in military service and himself exempted, Duchamp felt uncomfortable in Paris. Meanwhile, Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 had scandalized Americans at the Armory Show, and helped secure the sale of all four of his paintings in the show. Thus, being able to finance the trip, Duchamp decided to emigrate to the United States in 1915.To his surprise, he found he was a celebrity when he arrived in New York in 1915, where he quickly befriended art patron Katherine Dreier and artist Man Ray. Duchamp's circle included art patrons Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, actress and artist Beatrice Wood and Francis Picabia, as well as other avant-garde figures. Though he spoke little English, in the course of supporting himself by giving French lessons and through some library work, he quickly learned the language.
For two years the Arensbergs, who would remain his friends and patrons for 42 years, were the landlords of his studio. In lieu of rent, they agreed that his payment would be The Large Glass. An art gallery offered Duchamp $10,000 per year in exchange for all of his yearly production, but Duchamp declined the offer, preferring to continue his work on The Large Glass.
Société Anonyme[link]
Duchamp created the Société Anonyme in 1920, along with Katherine Dreier and Man Ray. This was the beginning of his life-long involvement in art dealing and collecting. The group collected modern art works, and arranged modern art exhibitions and lectures throughout the 1930s.
By this time Walter Pach, one of the coordinators of the 1913 Armory Show, sought Duchamp's advice on modern art. Beginning with Société Anonyme, Dreier also depended on Duchamp's counsel in gathering her collection, as did Arensberg. Later Peggy Guggenheim, Museum of Modern Art directors Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney consulted with Duchamp on their modern art collections and shows.
Dada[link]
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New York Dada had a less serious tone than that of European Dadaism, and was not a particularly organized venture. Duchamp's friend Picabia connected with the Dada group in Zürich, bringing to New York the Dadaist ideas of absurdity and "anti-art." Duchamp and Picabia first met in September 1911 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, where they were both exhibiting. Duchamp showed a larger version of his Young Man and Girl in Spring 1911, a work that had an Edenic theme and a thinly veiled sexuality also found in Picabia's contemporaneous Adam and Eve 1911. According to Duchamp, 'our friendship began right there." [15] A group met almost nightly at the Arensberg home, or caroused in Greenwich Village. Together with Man Ray, Duchamp contributed his ideas and humor to the New York activities, many of which ran concurrent with the development of his Readymades and The Large Glass.
The most prominent example of Duchamp's association with Dada was his submission of Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917. Artworks in the Independent Artists shows were not selected by jury, and all pieces submitted were displayed. However, the show committee insisted that Fountain was not art, and rejected it from the show. This caused an uproar amongst the Dadaists, and led Duchamp to resign from the board of the Independent Artists.[16]
Along with Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, Duchamp published a Dada magazine in New York, titled The Blind Man, which included art, literature, humor and commentary.
When he returned to Paris after World War I, Duchamp did not participate in the Dada group.
Readymades[link]
Main article: Readymades of Marcel Duchamp
"Readymades" were found objects which Duchamp chose and presented as art. In 1913, Duchamp installed a Bicycle Wheel in his studio. However, the idea of Readymades did not fully develop until 1915. The idea was to question the very notion of Art, and the adoration of art, which Duchamp found "unneccessary"[17]
My idea was to choose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see.[17]
Bottle Rack (1914), a bottle drying rack signed by Duchamp, is considered to be the first "pure" readymade. Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915), a snow shovel, also called In Advance of the Broken Arm, followed soon after. His Fountain, a urinal signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", shocked the art world in 1917. Fountain was selected in 2004 as "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by 500 renowned artists and historians.[18]
In 1919, Duchamp made a parody of the Mona Lisa by adorning a cheap reproduction of the painting with a mustache and goatee. To this he added the inscription L.H.O.O.Q., a phonetic game which, when read out loud in French quickly sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul". This can be translated as "She has a hot ass", implying that the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. It may also have been intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo da Vinci's alleged homosexuality. Duchamp gave a "loose" translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as "there is fire down below" in a late interview with Arturo Schwarz.
According to Rhonda Roland Shearer, the apparent Mona Lisa reproduction is in fact a copy modeled partly on Duchamp's own face.[19] Research published by Shearer also speculates that Duchamp himself may have created some of the objects which he claimed to be "found objects".
[edit] The Large Glass
Main article: The Large Glass
File:Duchamp LargeGlass.jpg
The Large Glass (1915–23) Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection
Duchamp worked on his complex Futurism inspired piece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) from 1915 to 1923, with the exception of periods in Buenos Aires and Paris in 1918–1920. He executed the work on two panes of glass with materials such as lead foil, fuse wire, and dust. It combines chance procedures, plotted perspective studies, and laborious craftsmanship. He published notes for the piece, The Green Box, intended to complement the visual experience. They reflect the creation of unique rules of physics, and a mythology which describes the work. He stated that his "hilarious picture" is intended to depict the erotic encounter between a bride and her nine bachelors.
The piece was inspired by a performance of the stage adaptation of Roussel's novel Impressions d'Afrique which Duchamp attended in 1912. Notes, sketches and plans for the work were drawn on Duchamp's studio walls as early as 1913. In order to concentrate on the work free from material obligations, Duchamp found work as a librarian while living in France. After emigrating to the United States in 1915, he commenced his work on the piece financed by the support of the Arensbergs.
The piece is partially constructed as a retrospective of Duchamp's works, including a three dimensional reproduction of his earlier paintings Bride (1912), Chocolate Grinder (1914) and Glider containing a water mill in neighboring metals (1913–1915), which has opened for numerous interpretations. The work was formally declared "Unfinished" in 1923. Going home from its first public exhibition, the glass broke in its shipping crate and received a large crack in the glass. Duchamp repaired it, but left the cracks in the glass intact, accepting the chance element as a part of the piece.
Until 1969 when the Philadelphia Museum of Art revealed Duchamp's Etant donnés tableau, The Large Glass was thought to have been his last major work.
