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Introduction

In his teens and twenties, John Cage (b. 1912–d. 1992) was interested in music, visual art, and literature. Once he began focusing all his attention on music, he composed in a manner that demonstrated an interest in Arnold Schoenberg. A brief period of study under Schoenberg himself convinced Cage to move decisively away from pitch-based media to percussion, then an emerging medium offering new sonic possibilities. Writing for percussion, he began to think of compositional materials as gamuts—unordered sets of sounds—that would be realized as music through the application of various types of durational structures. Such structures might be articulated by the sounding materials themselves, or they might remain unheard as abstract schemas of compositional design. Around 1950, Cage embraced what he called “chance composition,” a method by which nearly all aspects of the planning and realization of a composition consisted of the identification of separate groups of possibilities for each aspect, with the actual choices for each made by recourse to a utility outside of his intention (usually the employment of the I Ching, or Book of Changes, as a random number generator). In addition to music, Cage also made various kinds of texts and (mostly from the late 1970s) nearly 1,000 works of visual art. His ideas about art resonated powerfully with the countercultural turn during the 1960s, and they continue to inspire individuals from many backgrounds. Critical and scholarly writings concerning his work began to appear in the mid-1960s and began to intensify around 1987; in general, much of this work emphasizes the music made before 1980, with less attention paid to texts and visual art and very little detail on any work after 1980. This article emphasizes this later period of scholarship and the development, in recent years, of new approaches to his work, including the analysis of the sounds in completed works, performance practice, and reception.

General Overviews

Pritchett 1993 and Pritchett and Kuhn 2007–2012 are the best general introductions, particularly for the music before 1980; Pritchett’s approach remains extremely influential. Tomkins 1968 presents important biographical material for the first time, though without sufficient documentation. Silverman 2010 and Larson 2012 include valuable context and employ more comprehensive research methods. Nicholls 2007 and Haskins 2012 offer short, critical introductions that point the reader toward other important secondary literature. Erdmann 2000 is the most comprehensive encyclopedia-length treatment.

Erdmann, Martin. “John Cage.” In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Personenteil. 2d ed. Vol. 3. Edited by Ludwig Finscher, 1557–1575. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000.
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Particularly noteworthy for its list of works, which divides Cage’s output into genre types (categories include theater works, concert pieces with precise instrumentation, and installations); this approach clearly shows the areas in which Cage concentrated most of his energies, revealing both the extent and innovation of his oeuvre. Less attention is paid to works made after 1969.
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Haskins, Rob. John Cage. Critical Lives. London: Reaktion, 2012.
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Part of Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, the book contextualizes Cage’s life by means of his works and ideas. Includes new insights on Cage’s acquaintance with Zen, commentaries on the sound (as opposed to the compositional method) of a number of compositions, and a critique of Taruskin 2010 (cited under Critical Appraisal). Includes good detail on compositions after 1980.
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Larson, Kay. Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists. New York: Penguin, 2012.
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This biography focuses on Cage’s experience of Zen and includes considerable detail on the writings of D. T. Suzuki. Archival work attempts to clarify the chronology of Cage’s turn toward Zen, and discussions of visual artists contemporary with and following Cage help illuminate his general approach and influence.
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Nicholls, David. John Cage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
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Part of a series of short volumes on American composers, Nicholls’s work contextualizes Cage’s life and work with respect to historical, environmental, and philosophical circumstances. Discussion of Cage’s work up to 1980 is particularly detailed.
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Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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A survey of Cage’s music, with special attention given to his sketches and pre-compositional process; Pritchett is one of the earliest scholars to clarify Cage’s compositional process in detail. Very comprehensive coverage for works from 1946 to 1961. Includes some information on Cage’s life, writings, and visual art.
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Pritchett, James, and Laura Kuhn. “Cage, John.” In Grove Music Online. Edited by Deane Root, 2007–2012.
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The text for the article itself largely follows Pritchett 1993. It provides an excellent summary of Cage’s music up to 1960, and a more general survey afterward. Personal or contextual details of his biography do not appear. Includes a chronological work list and bibliography with items up to 2009. Available online by subscription.
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Silverman, Kenneth. Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage. New York: Knopf, 2010.
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A thoroughly researched biography that documents little-known events in Cage’s life (such as difficulties in his personal relationship with the choreographer Merce Cunningham toward the end of his life), provides more information on people he knew, and elaborates well-known biographical facts (for instance, his work with mushrooms). Nontechnical discussions of music include links to audio excerpts.
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Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde. With a new introduction and expanded text. New York: Viking, 1968.
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Profiles of Duchamp, Tinguely, Cage, Rauschenberg, and Cunningham originally written for The New Yorker. The Cage chapter (pp. 69–144) is one of the earliest biographical sketches; while it must be used with caution (the account of Cage’s work with Schoenberg, for instance, has been superseded by Hicks 1990, cited under Chronology), it contains the earliest reference to such important events as the premiere of The Perilous Night (1944).
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Cage’s Writings

