Notational

thepenguinpress:

This summer marks the John Cage centenary. If you’re not familiar with the composer, let’s just say he redefined what music could be more than anyone else in the 20th century. (See “4’33”.”)

Art critic Kay Larson looks at his life, legacy, and connection to art in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists.

Seth Colter Walls writes in Slate:  

This mashup of histories and aesthetics that Larson proposes develops into something not just convincing, but revelatory. …

Cage lover that I am, I entered the book dubious that she could unpack the work of Cage the composer, no matter how well read she is in his journals. I was nitpicking my way through the text, wondering why she was breaking up the Cage life-story to tell us about a centuries-old permutation of Buddhism even before the part of the story where Cage makes his own turn toward Zen. Was the book going to be this reductive and deterministic throughout, I wondered, by reading all of Cage’s many permutations of mind as inexorably tied to his eventual Zen awakening? But after page 200—say, at the point when Larson brought Cage’s first “happening” seamlessly into conversation with contemporaneous events like D.T. Suzuki’s Columbia University lectures (which Cage attended) and the creation of “Mother of God” by Robert Rauschenberg (who had fallen into Cage’s retinue)—I just started writing Wow in the book’s margins. The whole strange mesh of it was speaking to me, and I stopped keeping score of how many times Larson missed or muffled a minor point—like her incorrect claim that CD players have always replaced turntables in modern performances of Cage’s earliest percussion pieces. I merely began to treasure the odd texture of her finely synthesized enthusiasms, and what it could teach me about works I already thought I knew pretty damn well.

It sounds like a parody of a Buddhistically deep koan to suggest that the book about Cage most likely to entrance newcomers is the same one that will most startle the class of so-called experts on the subject—but that’s the trick Larson has managed here. Some of the Cage-ian dramas that appeal mostly to modern-music geeks, like the composer’s brief friendship and longer breakup with Pierre Boulez, are sketched briefly or not at all. His music for larger forces—such as choruses or orchestras—is given short shrift compared to small-ensemble pieces that engage dance and other forms (like conceptual art) more directly. Despite these choices, Where the Heart Beats may not just be the best book written yet about John Cage; it’s probably also one of the most substantive-yet-readable entryways into the nexus of 20^th-century American art and the immortal qualities of Eastern thought.

“Quiet Riot”