Kinetic works[link]
Duchamp's interest in kinetic works can be discerned as early as the notes for The Large Glass and the Bicycle Wheel readymade, and despite losing interest in "retinal art", he retained interest in visual phenomena.
In 1920, with help from Man Ray, Duchamp built a motorized sculpture, Rotative plaques verre, optique de précision ("Rotary Glass Plates, Precision Optics"). The piece, which he did not consider to be art, involved a motor to spin pieces of rectangular glass on which were painted segments of a circle. When the apparatus spins, an optical illusion occurs, in which the segments appear to be closed concentric circles.
Man Ray set up equipment to photograph the initial experiment, but when they turned the machine on for the second time, a belt broke, and caught a piece of the glass, which after glancing off Man Ray's head, shattered into bits.[20]
After moving back to Paris in 1923, at André Breton's urging and through the financing of Jacques Doucet, Duchamp built another optical device based on the first one, Rotative Demisphère, optique de précision (Rotary Demisphere, Precision Optics). This time the optical element was a globe cut in half, with black concentric circles painted on it. When it spins, the circles appear to move backwards and forwards in space. Duchamp asked that Doucet not exhibit the apparatus as art.[21].
Rotoreliefs were the next phase of Duchamp's spinning works. To make the optical "play toys", he painted designs on flat cardboard circles and spun them on a phonographic turntable. When spinning, the flat disks appeared three-dimensional. He had a printer produce 500 sets of six of the designs, and set up a booth at a 1935 Paris inventors' show to sell them. The venture was a financial disaster, but some optical scientists thought they might be of use in restoring three-dimensional stereoscopic sight to people who have lost vision one eye.[22]
In collaboration with Man Ray and Marc Allégret, Duchamp filmed early versions of the Rotoreliefs and they named the film Anémic Cinéma (1926).
Later, in Alexander Calder's studio in 1931, while looking at the sculptor's kinetic works, Duchamp suggested that these should be called "mobiles". Calder agreed to use this novel term in his upcoming show. To this day, sculptures of this type are called "mobiles."[23]
Musical Ideas[link]
Between 1912 and 1915, Duchamp worked with various musical ideas. At least three pieces have survived: two compositions and a note for a musical happening. The two compositions are based on chance operations. Erratum Musical, written for three voices, was published in 1934. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même. Erratum Musical is unfinished and was never published or exhibited during Duchamp's lifetime. According to the manuscript, the piece was intended for a mechanical instrument "in which the virtuoso intermediary is suppressed". The manuscript also contains a description for "An apparatus automatically recording fragmented musical periods", consisting of a funnel, several open-end carss and a set of numbered balls.[24] These pieces predate John Cage's Music of Changes (1951), which is often considered the first modern piece to be conceived largely through random procedures.[25]
In 1968, Duchamp and John Cage appeared together at a concert entitled "Reunion", playing a game of chess and composing Aleatoric music by triggering a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard.[26]
Rrose Sélavy[link]
Main article: Rrose Sélavy
"Rrose Sélavy", also spelled Rose Sélavy, was one of Duchamp's pseudonyms. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase "Eros, c'est la vie", which may be translated as "Eros, such is life." It has also been read as "arroser la vie" ("to make a toast to life").
Sélavy emerged in 1921 in a series of photographs by Man Ray showing Duchamp dressed as a woman. Through the 1920s Man Ray and Duchamp collaborated on more photos of Sélavy. Duchamp later used the name as the byline on written material and signed several creations with it. These included at least one sculpture, Why Not Sneeze Rrose Sélavy? (1921). The sculpture, a type of readymade called an assemblage, consists of an oral thermometer, and several dozen small cubes of marble resembling sugar cubes inside a birdcage.
The inspiration for the name "Rrose Sélavy" may have been Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's librarian of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Following the death of J.P. Morgan, Sr., Greene became the Library's director, working there for a total of forty-three years. Empowered by the Morgans, she built the library collection, buying and selling rare manuscripts, books and art.[citation needed]
Transition from art to chess[link]
In 1918, Duchamp took leave of the New York art scene, interrupting his work on the Large Glass, and went to Buenos Aires, where he remained for nine months and often played chess. He even carved from wood his own chess set, with the assistance of a local craftsman who made the knights. He moved to Paris in 1919, and then back to the United States in 1920. Upon his return to Paris in 1923, Duchamp was, in essence, no longer a practicing artist although he did work on several projects towards his death. Instead, his main interest was now chess, which he studied for the rest of his life to the exclusion of most other activities.
Duchamp can be seen, very briefly, playing chess with Man Ray in the short film Entr'acte (1924) by René Clair. He designed the 1925 Poster for the Third French Chess Championship, and as a competitor in the event, finished at fifty percent (3–3, with two draws). Thus he earned the title of chess master. During this period his fascination with chess so distressed his first wife that she glued his pieces to the board. Duchamp continued to play in the French Championships and also in the Chess Olympiads from 1928–1933, favoring hypermodern openings such as the Nimzo-Indian.
Sometime in the early 1930s, Duchamp reached the height of his ability, but realized that he had little chance of winning recognition in top-level chess. In following years, his participation in chess tournaments declined, but he discovered correspondence chess and became a chess journalist, writing weekly newspaper columns. While his contemporaries were achieving spectacular success in the art world by selling their works to high-society collectors, Duchamp observed, "I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art—and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position."[citation needed] On another occasion, Duchamp elaborated, "The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. ... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."[citation needed]
In 1932, Duchamp teamed with chess theorist Vitaly Halberstadt to publish L'opposition et cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (Opposition and Sister Squares are Reconciled), known as corresponding squares. This treatise describes the Lasker-Reichhelm position, an extremely rare type of position that can arise in the endgame. Using enneagram-like charts that fold upon themselves, the authors demonstrated that in this position, the most Black can hope for is a draw.