Cage began writing about music in his twenties, and he continued to do so for the rest of his life. Though some of these texts were conventional essays, a number from 1951 on straddled the boundary between text and composition, as they employed structuring devices similar to the ones he explored in his music, and were also usually meant to be read aloud. Most of his Books generally contain all sorts of these writings, which can be further categorized as Essays and Lectures or Text Compositions—the latter are works of poetry that are purposefully structured using techniques similar to those in his music and that are specifically intended to be performed by reading aloud. The use of the phrase “text composition” is intended to call attention to the compositional techniques Cage used to make them as well as their emphasis on sound for its own sake.

Books

Cage 1961 was published by Wesleyan University Press following Cage’s one-year appointment as Fellow at the university’s Center for Advanced Studies in the Liberal Arts, Professions, and Sciences, and it collects a variety of essays, program notes, text compositions, and occasional pieces from the beginning of his career to 1961. Nearly all of his subsequent books were published by Wesleyan, and the university holds the papers for his books and other writings. Cage 1967 expands his interests, notably in the direction of social concerns; Cage 1973 includes new text compositions and poetry (notably the introduction of his mesostics); Cage 1979 and Cage 1983 alternate text compositions, essays (usually on music), and mesostics. Altogether, the books collect a great number of different sorts of texts; used carefully, they show the development of his ideas on many subjects. Kostelanetz 1993 anthologizes early and later writings in much the same way; some entries in this source had not been published previously. Cage 1990 comprises the lectures Cage gave while serving as Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, and is a lengthy text composition in six parts. Cage 1969 primarily contains a variety of manuscripts by different composers now housed at Northwestern University.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
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Cage’s first collection of essays contains writings and text compositions from the late 1930s to 1961; thus, this collection documents the ongoing development of his aesthetics and compositional practice over many years. The organization is mostly (but not systematically) chronological; thus, care must be taken to understand the particular historical context for each item. Some of the individual chapters from this volume are cited under Essays and Lectures and Text Compositions. See also Patterson 2002 (cited under Collections of Essays), Miller 2002 (cited under Chronology), and Hollander 1993 (cited under Critical Appraisal).
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Cage, John. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
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The second collection of Cage’s writings includes a few older works alongside writings after 1961; many, as in the first three installments of “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Can Only Make Matters Worse),” are characterized by a somewhat interdisciplinary consideration of social problems. (See also Cage 1967, cited under Text Compositions.)
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Cage, John. Notations. New York: Something Else, 1969.
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Facsimiles of holographs from 269 composers to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts; the length and typography of accompanying texts—sometimes written by the composers, sometimes written or selected by Cage or Fluxus artist Alison Knowles—were determined by using chance operations. Knowles also composed the book’s layout.
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Cage, John. M: Writings,’67–’72. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.
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Much variety appears in Cage’s third collection, which includes four further installments of the “Diary,” several texts that Cage set in Song Books (1970), and his first mesostic poems (in which a central string shows a name or other word in capital letters). Some works are imaginative texts that are intended for performance aloud and approach musical compositions; these include 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971) and Mureau (1970).
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Cage, John. Empty Words: Writings,’73–’78. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.
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Cage’s fourth collection includes the politically inflammatory preface to Lecture on the Weather, observations on younger contemporaries (Cage 1979, cited under Text Compositions) and reminiscences of meals shared with the Cunningham company (“Where are We Eating? And What are We Eating?”) See also Cage 1979 cited under Essays and Lectures.
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Cage, John. X: Writings,’79–’82. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.
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The fifth of Cage’s collections, and the last published while he was alive. Contains the final completed installment of the “Diary,” the fourth and fifth writings through Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (mesostic poems using the Wake as source material, with “James Joyce” as the central capitalized string), writings through Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and the first version of Composition in Retrospect (later completed in 1988; see Cage 1993 cited under Text Compositions).
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Cage, John. I–VI: Method Structure Intention Discipline Notation Indeterminacy Interpenetration Imitation Devotion Circumstances Variable Structure Nonunderstanding Contingency Inconsistency Performance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
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The fifth of Cage’s late mesostics, it comprises the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard University during the 1988–1989 academic year. Sources include Cage’s own “Composition in Retrospect” along with quotations from Wittgenstein, newspapers, and many other sources. Excerpts from the question and answer sessions that followed each lecture appear in running text below each page of main text.
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Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage, Writer: Uncollected Pieces. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993.
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Anthology of texts from 1948 to 1991, including program notes, occasional writings, essays, and mesostics. Of special importance is the letter to the members of the Zurich Opera House decrying their performance of Europeras 1 & 2 (1987) and an early essay, “The East in the West.” See also Cage 1993a cited under Essays and Lectures
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Essays and Lectures