The theme of the "endgame" is important to an understanding of Duchamp's complex attitude towards his artistic career. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was an associate of Duchamp, and used the theme as the narrative device for the 1957 play of the same name, Endgame In 1968, Duchamp played an artistically important chess match with avant-garde composer John Cage, at a concert entitled "Reunion." Music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard, triggered sporadically by normal game play.[26]
On choosing a career in chess, Duchamp said, "If Bobby Fischer came to me for advice, I certainly would not discourage him—as if anyone could—but I would try to make it positively clear that he will never have any money from chess, live a monk-like existence and know more rejection than any artist ever has, struggling to be known and accepted."[27] Duchamp left a legacy to chess in the form of an enigmatic endgame problem he composed in 1943. The problem was included in the announcement for Julian Levi's gallery exhibition "Through the Big End of the Opera Glass", printed on translucent paper with the faint inscription: "White to play and win." Grandmasters and endgame specialists have since grappled with the problem, with most concluding that there is no solution.[28]
Artistic involvement and marriages[link]
Although Duchamp was no longer considered to be an active artist, he continued to consult with artists, art dealers and collectors. From 1925 he often traveled between France and the United States, and made New York's Greenwich Village his home in 1942. He also occasionally worked on artistical projects such as the short film Anemic Cinema (1926), Box in a Valise (1935–41), Self Portrait in Profile (1958) and the larger work Etant Donnés (1946–66).
In June 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor; however, they divorced six months later. It was rumored that Duchamp had chosen a marriage of convenience, because Sarazin-Lavassor was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer. Early in January 1928, Duchamp said that he could no longer bear the responsibility and confinement of marriage, and soon thereafter they were divorced.[29]
From the mid-1930s onwards, he collaborated with the Surrealists, however, he did not join the movement despite the coaxing of André Breton. From then until 1944, together with Max Ernst, Eugenio Granell and Breton, Duchamp edited the Surrealist periodical VVV, and also served as an advisory editor for the magazine View, which featured him in its March 1945 edition, thus introducing him to a broader American audience.
In 1954, he and Alexina "Teeny" Sattler married, and they remained together until his death. Duchamp became a United States citizen in 1955.
His influence on the art world remained behind the scenes until the late 1950s, when he was "discovered" by young artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were eager to escape the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. He was a co-founder of the international literary group Oulipo in 1960.
Interest in Duchamp was reignited in the 1960s, and he gained international public recognition. 1963 saw his first retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum, and in 1966 the Tate Gallery hosted a large exhibit of his work. Other major institutions, including the Philadelphia Art Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, followed, with large showings of Duchamp's work. He was invited to lecture on art and to participate in formal discussions, as well as sitting for interviews with major publications.
As the last surviving member of the Duchamp family of artists, in 1967 Duchamp helped to organize an exhibition in Rouen, France, called "Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp." Parts of this family exhibition were later shown again at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.
Exhibition design[link]
Duchamp was the designer of the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, which was held at the Gallerie des Beaux-arts, Paris. The show featured more than 60 artists from different countries, including approximately 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations.
The surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act, and called on Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi This work consisted of a taxicab rigged to produce a drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat, and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back. In this way Duchamp greeted entering patrons, who were in full evening dress.
Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various surrealists. The main hall was a simulation of a dark subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling. Illumination was provided only by a single light bulb,[30] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art.
An installation by Wolfgang Paalen was composed of oak leaves and a water-filled pond with water lilies and reeds, while the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Around midnight, the visitors witnessed the dancing shimmer of a sparsely dressed girl who suddenly arose from the reeds, jumped on a bed, shrieked hysterically, then disappeared just as quickly. Much to the surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.
In 1942, for the First Papers of Surrealism show in New York, surrealists again called on Duchamp to design the exhibition. This time he wove a three-dimensional web of string throughout the rooms of the space, in some cases making it almost impossible to see the works.[31] Duchamp made a secret arrangement with an associate's son to bring young friends to the opening of the show. When the finely dressed patrons arrived, they found a dozen children in athletic clothes kicking and passing balls, and skipping rope. When questioned, the children were told to say "Mr. Duchamp told us we could play here." Duchamp's design of the catalog for the show included "found", rather than posed, photographs of the artists.
File:Etant donnes.jpg
Etant donnés, 1946–1966, mixed media, Philadelphia Museum of Art. This was posthumously and permanently installed in the museum in 1969
[edit] Etant donnés
Main article: Etant donnés
Duchamp's final major art work surprised the art world that believed he had given up art for chess 25 years earlier. Entitled Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage ("Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas"), it is a tableau, visible only through a peep hole in a wooden door.[2] A nude woman can be seen lying on her back with her face hidden, legs spread, and one hand holding a gas lamp in the air against a landscape backdrop.[3] Duchamp had worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio while even his closest friends thought he had abandoned art.
Death and burial[link]
Marcel Duchamp died on 2 October 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, France. His grave bears the epitaph, "D'ailleurs, c'est toujours les autres qui meurent;" or "Besides, it's always other people who die."
Legacy[link]
A quotation erroneously attributed to Duchamp suggests a negative attitude toward later trends in 20th-century art:
This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.
However, this was actually written in 1961 by fellow Dadaist Hans Richter, in the second person, i.e. "You threw the bottle-rack...". Although a marginal note in the letter suggests that Duchamp generally approved of the statement, Richter did not make the distinction clear until many years later.[32]
Duchamp's attitude was actually more favorable, as evidenced by another statement made in 1964:
Pop Art is a return to "conceptual" painting, virtually abandoned, except by the Surrealists, since [Gustave] Courbet, in favor of retinal painting.... If you take a Campbell soup can and repeat it 50 times, you are not interested in the retinal image. What interests you is the concept that wants to put 50 Campbell soup cans on a canvas.[citation needed]
The Prix Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp Prize), established in 2000, is an annual award given to a young artist by the Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2004, as a testimony to the legacy of Duchamp's work to the art world, his Fountain was voted "the most influential artwork of the 20th century" by a panel of prominent artists and art historians.
See also[link]
Notes[link]
- ^ "Duchamp:A biography". http://www.amazon.com/Duchamp-Biography-Calvin-Tomkins/dp/0805057897. "Regarded by many in the art world as the most influential artist of the century"
- ^ "Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. - Review - book review". http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/archive/aia_2000_nodelman.pdf.
- ^ "Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp". http://www.understandingduchamp.com/author/duchamp.html.
- ^ "Duchamp & Androgyny: The Concept and its Context". http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/articles/graham/graham1.html.
- ^ "Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare". http://www.mfa.org/collections/publications/marcel-duchamp.
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography.
- ^ Gammel, 224-225.
- ^ Marcel Duchamp, from Session on the Creative Act, Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957.
- ^ see him on film [1]
- ^ Tomkins 1996, p. 83
- ^ a b Mink, J. (2004). Duchamp. Taschen.
- ^ Poincaré, H. (1902) Science and Hypothesis. London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., p. xxiv.
- ^ Mink, J. (2000). Marcel Duchamp. Art as Anti-Art. Taschen Verlag.
- ^ Mink, J. (2004) Duchamp. Taschen, p. 48.
- ^ Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia - Edited by Jennifer Mundy; TATE 2008; p. 12
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 181–186.
- ^ a b Interview, BBC TV, 1966 "Duchamp interviews"
- ^ "Duchamp's urinal tops art survey", BBC News, 1 December 2004.
- ^ Marting, Marco De (2003). "Mona Lisa: Who is Hidden Behind the Woman with the Mustache?". Art Science Research Laboratory. http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org/articles/panorama.htm. Retrieved 27 April 2008.
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 227–228.
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 254–255.
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 301–303.
- ^ Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography, pages 294.
- ^ Petr Kotik. Liner Notes to CD "The Music of Marcel Duchamp", Edition Block + Paula Cooper Gallery, 1991.
- ^ Randel, Don Michael. 2002. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ISBN 0-674-00978-9.
- ^ a b "Becoming Duchamp" by Sylvère Lotringer
- ^ Brady, Frank: Bobby Fischer: profile of a prodigy, Courier Dover Publications, 1989; p. 207.
- ^ Beliavsky, A & Mikhalchishin, A: Winning Endgame Technique Batsford, 1995.
- ^ Hulten, Pontus. Marcel Duchamp, Work and Life: Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Selavy, 1887–1968. Pages 8–9 June (1927) to 25 January (1928). ISBN 0-262-08225-X.
- ^ Marcel Duchamp
- ^ Marcel Duchamp
- ^ "(Ab)Using Marcel Duchamp: The Concept of the Readymade in Post-War and Contemporary American Art" by Thomas Girst at toutfait.com, Issue 5, 2003
References[link]
- Tomkins, Calvin: Duchamp: A Biography, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996. ISBN 0-8050-5789-7
- Seigel, Jerrold: The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp, University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0-520-20038-1
- Hulten, Pontus (editor): Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, The MIT Press, 1993. ISBN 0-262-08225-X
- Yves Arman: Marcel Duchamp plays and wins, Marcel Duchamp joue et gagne, Marval Press, 1984
- Cabanne, Pierre: Dialogs with Marcel Duchamp, Da Capo Press, Inc., 1979 (1969 in French), ISBN 0-306-80303-8
- Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
- Duchamp Bottles Belle Greene: Just Desserts For His Canning by Bonnie Jean Garner (with text boxes by Stephen Jay Gould)
- Gibson, Michael: Duchamp-Dada, (in French, Nouvelles Editions Françaises-Casterman, 1990) International Art Book Award of the Vasari Prize in 1991.
- Sanouillet, Michel and Peterson, Elmer: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. NY: Da Capo Press, 1989. ISBN 0-306-80341-0
- Sanouillet, Michel and Matisse, Paul: Marcel Duchamp : Duchamp du signe suivi de Notes, Flammarion, 2008. ISBN 978-2-08-011664-2
- Catherine Perret Marcel Duchamp, le manieur de gravité, Ed. CNDP, Paris, 1998
- Banz, Stefan (ed), Marcel Duchamp and the Forestay Waterfall, JRP-Ringier, Zürich, 2010. ISBN 978-3-03764-156-9
Further reading[link]
- Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Delano Greenidge Editions, 1995
- Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998
- Paola Magi, Caccia al tesoro con Marcel Duchamp, Edizioni Archivio Dedalus, Milano, 2010, ISBN 978-88-904748-0-4
- Paola Magi: Treasure Hunt With Marcel Duchamp, Edizioni Archivio Dedalus, Milano, 2011, ISBN 978-88-904748-7-3
- Marc Décimo: Marcel Duchamp mis à nu. A propos du processus créatif (Marcel Duchamp Stripped Bare. Apropos of the creative Act), Les presses du réel, Dijon (France), 2004 ISBN 978-2-84066-119-1.
- Marc Décimo:The Marcel Duchamp Library, perhaps (La Bibliothèque de Marcel Duchamp, peut-être), Les presses du réel, Dijon (France), 2002.
- Marc Décimo, Le Duchamp facile, Les presses du réel, coll. « L'écart absolu / Poche", Dijon, 2005
- Marc Décimo (dir.), Marcel Duchamp et l'érotisme, Les presses du réel, coll. « L'écart absolu / Chantier », Dijon, 2008
- T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007.
- Lydie Fischer Sarazin-Levassor, A Marriage in Check. The Heart of the Bride Stripped by her Bachelor, even, Les presses du réel, Dijon (France), 2007.
- J-T. Richard, "M. Duchamp mis à nu par la psychanalyse, même" (M. Duchamp stripped bare even by psychoanalysis), éd. L'Harmattan, Paris (France), 2010.