Among Cage’s numerous texts, many of which are quite well known, a few warrant inclusion here. Cage 1993a summarizes his autobiography and compositional practice up to 1948. Cage 1993b is a very early formulation of concerns about devotion as well as music and expression. Cage 1961c identifies all sound, even noise, as potential musical resources, while Cage 1961a imagines composition as an act whose results are unforeseen. Cage 1961d and Cage 1961e are the first essays devoted specifically to describing compositional techniques after Cage’s turn to chance. Cage 1961b sketches a history of modern music and situates his work within that tradition, while Cage 1979 reflects on the then-present music world.

Cage, John. “Experimental Music.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 7–12. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961a.
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A lecture given in February 1957 defining experimental composition as an act that makes the composer a listener, for the music invites attention to both the sounds that are actually part of the work and the sounds occurring fortuitously during its performance. Such music admits any kinds of sounds, traditional or otherwise, and leads naturally to theater, an art form that encourages experiencing intended and unintended images as well as sounds.
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Cage, John. “Forerunners of Modern Music.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 62–66. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961b.
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Written around 1949, this essay contains Cage’s most systematic description of composition to date. Includes references to music’s edifying purpose (with citations of Meister Eckhart) and critical comments on jazz, folk music, Schoenberg, and the neoclassic Stravinsky.
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Cage, John. “The Future of Music: Credo.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 3–6. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961c.
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Probably written in 1940, not 1938 (see evidence presented in Miller 2002, cited under Chronology). The essay combines a manifesto on noise (and especially electronic instruments) as a primary source for new music, with which are interleaved commentary and amplification of key points. Central to Cage’s concern is to find an aesthetic and structural method that treats these materials in a truly contemporary manner.
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Cage, John. “To Describe the Process of Composition used in Music for Piano 21–52.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 60–61. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961d.
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Written in 1956. Provides a clear explanation of Cage’s general approach to composition—to proceed from the most general details to the most specific—and his technique of intensifying paper imperfections to locate sound events occurring in time. The short concluding commentary points up the pieces’ extremely indeterminate nature in spite of the compositional process used.
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Cage, John. “To Describe the Process of Composition used in Music of Changes and Imaginary Landscape No. 4.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 57–59. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961e.
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Written in 1951 or 1952, this essay describes the pre-compositional materials and the technical use of the I Ching to realize these materials as chance compositions. Final paragraph shows impact of Zen on Cage’s aesthetics. The writing style reflects Cage’s interactions with Boulez (see Nattiez 1993, cited under Sources and Bibliography).
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Cage, John. “The Future of Music.” In Empty Words: Writings,’73–’78. By John Cage, 177–187. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.
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Written in 1974, this essay draws together remarks on historical and recent 20th-century music and identifies worthwhile goals for new composition, including the creation of music as a locus for a sense of community, increased open-mindedness and eclecticism, hard work, and the blurring of traditional roles for composer, performer, and listener. These goals, further, will improve society as a whole.
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Cage, John. “A Composer’s Confessions.” In John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 27–44. New York: Limelight Editions, 1993a.
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First delivered at Vassar College in February 1948, this lecture is as important for the biographical information it presents as it is for the manner in which Cage actively shapes the account as a kind of archetypal story (echoing narratives he discovered through Joseph Campbell). The text is important, too, for creating a terminus post quem to Cage’s turn toward Buddhism between 1949 and 1952.
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Cage, John. “Counterpoint.” In Writings about John Cage. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 15–17. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993b.
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Cage’s earliest published essay (1934) offers early evidence of many ongoing concerns. Includes his opinions of contemporary composers, his impression that new music tends toward counterpoint and away from harmony, and—significantly—his idea that music communicates emotion without a composer’s intervention. Also argues for an ideal performer that lives the kind of music he performs.
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Text Compositions

Around 1951, Cage’s lectures began to exemplify some of the same procedures that he used in his music. Cage 1961b and Cage 1961c help to document his embrace of Zen Buddhism, both personally and as an aesthetic principle. Such texts as Cage 1961a and Cage 1967 demonstrate mosaic-like techniques, at first autobiographical and later including quotations of other authors and reflections on current events and social problems; Cage 1979 exhaustively demonstrates the potential of structuring text according to chance operations (in this case, the Journal of Henry David Thoreau), while Cage 1986, Cage 1993, and Cage 2001 show the formal procedure he developed in the mesostic, where a central string of capitalized letters spells out a name, quotation, or concept to which the horizontal poetic lines may or may not relate; in addition, the horizontal lines are usually written to exclude a repetition of the mesostic letter that appears before and/or after the line.