External links[link]
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marcel Duchamp |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marcel Duchamp |
- Duchamp works
- Philadelphia Museum of Art houses the Arensbergs' large collection of Duchamp's work. (website)
- The Israel Museum has many of Duchamp's works in its Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art. (website)
- Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art
- An explanation about the "Roue de bicyclette" by Duchamp (website)
- Dossier : Marcel Duchamp, Centre Pompidou
- Philadelphia Museum of Art Portrait of Chess Players (Portrait de joueurs d'echecs) (1911).
- Philadelphia Museum of Art The Green Box. Notes and studies for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. (1915–1923)
- Rotoreliefs (1920s)
- Anémic Cinéma film (1926)
- Essays by Duchamp
- Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act (1957) Audio
- General resources
- Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp Andrew Stafford: – animated explanations.
- Marcel-Duchamp.com Étant donné – annual review published by L'association pour l'etude de Marcel Duchamp.
- Toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal
- MarcelDuchamp.org – Personal website dedicated to Duchamp.
- MarcelDuchamp.net – Art Science Research Laboratory site about researching Duchamp.
- Marcel Duchamp – Olga's Gallery pages with biography and images.
- Marcel Duchamp Rotoreliefs – animated.
- Marcel Duchamp (DADA Companion) – the Online Research Companion.
- Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Poraiture – online exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
- profile at ChessGames.com
- Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, a model of Duchamp's from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Essays about Duchamp
- Marcel Duchamp's Impossible Bed and Other "Not" Readymade Objects: A Possible Route of Influence From Art To Science Rhonda Roland Shearer:
- Duchamp is Dandy! Michael Beyer:
- "Duchamp & his legacy" Hilton Kramer:, The New Criterion
- "Peep show" Marcel Duchamp's "Étant donnés." Morgan Meis:, The Smart Set
- Audio and video
- Duchamp audio CD Musical Erratum + In Conversation at LTM
- Voices of Dada, Futurism & Dada Reviewed and Surrealism Reviewed – readings by Duchamp on audio CDs
- UbuWeb – Music, lectures, and film
- Duchamp's Legacy with Richard Hamilton and Sarat Maharaj from Tate Britain. (RealPlayer required.)
- Audio of Marcel Duchamp's 'Some texts from "A l'infinitif"' (1912–20). Recorded by Aspen magazine (4:00) published on the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine @ Ubuweb
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|||||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Duchamp, Marcel |
| Alternative names | Duchamp, Henri-Robert-Marcel |
| Short description | Painting, Sculpture, Film |
| Date of birth | 1887-7-28 |
| Place of birth | Blainville-Crevon, France |
| Date of death | 1968-10-2 |
| Place of death | Neuilly-sur-Seine, France |
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| Merce Cunningham | |
|---|---|
| File:Merce Cunningham by Annie Leibovitz.jpg | |
| Born | Mercier Philip Cunningham (1919-04-16)April 16, 1919 Centralia, Washington |
| Died | July 26, 2009(2009-07-26) (aged 90) New York City |
| Occupation | Dancer, choreographer |
| Years active | 1938–2009 |
| Partner | John Cage[1] |
| Website | |
| merce.org | |
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance. He is also notable for his frequent collaborations with artists of other disciplines, including musicians John Cage and David Tudor, artists Robert Rauschenberg and Bruce Nauman, designer Romeo Gigli, and architect Benedetta Tagliabue. Works that he produced with these artists had a profound impact on avant-garde art beyond the world of dance.
As a choreographer, teacher and leader of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,[2] Cunningham had a profound influence on modern dance. Many dancers who trained with Cunningham formed their own companies, and they include Paul Taylor, Remy Charlip, Viola Farber, Charles Moulton, Karole Armitage, Robert Kovich, Foofwa d’Imobilité, Kimberly Bartosik, Floanne Ankah and Jonah Bokaer.
In 2009, the Cunningham Dance Foundation announced the Legacy Plan, a precedent-setting plan for the continuation of Cunningham’s work and the celebration and preservation of his artistic legacy.[3]
Cunningham earned some of the highest honors bestowed in the arts, including the National Medal of Arts and the MacArthur Fellowship. He also received Japan's Praemium Imperiale, a British Laurence Olivier Award, and was named Officier of the Légion d'honneur in France.
Cunningham’s life and artistic vision have been the subject of numerous books, films, and exhibitions, and his works have been presented by groups including the Paris Opéra Ballet, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, White Oak Dance Project, and London's Rambert Dance Company.
Contents |
Biography[link]
Merce Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington in 1919, the second of three sons. Both his brothers followed their father into the legal profession. Cunningham initially received his first formal dance and theater training at the Cornish School (now Cornish College of the Arts) in Seattle, which he attended from 1937–9 at age 20. During this time, Martha Graham saw Cunningham dance and invited him to join her company.[4]
In the fall of 1939, Cunningham moved to New York and began a six-year stint as a soloist in the company of Martha Graham. He presented his first solo concert in New York in April 1944 with composer John Cage, who became his life partner and frequent collaborator until Cage's death in 1992.
In the summer of 1953, as a teacher in residence at Black Mountain College, Cunningham formed the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as a forum to explore his new ideas on dance and the performing arts.
Over the course of his career, Cunningham choreographed more than 200 dances and over 800 “Events,” which are site-specific choreographic works. In 1963 he joined with Cage to create the Walker Art Center's first performance, instigating what would be a 25-year collaborative relationship with the Walker. In his performances, he often used the I Ching in order to determine the sequence of his dances and, often, dancers were not told until the night of the performance. In addition to his role as choreographer, Cunningham performed as a dancer in his company into the early 1990s.
He continued to lead his dance company until his death, and presented a new work, Nearly Ninety, in April 2009, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, to mark his 90th birthday.[5]
Cunningham lived in New York City, and was Artistic Director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He died peacefully in his home.[6]
Merce Cunningham Dance Company[link]
Cunningham formed Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) at Black Mountain College in 1953. Guided by its leader's radical approach to space, time and technology, the Company has forged a distinctive style, reflecting Cunningham’s technique and illuminating the near limitless possibility for human movement.