Cage, John. “Indeterminacy.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 260–273. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961a.
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Completed in 1958, this work consists of a series of seemingly unrelated stories, each of which is designed to be read aloud in sixty seconds. They also exemplify the Zen principle of interpenetration, wherein heterogeneous phenomena of equal importance compose the totality of the universe. Additional stories from “Indeterminacy” are interspersed between other essays in Cage 1961 and Cage 1967 (both cited under Books).
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Cage, John. “Lecture on Nothing.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 109–126. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961b.
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Probably delivered at the Artists’ Club in February 1951, the lecture is composed using the micro-macrocosmic rhythmic system used to structure Cage’s music; individual sections discuss familiar topics, such as structure and material, but also include nascent Buddhist references, significantly in its reference to the word “nothing” and in its fourth section, a sevenfold repetition (with slight variations) of twenty-five lines of text.
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Cage, John. “Lecture on Something.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 128–145. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961c.
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Written in 1951 and probably delivered in March 1952, this work explores Buddhist themes in the context of music, notably nondualism, emptiness (represented by blank pages), and the interconnections of all phenomena. References to Morton Feldman introduce the term “no-continuity,” which refers to successions of sounds that suggest many possible modes of listening and connection.
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Cage, John. “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) 1965.” In A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. By John Cage, 3–20. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
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The first of an eight-part mosaic of ideas, quotations, words, and stories that also functions as a stylized diary. Contains valuable remarks on anarchism, societal improvement generally, and aesthetics, but its unusual status (as a text composition) should probably be acknowledged when using it as a source. Remaining installments in Cage 1973 and Cage 1983 (both cited under Books).
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Cage, John. “Empty Words.” In Empty Words: Writings,’73–’78. By John Cage, 11–77. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979.
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Completed in 1974 and Cage’s most ambitious text work to date, Empty Words enacts a systematic transformation of language into a music comprising silences and single letters (all derived via chance operations from Thoreau’s Journal).
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Cage, John. “Mushrooms et Variationes.” In The Guests Go in to Supper. Edited by Melody Sumner, Kathleen Burch, and Michael Sumner, 28–96. Santa Fe, NM: Burning Books, 1986.
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The second of Cage’s late mesostic text works, written in 1983, follows the same method used for Themes & Variations: he wrote sixty mesostics on a collection of subjects (now with Latin names of mushrooms forming the mesostic string), then used chance operations to rearrange the lines while preserving the string; the resulting nonsyntactic mesostics act as a stylized imitation of Japanese renga poetry.
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Cage, John. Composition in Retrospect. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993.
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This new edition of Cage’s mesostic autobiography includes material originally published in Cage 1983 and Cage 1990 (both cited under Books). Unlike Cage’s other late mesostics, this one makes conventional sense. The book includes Themes & Variations, the first of Cage’s late mesostic texts, originally published in 1982 in an unpaginated volume.
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Cage, John. Anarchy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
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The fourth of Cage’s late mesostics, it was written for the 1988 conference John Cage at Wesleyan and published in Fleming and Duckworth 1989 (cited under Collections of Essays). Sources come from quotations of anarchist writers; mesostic strings from the quotations, names of authors, book titles, or graffiti. Computer software facilitated the compositional process.
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Interviews

Cage granted many interviews throughout his career, with the content varying in quality depending upon the insights and awareness of the interviewer. Many researchers have used Kostelanetz 2003, although its organization requires caution. Some sources, such as Cage 1981 and Cage and Retallack 1996, contain invaluable documentation of particular periods in his career, while Kirby and Schechner 1965 and Cage and Barnard 1980 treat specific topics in depth.

Cage, John. For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles. Translated by Richard Gardner. Edited by Tom Gora and John Cage. Boston: Marion Boyars, 1981.
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Draws to some extent on interviews between Charles and Cage from 1968 to around 1970. Some tapes were lost or damaged, however, and Charles reconstructed their content; other interviews were newly written by Charles in response to texts or recordings Cage sent him. Despite these anomalies, this source includes important information concerning Cage’s thoughts on Zen, anarchism, and politics generally, several 1960s works, and Song Books (1970).
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Cage, John, and Geoffrey Barnard. Conversation without Feldman. Darlinghurst, UK: Black Ram, 1980.
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Interview from November 1978. Documents Cage’s growing pessimism in the wake of events such as Watergate and the Jonestown massacre, his impressions of political expression in music (Cardew, Wolff, Rzewski), and his commitment to noncoercive art and government in all its aspects. Barnard, very interested in anarchism himself, successfully engages Cage on the topic.
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Cage, John, and Joan Retallack. Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.
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Interviews conducted between September 1990 and July 1992. Topics of conversation range widely—including aesthetics, performance, and social issues—but focus principally on Cage’s late visual art, writings, and music. Also documents conversation between Michael Bach and Cage, during which Cage worked on the unfinished cello compositions Ryoanji and One¹³.
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Kirby, Michael, and Richard Schechner. “An Interview with John Cage.” Tulane Drama Review 10.2 (1965): 50–72.
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Valuable, in particular, for reminiscences of the Black Mountain Piece and Theatre Piece, as well as remarks on Happenings, the aesthetic and cultural implications of Cage’s view of theater, and the importance of removing the ego in theatrical performance.
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Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 2003.
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Anthology of excerpts from many published and unpublished interviews, arranged into topical categories devoted to particular subjects (for example, Cage’s biography, aesthetics, and social concerns). New edition includes late interviews not published previously. Invaluable, but must be used with caution because the format often makes it difficult to fully understand the original context of Cage’s remarks.
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Exhibition Catalogues

The calligraphic appeal of Cage’s manuscripts has been acknowledged since 1958, when New York’s Stable Gallery mounted an exhibition of them in close proximity to his twenty-five-year retrospective concert at Town Hall. Though he made several art works in the following decade, of which the best known is Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel (1969), he began sustained work in visual art only in 1978, producing around 1,000 prints, watercolors, and pencil drawings. Cage 1982 documents his first five years of printmaking at Crown Point Press. Cage 1992 presents a selection of his visual works from an exhibition celebrating his eightieth birthday. Kass 2011 documents all of his work with watercolors, while Addiss and Kass 2010 documents an exhibition of test sheets related to a specific watercolor project. Millar 2010 celebrates the first major exhibition of Cage’s visual art. Derived from a Barcelona exhibition, Robinson 2009 counterpoises Cage’s visual work with various contemporaries. Cage 1993 and Herzogenrath and Kreul 2002 also concern his work with other kinds of installations, some of which use chance operations to select among the holdings of various museums as an essential part of the curatorial process.

Addiss, Stephen, and Ray Kass, eds. John Cage: Zen Ox-Herding Pictures. Richmond, VA: University of Richmond Museums, 2010.
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Catalogue from exhibit displaying test sheets made in 1988 by Cage at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The sheets are arranged into five sets of ten, each of which complements the imagery of the classic ox-herding poems and paintings series used in Zen instruction. Short essays trace Cage’s work in watercolor and his relationship with Zen.
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Cage, John. Etchings, 1978–82. Oakland, CA: Crown Point, 1982.
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Documents all the print series Cage made during his first five years at Crown Point Press. Contains introductory essay and commentaries on work, including Cage’s own description of the procedure used to make Seven Day Diary (Not Knowing) (1978).
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Cage, John. Arbeiten auf Papier. Wiesbaden: Nassauischer Kunstverein, 1992.
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Documents exhibition mounted on the occasion of Cage’s eightieth birthday, including a small portion of the Ryoanji drawings, watercolors, and late prints. Includes facsimile of letter from Cage to Alexej von Jawlensky. The introductory essay, by Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe (pp. 9–20), discusses Cage’s early interactions with Jawlensky and other artists in the 1930s and early 1940s.
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Cage, John. Rolywholyover: A Circus. New York: Rizzoli, 1993.
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Documents an exhibition that opened at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art in September 1993. A metal box contains reprinted articles important to Cage (for example, Marshall McLuhan’s “Agenbite of Outwit” and D. T. Suzuki’s “Zen and Dhyana”); new essays (including one on the Number Pieces by Mark Swed); photographs; and a chronology.
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Herzogenrath, Wulf, and Andreas Kreul. Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves. Tacoma, WA: Museum of Glass, 2002.
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Translation (from German) of the catalogue for an exhibition at Kunsthalle Bremen and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. Essays contextualize Cage’s visual arts and his relationships with Tobey and Graves; includes documentation of his Bremen installation, Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1985–1991). See also Herzogenrath 2002 cited under Art.
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Kass, Ray, ed. The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors. Roanoke, VA: Taubman Museum of Art, 2011.
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Documents an exhibition curated by Kass and Marshall Price at New York’s National Academy Museum and Roanoke’s Taubman Museum in 2012–2013. In addition to reproductions of all Cage’s watercolors, the catalogue includes texts, photographs, and a DVD documenting Cage’s working methods. See also Kass 2011 and Kass and Pike 2011 (both cited under Art).
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Millar, Jeremy, ed. Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage. London: Hayward, 2010.
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Documents the first major exhibition of Cage’s prints, watercolors, and drawings. Includes interviews with Kathan Brown, Ray Kass, and Julie Lazar—all of whom were instrumental in facilitating Cage’s work with art or exhibition—as well as recollections of a 1966 interview with Cage by the art critic Irving Sandler, along with more general texts.
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Robinson, Julia, ed. The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009.
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Documents a Barcelona exhibition that traveled to Norway and Holland through fall 2010. Includes many of Cage’s works from 1933 to 1969 (along with a few later ones) as well as works by many other artists, including Walter de Maria, Ellsworth Kelly, and George Brecht.
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Sources and Bibliography