The original Company included dancers Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber, Paul Taylor, and Remy Charlip, and musicians John Cage and David Tudor.
In its early years, MCDC toured in a Volkswagen bus driven by John Cage with just enough room for six dancers, the two musicians, and a stage manager, who was often Robert Rauschenberg. MCDC’s first international tour in 1964—which included performances in Western and Eastern Europe, India, Thailand, and Japan—solidified a constant stream of national and international bookings. In the years since, MCDC has continued to tour the world to critical and popular acclaim, serving as an ambassador for contemporary American culture.
Recent performances and projects include a two-year residency at Dia:Beacon, where MCDC performed Events, Cunningham’s site-specific choreographic collages, in the galleries of Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt among others. In 2007, MCDC premiered XOVER, Cunningham’s final collaboration with Rauschenberg, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. In 2009, MCDC premiered Cunningham’s newest work, Nearly Ninety, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Company is presently concluding its farewell tour. [7]
Final Performance:
Park Avenue Armory Events (2011)
Arranged by: Robert Swinston
Music: David Behrman, John King, Takehisa Kosugi and Christian Wolf
Décor: Daniel Arsham
Costumes: Anna Finke
Lighting: Christine Shallenberg
Artistic philosophy[link]
Collaboration[link]
Since its founding, Merce Cunningham Dance Company has frequently collaborated with visual artists, architects, designers, and musicians.
From the company's beginnings, Cunningham collaborated with John Cage, its Musical Advisor and Cunningham's life partner from the 1940s until Cage’s death in 1992. Cage had the greatest influence on his practice. Together, Cunningham and Cage proposed a number of radical innovations. The most famous and controversial of these concerned the relationship between dance and music, which they concluded may occur in the same time and space, but should be created independently of one another. They also made extensive use of chance procedures, abandoning not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. For Cunningham the subject of his dances was always dance itself.
After his death, John Cage was succeeded in the role of music director by David Tudor. Since 1995, MCDC has been under the music direction of Takehisa Kosugi. MCDC has commissioned more work from contemporary composers than any other dance company. Its repertory includes works by musicians ranging from John Cage and Gordon Mumma to Gavin Bryars and even contemporary bands like Radiohead, Sigur Rós and Sonic Youth[8].
The Company has also collaborated with an array of visual artists and designers. Robert Rauschenberg, whose famous “Combines” reflect the approach he used to create décor for a number of MCDC’s early works, served as the Company’s resident designer from 1954 through 1964. Jasper Johns followed as Artistic Advisor from 1967 until 1980, and Mark Lancaster from 1980 through 1984. The last Advisors to be appointed were William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw in 1984. Other artists who have collaborated with MCDC include Daniel Arsham, Tacita Dean, Liz Phillips, Rei Kawakubo, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Frank Stella, Benedetta Tagliabue, and Andy Warhol.
Chance operations[link]
John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.
Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.
I was working on a title called, “Untitled Solo,” and I had made—using the chance operations—a series of movements written on scraps of paper for the legs and the arms, the head, all different. And it was done not to the music but with the music of Christian Wolff. —Merce Cunningham, Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance, 2000
Although the use of chance operations was considered an abrogation of artistic responsibility,[citation needed] Cunningham was thrilled by a process that arrives at works that could never have been created through traditional collaboration. This does not mean, however, that Cunningham holds every piece created in this fashion is a masterpiece. Those dances that do not "work" are quickly dropped from repertory, while those that do are celebrated as serendipitous discoveries.
Another of Cunningham's innovations was the development of what might be called "non-representative" dance which simply emphasizes movement: in Cunningham's choreography, dancers do not necessarily represent any historical figure, emotional situation, or idea.
Use of technology[link]
Cunningham’s lifelong passion for exploration and innovation has made him a leader in applying new technologies to the arts. He began investigating dance on film in the 1970s, and since 1991 has choreographed using the computer program DanceForms. Cunningham explored motion capture technology with digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar to create Hand-drawn Spaces, a three-screen animation that was commissioned by and premiered at SIGGRAPH in 1998. This led to a live dance for the stage, BIPED, for which Kaiser and Eshkar provided the projected decor. In 2008, Cunningham released his Loops choreography for the hands as motion-capture data under a Creative Commons license; this was the basis for the open source collaboration of the same name with The OpenEnded Group.
In 2009, Cunningham’s interest in new media led to the creation of Mondays with Merce. This webcast series provides a never-before-seen look at the Company and Cunningham’s teaching technique with video of advanced technique class, Company rehearsal, archival footage, and interviews with current and former Company members, choreographers, and collaborators.
Legacy Plan[link]
The Cunningham Dance Foundation announced the Legacy Plan (LLP) in June 2009. The Plan provided a roadmap for the future of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, as envisioned by Cunningham. The first of its kind in the dance world, the plan represents Merce Cunningham’s vision for continuing his work in the upcoming years, transitioning his Company once he was no longer able to lead it, and preserving his oeuvre.
The Legacy Plan includes a comprehensive documentation and preservation program, which will ensure that pieces from his repertory can be studied, performed and enjoyed by future generations with knowledge of how they originally came to life. In addition, to ensure the authenticity of the presentation of his oeuvre once Cunningham was no longer able to lead his Company, the plan outlined a final international tour for the Company, and, ultimately, the closure of the Cunningham Dance Foundation and Merce Cunningham Dance Company and the transfer of all assets to the Merce Cunningham Trust, established by Cunningham to serve as the custodian for his works. From Merce's death at age 90 through the Board's last meeting in 2012, the Legacy Plan implemented his wish that the Company complete a worldwide legacy tour and then close. December 31, 2011 was the final performance of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
The final meeting of the Board of Directors for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was held March 15, 2012, in Merce's beautiful studio at the top of the Westbeth building in the West Village.[9]
Exhibitions[link]
There have been numerous exhibitions dedicated to Cunningham’s work. In addition, he is a visual artist represented by Margarete Roeder Gallery.