Cage’s artistic activities were varied and numerous, and the earliest sources (Dunn 1962, Kostelanetz 1991 [originally published 1970]) are primarily documentary. Van Emmerik and Erdmann 1992 is the only essay devoted to the state of research, and it is in need of updating. Nattiez 1993 includes most of the correspondence between Cage and Boulez, which clarifies their moment of aesthetic convergence as well as key elements in the chronological development of Cage’s work, while Haskins 2010 considers the development of Cage reception as illustrated by recordings of his music. A John Cage Compendium and the John Cage Trust are invaluable bibliographic sources for Cage research.

Dunn, Robert, ed. John Cage. New York: C.F. Peters, 1962.
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Catalogue listing all of Cage’s music to 1961. Includes Cage’s program notes on his compositions, most of which were republished in Kostelanetz 1993 (cited under Books).
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Haskins, Rob. “John Cage and Recorded Sound: A Discographical Essay.” Notes: The Journal of the Music Library Association 68.2 (2010): 382–409.
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Lists and evaluates sources for Cage discography; traces the history of Cage’s music on record, which often emphasized older Cage works until 1978, when more widespread representation of his music began to appear. Includes critical evaluation of many recordings and identifies important works in need of greater discographical representation.
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A John Cage Compendium. Edited by Paul van Emmerik, Herbert Henck, and András Wilheim.
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A major online resource that includes a chronology of Cage’s life, works list (arranged alphabetically) with additional information (choreographer, first performance, etc.), list of manuscript sources (arranged alphabetically by geographical location), bibliography, and discography (in alphabetical order). No advanced searching capabilities. A recent update on 11 January 2014 is available.
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John Cage Trust.
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When complete, the website will include fully searchable databases, including a works list, an annotated listing of Cage’s library, a discography of archival and commercial recordings, and a catalogue of his visual art. Currently lacks only the annotated listing of Cage’s library; other miscellaneous content includes a “prepared piano app.”
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Kostelanetz, Richard, ed. John Cage: An Anthology. New York: Da Capo, 1991.
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Originally published in 1970, the anthology includes reprints of Cage’s reviews for Modern Music, occasional publications such as his exchange with the music critic Abraham Skulsky on Satie, reproductions of early programs and other documentary photographs, a few early reviews and features from newspapers, and interviews.
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Nattiez, Jean-Jacques, ed. The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Translated by Robert Samuels. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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This edition collects all of the correspondence between Cage and Boulez from 1949 to 1954, illustrating points of convergence between the two composers’ methods and aesthetic and also documenting Cage’s gradual embrace of chance composition in the early 1950s (as well as Boulez’s developing critique of it). Annotations and a glossary of names furnish important context.
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van Emmerik, Paul, and Martin Erdmann. “Zur Geschichte der Cage-Forschung.” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 49 (1992): 207–223.
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Offers the only summary of Cage research up to the early 1990s, and identifies three central tasks: studies of compositional process, biography, and aesthetics.
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Chronology

Primary sources at Northwestern University and many of Cage’s interviews confirm that he carefully crafted his image as it developed; this process, and his faulty memory, also created a pattern in which key events were forgotten, assigned an incorrect date, or unintentionally obscured. Hicks 1990 clarifies the exact nature of his interactions with Schoenberg, perhaps one of the most frequently misunderstood periods in his development. Miller 2002 and Miller 2006 consider the network of mentors and colleagues Cage encountered in California and Seattle, demonstrating that these individuals were critical to his developing aesthetic. Hines 1994 documents Cage’s residences, interactions with Europeans in California, and sexuality. Patterson 1996 and Patterson 2002 examine a number of primary sources to construct a chronology illuminating Cage’s appropriations of terminology from other authors or spiritual traditions. Shultis 2002 considers Cage’s relationship to Europe during both his formative years and in the early 1950s, shortly after his embrace of chance operations in composition.