The major exhibition Invention: Merce Cunningham & Collaborators at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts closed on October 13, 2007.
Merce Cunningham: Dancing on the Cutting Edge, an exhibition of recent design for MCDC, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, in January 2007.
A trio of exhibitions devoted to John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham, curated by Ron Bishop, were shown in the spring of 2002 at the Gallery of Fine Art, Edison College, Fort Myers, Florida.
A major exhibition about Cunningham and his collaborations, curated by Germano Celant, was first seen at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona in 1999, and subsequently at the Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 1999; the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, 2000; and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2000.
Works[link]
Cunningham choreographed almost two hundred works for his company.[10]
Suite for Five (1956–1958)
Music: John Cage, Music for Piano
Costumes: Robert Rauschenberg
Lighting: Beverly Emmons
Crises (1960)
Music: Conlon Nancarrow (from Rhythm Studies for Player Piano)
Costumes, Lighting: Robert Rauschenberg
Rainforest (1968)
Music: David Tudor
Décor: Andy Warhol (Silver Clouds)
Costumes: Jasper Johns (uncredited)
Lighting: Richard Nelson
Second Hand (1970)
Music: John Cage, (Cheap Imitation)
Décor & Costumes: Jasper Johns
Lighting: Richard Nelson (1970) Christine Shallenberg (2008)
Sounddance (1975)
Music: David Tudor, Toneburst & Untitled (1975/1994)
Décor, Lighting, Costumes: Mark Lancaster
Fabrications (1987)
Music: Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, Short Waves & SBbr
Décor, Costumes: Dove Bradshaw
Lighting: Josh Johnson
CRWDSPCR (1993)
Music: John King, blues 99
Décor, Lighting, Costumes: Mark Lancaster
Ocean (1994)
Music: David Tudor,Soundings: Ocean Diary and Andrew Culver, Ocean 1–95
Décor, Lighting, Costumes: Marsha Skinner
BIPED (1999)
Music: Gavin Bryars, Biped
Décor: Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar
Costumes: Suzanne Gallo
Lighting: Aaron Copp
Split Sides (2003)
Music: Radiohead, Sigur Rós
Décor: Robert Heishman, Catherine Yass
Costumes: James Hall
Lighting: James F. Ingalls
Views on Stage (2004)
Music: John Cage, ASLSP and Music for Two
Décor: Ernesto Neto, Other Animal
Costumes: James Hall
Lighting: Josh Johnson
eyeSpace (2006)
Music: Mikel Rouse, International Cloud Atlas
Décor: Henry Samelson, Blues Arrive Not Anticipating What Transpires Even Between Themselves
Costumes: Henry Samelson
Lighting: Josh Johnson
eyeSpace (2007)
Music: David Behrman, Long Throw and/or Annea Lockwood, Jitterbug
Décor: Daniel Arsham, ODE/EON
Costumes: Daniel Arsham
Lighting: Josh Johnson
XOVER (2007)
Music: John Cage, Aria (1958) and Fontana Mix (1958)
Décor & Costumes: Robert Rauschenberg, Plank
Lighting: Josh Johnson
Nearly Ninety (2009)
Music: John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, Sonic Youth
Décor: Benedetta Tagliabue
Costumes: Romeo Gigli for io ipse idem
Lighting: Brian MacDevitt
Video Design: Franc Aleu
Honors & awards[link]
2009
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award
Skowhegan Medal for Performance
2008
Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
2007
Nelson A. Rockefeller Award, Purchase College School of the Arts, State University of New York
Montgomery Fellow (Arts and Literature), Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
2006
Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle WA
2005
Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MN
Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo
2004
Officier of the Légion d'Honneur, France
2003
Edward MacDowell Medal in interdisciplinary art, the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough NH
2002
Kitty Carlisle Hart Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts (Arts & Business Council), New York NY
MATA (Music at the Anthology) Award, New York NY
Medal of the City of Dijon, France
2001
Coat of Arms of the City of Mulhouse, France
La Grande Médaille de la Ville de Paris (echelon vermeil) from the Mayor of Paris
Career Transition for Dancers Award, New York NY
Herald Archangel Award, Glasgow, Scotland
Honorary degree from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
2000
Nijinsky Special Prize, Monaco
The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, New York NY
Named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress, Washington DC
1999
Premio Internazionale “Gino Tani,” Rome
Handel Medallion from the Mayor of New York City NY
Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Lifetime Achievement, San Francisco CA
Fellow of the Academy of Performing Arts, Hong Kong
The key to the City of Montpellier, France
1998
Bagley Wright Fund Established Artists Award, Seattle WA
1997
Barnard College Medal of Distinction, New York NY
Grand Prix of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, France
1996
Nellie Cornish Arts Achievement Award from his alma mater, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle WA
1995
Honorary degree from Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
Carina Ari Award (Grand Prix Video Danse with Elliot Caplan), Stockholm, Sweden
Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, Italy
1993
Inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, NY
Dance and Performance Award for Best Performance by a Visiting Artist, London, England
Medal of Honor from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain
(With John Cage, posthumously) the Wexner Prize of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Columbus OH
New York Dance and Performance Award (“Bessie”), New York NY
Tiffany Award from the International Society of Performing Arts Administrators, New York NY
1990
National Medal of Arts, Washington DC
Porselli Prize, Italy
Digital Dance Premier Award, London, England
Award of Merit from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, New York NY
1989
Chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur, France
1988
Dance/USA National Honor, New York NY
1987
Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX
1985
Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production (Pictures), London, England
Kennedy Center Honors, Washington DC
MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago IL
1984
Inducted as an Honorary Member into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York NY
1983
The Mayor of New York’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture, New York NY
1982
The Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award, Durham NC
Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France
1977
Capezio Award, New York NY
1975
New York State Award, Albany NY
1972
BITEF Award, Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Honorary degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana IL
1966
Gold Medal for Choreographic Invention at the Fourth International Festival of Dance, Paris
1964
Medal of the Society for the Advancement of Dancing in Sweden, Stockholm
1960
Dance Magazine Award, New York NY
1959 & 1954
Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York NY
Footnotes[link]
- ^ Merce Cunningham obituary, Telegraph (UK), July 27, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/dance-obituaries/5919495/Merce-Cunningham.html, retrieved 2010-01-26, "Merce Cunningham who died on July 26 aged 90, was a colossus of 20th-century choreography; his career in dance, which lasted more than 60 years, began when, as a Seattle-based dance student in 1939, he was invited by Martha Graham to join her company in New York"
- ^ Merce Cunningham Dance Company, http://www.merce.org/thecompany.html, retrieved 2010-01-26
- ^ Legacy Plan, Cunningham Dance Foundation, http://www.merce.org/p/living-legacy-plan.html, retrieved 2010-01-26
- ^ [1]
- ^ Vaughan, David (July 27, 2009). "Merce Cunningham". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/27/obituary-merce-cunningham. Retrieved May 12, 2010.