Hicks, Michael. “Cage’s Studies with Schoenberg.” American Music 8.2 (1990): 125–140.
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Meticulous documentation of Cage’s attendance in classes by Schoenberg, which probably began in January 1935 and ended in the fall of 1936. Hicks also demonstrates how Cage embellished his reminiscences of Schoenberg, in part by clarifying the details of his single private meeting with Schoenberg and the German composer’s description of him as an inventor of genius.
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Hines, Thomas J. “‘Then Not Yet “Cage”’: The Los Angeles Years, 1912–1938.” In John Cage: Composed in America. Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 65–99. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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Clarifies the chronology of Cage’s earliest years along with documentation of his debt to European culture, professionals he met who helped his career, and his romantic relationships with Don Sample, Xenia Kashevaroff, and Pauline Schindler. Includes photographs of Cage’s childhood home and the apartment at the Schindler House, where he briefly lived with Sample.
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Miller, Leta E. “Cultural Intersections: John Cage in Seattle (1938–1940).” In John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Edited by David W. Patterson, 47–82. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Using a variety of archival materials, Miller produces a chronology of Cage’s Seattle activities and, more important, the impact of leftist Seattle colleagues, including Melvin Rader, Ralph Grundlach, and Bonnie Bird. She also argues persuasively to redate his seminal lecture “Future of Music: Credo” (Cage 1961c, cited under Essays and Lectures) to 1940.
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Miller, Leta E. “Henry Cowell and John Cage: Intersections and Influences, 1933–1945.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 59.1 (2006): 47–112.
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Through a close examination of many primary sources, Miller explores Cage’s reception of several ideas originating with Cowell, including elastic form, percussion music, and sliding tones, all of which Cowell claimed were central to the development of new music. Cowell’s Pulse (1939), for instance, anticipates Cage’s ideas of rhythmic structure. Nevertheless, Miller’s study emphasizes the characteristic complexity of the transmission process.
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Patterson, David W. “Appraising the Catchwords, c. 1942–1959: John Cage’s Asian-Derived Rhetoric and the Historical Reference of Black Mountain College.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1996.
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This outstanding dissertation includes an exhaustive chronology along with careful consideration of a number of primary sources in order to demonstrate how Cage fashioned his aesthetic project by appropriation (and sometimes extreme reformulation) of such figures as Coomaraswamy, Meister Eckhart, the Taoists, and Zen Buddhism. Selected chapters published as Patterson 2002 (cited below) and Patterson 2002 (cited under Aesthetics); the chapter on Black Mountain College (pp. 180–240) is one of the finest studies of that period.
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Patterson, David W. “Cage and Asia: History and Sources.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 41–59. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Originating in Patterson 1996, this essay traces the various Asian sources that influenced Cage’s developing aesthetic, including the writings of Coomaraswamy, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, R. H. Blythe, and the Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind. Also documents the dates Cage actually attended Suzuki’s classes at Columbia and how Cage adapted Zen ideas. See also Patterson 2002, cited under Aesthetics.
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Shultis, Christopher. “Cage and Europe.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 20–40. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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After summarizing Cage’s formative influences from European travels or artists (in particular, the Bauhaus and Erik Satie), Shultis traces the early German reception of Cage at Donaueschingen (1954) and Darmstadt (1958) and the three lectures “Changes,” “Indeterminacy,” and “Communication” (including comments on the latter’s translation into German). Shultis concludes that Cage’s anti-European stance resulted from his negative reception in Europe during the 1950s.
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Collections of Essays

The earliest collection here—Gena and Brent 1982—marked Cage’s seventieth birthday and primarily contains documentary material, appreciations, and interviews. (Brooks 1982, cited under Specific Works, 1961–1975, is the single significant musicological study) With Fleming and Duckworth 1989, which originated in a 1987 festival of Cage’s music with some paper presentations, the content began to include more scholarly studies, such as Pritchett 1989 (cited under Specific Works, 1933–1960). Conferences multiplied after this event; Perloff and Junkerman 1994 emphasizes scholarly interest from other fields, while Schädler and Zimmermann 1992 and Bernstein and Hatch 2001 include a number of musicological essays. Nicholls 2002 principally assembles essays by various musicologists to offer a comprehensive scholarly introduction to Cage’s work and the state of research, and Patterson 2002 presents an invaluable collection of essays that focus on Cage’s work up to 1950.