- ^ Death notice
- ^ Village Voice Deborah Jowitt, Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
- ^ Vadukul, Alex (April 20, 2009). "Sonic Youth, John Paul Jones Give Merce Cunningham's Dance Show a Fierce Soundtrack". Rolling Stone. http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/sonic-youth-john-paul-jones-give-merce-cunninghams-dance-show-a-fierce-soundtrack-20090420. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
- ^ http://suttons-law.blogspot.com/2012/03/final-goodbye.html?spref=fb
- ^ "Merce Cunningham Dance Company – Biography". 2009. http://www.merce.org/about_biography.html. Retrieved 2009-07-28.
Sources[link]
- Bremser, M. (Ed) (1999) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-10364-9
- Cunningham, Merce (1968) Changes/Notes on Choreography. Something Else Press.
- Cunningham, M. and Lesschaeve, J. (1992) The Dancer and the Dance. Marion Boyars Publishers. ISBN 0-7145-2931-1
- Vaughan, David (1999) Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years. Aperture. ISBN 0-89381-863-1
- Vaughan, D. and Cunningham, M. (2002) Other Animals. Aperture. ISBN 978-0-89381-946-0
- Kostelanetz, R. (1998) Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time. Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80877-3
- Brown, Carolyn (2007) Chance and Circumstance Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-394-40191-1 Biography 53750
External links[link]
- Merce Cunningham Dance Company
- Archival footage of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing in Sounddance in 2009 at Jacob's Pillow.
- DLAR Artists bio
- PBS:American Masters biography
- Kennedy Center biography
- Archive footage of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing Cunningham's piece Banjo in 1955 at Jacob's Pillow
- American Ballet Theater biography
- Merce Cunningham ìn the Mediateca Media Art Space
- Merce Cunningham at the Internet Movie Database
- Merce Cunningham — Daily Telegraph obituary
- Guardian Obituary
- Online memorial
- Obituary in the Star-Gazette
- New York Times Obituary 28 July 2009
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Cunningham, Merce |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | April 16, 1919 |
| Place of birth | Centralia, Washington |
| Date of death | July 26, 2009 |
| Place of death | New York City |
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Contents |
Biography[link]
David Greilsammer was born in Jerusalem, Israel. He started his music studies at the age of six at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. After completing his military service in Israel he entered The Juilliard School in New York as a student of Yoheved Kaplinsky. Following studies in piano and conducting, he went on to work with the American pianist Richard Goode. David Greilsammer made his debut in 2004 in New York, as soloist at Lincoln Center, in a performance that was hailed by the New York Times.[citation needed] Since then, he has appeared in the most important music festivals worldwide and in the most prestigious concert halls. Since 2010, David Greilsammer is also the Music Director and principal conductor of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra.[1]
Discography[link]
In 2005, after completing his studies at Juilliard, David Greilsammer signed his first recording contract with the American label Vanguard Classics. He made his first recording for Vanguard in New York, as pianist and conductor, with a program dedicated to Mozart’s early piano concertos. This recording was praised by critics and audiences, leading immediately to an exclusive contract with the French label Naïve. For Naïve, David Greilsammer made three recordings that have received numerous prizes and awards: - “fantaisie_fantasme”, a solo piano disc that presents an encounter between different musical worlds, from baroque to contemporary music.[2] - Mozart’s concertos no. 22 and 24, as pianist and conductor, with the Suedama Ensemble, a New York based orchestra created by David Greilsammer in 2005. - Live concert from Salle Pleyel in Paris, with works by Alexandre Tansman, Nadia Boulanger and George Gershwin, accompanied by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France. In this disc, the concertos of Tansman and Boulanger have received their world-premiere recording.[3]
Artistic vision and Projects[link]
David Greilsammer is known internationally for his interpretation of Mozart’s music. In 2008, he performed, in a one-day marathon, all of Mozart’s piano sonatas in Paris. He then performed all the sonatas again at the Verbier Festival and on tour worldwide. Also known for his interpretation of Baroque and Contemporary music, David Greilsammer is recognized as an audacious artist who creates unique and unusual programs for his concerts. Among his most renowned recital programs-- “Gates”, performed for the first time in New York in 2010, and “Scarlatti: Cage: Sonatas”, performed for the first time in Paris in 2009, with two pianos on stage. A strong believer in the need to open the classical music world to new and younger audiences, David Greilsammer creates every year original projects mixing dance, theatre, and music, as well as new musical projects for children.
References[link]
External links[link]
- David Greilsammer’s Official Website
- Geneva Chamber Orchestra Official Website
- Naïve’s Officiale Website
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Greilsammer |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | |
| Place of birth | Jerusalem, Israel |
| Date of death | |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