Bernstein, David W., and Christopher Hatch, eds. Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226044873.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The book contains essays originally presented at a 1995 conference at Mills College. It includes studies of Cage’s writings by Jackson Mac Low, panel discussions on Cage’s influence and work with computers, and studies of other specific works and/or techniques. See also Bernstein 2001a (cited under Miscellaneous Criticism), Katz 2001 (cited under Social and Political Concerns), Mumma 2001 (cited under Performance Practice), and Lewallen 2001 and Lohner 2001 (both cited under Art).
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Fleming, Richard, and William Duckworth, eds. John Cage at Seventy-Five. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989.
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A special issue of Bucknell Review that includes two interviews (by William Duckworth and Richard Kostelanetz) and several items presented at the 1988 conference John Cage at Wesleyan, including a critical lecture by Norman O. Brown (discussed in Shultis 2008, cited under Critical Appraisal), a photo essay, Cage’s mesostic poem Anarchy (see Cage 2001, cited under Text Compositions), and other essays by performers and scholars such as William Brooks, Tom Johnson, and Margaret Leng Tan. See also Pritchett 1989, cited under Specific Works, 1933–1960.
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Gena, Peter, and Jonathan Brent, eds. A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday. New York: C.F. Peters, 1982.
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The first book-length collection to include essays by a wide range of composers, artists, performers, and scholars, this collection also includes articles about Cage’s writings, theater, and art; color plates of selected Cage etchings; and a very insightful interview with Morton Feldman conducted by Peter Gena. See also Brooks 1982 (cited under Specific Works, 1961–1975 and Richards 1982 (cited under Reception).
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Nicholls, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Exemplary and fairly comprehensive collection of essays on Cage’s biography, music, writings, and art, which also includes studies of his interactions with social concerns, his connections to modernism and postmodernism, and his continuing influence. Less coverage for music of the 1960s onward. Specific entries are cited throughout this bibliography; see Bernstein 2002 (cited under Music), Bernstein 2002 (cited under Specific Works, 1933–1960), Patterson 2002 (cited under Chronology), Patterson 2002 (cited under Writings and Text Compositions), Shultis 2002 (cited under Chronology), Brooks 2002 (cited under Music), Brooks 2002 (cited under Social and Political Concerns), Holzaepfel 2002 (cited under Performance Practice), Williams 2002 (cited under Miscellaneous Criticism), and Gann 2002 (cited under Reception).
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Patterson, David W., ed. John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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A very important collection of essays, primarily by musicologists, devoted principally to Cage’s work before he embraced chance composition. It employs a wide variety of approaches including archival scholarship, analysis, and criticism. Individual chapters are cited elsewhere in this bibliography; see Bernstein 2002 (cited under Reception), Miller 2002 (cited under Chronology), Shultis 2002 (cited under Specific Works, 1933–1960), Joseph 2002 (cited under Aesthetics), and Patterson 2002 (cited under Aesthetics).
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Perloff, Marjorie, and Charles Junkerman, eds. John Cage: Composed in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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A collection publishing essays presented at the 1992 conference Here Comes Everybody: The Music, Poetry and Art of John Cage, held at Stanford. Includes Cage’s final extended mesostic, “Overpopulation and Art,” along with a number of studies, mostly from scholars working outside of music, examining Cage’s work from poetic, philosophical, and scientific perspectives. See also Hines 1994 (cited under Chronology), and Bruns 1994 (cited under Social and Political Concerns).
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Schädler, Stefan, and Walter Zimmermann, eds. John Cage: Anarchic Harmony. Mainz: Schott, 1992.
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Documents a symposium and concert series held in Frankfurt am Main from 15 August to 27 September 1992. The contents include essays by Walter Zimmermann (on the principle of subtraction in Quartets I–VIII [1976]), Ruth Young (on Cage and Thoreau), and John Holzaepfel (on recently discovered correspondence between Boulez and Cage), brief encomia by composers and others, and Cage’s text composition Muoyce II (1992).
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Music

Cage made over three hundred compositions made from many different kinds of techniques throughout his career; later compositions might introduce new techniques or working habits or revisit older ones, which makes it difficult to understand his career systematically. Still, some patterns of affinity can be found, as demonstrated in Brooks 2002, which considers the music after 1960. Bernstein 2002 examines serial techniques that Cage eventually abandoned, but also argues persuasively for a continuity in Cage’s music manifested in unordered sets of pitches or other sounds, and in an interest in various kinds of temporal structures. Fetterman 1996 surveys Cage’s works straddling music and theater. Tenney 1993 advances a theory of harmonic analysis circumventing conventional understandings of the term that Cage resisted. Although the grouping of entries below suggests only three periods of compositional activity, it is more profitable to divide Cage’s career into five periods: 1933–1949—compositional decisions made by taste as well as the development of rhythmic structures; 1950–1960—initial forays into chance composition; 1960–1968—a move toward the extreme ramifications of indeterminacy in composition; 1969–1979—a return to the use of pitches in chance composition explored alongside continued work with indeterminacy and the development of a new approach toward improvisation; and 1980–1992—a reconciliation of the ideas of chance composition and indeterminacy (or, as Cage put it, “object” and “process”) represented by the use of time brackets. Future updates of this article will follow this pattern as more scholarship is completed.

Bernstein, David W. “Music I: To the Late 1940s.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 63–84. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Bernstein demonstrates that some of Cage’s later concerns, such as limited pitch collections and rhythmic structuring, manifest themselves in his earliest work; his account of the 1935 Two Pieces for Piano emphasizes Cage’s particular approach to twelve-tone composition. The analysis of Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1945–1948) includes a welcome discussion of pitch relations in selected movements.
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Brooks, William. “Music II: From the Late 1960s.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 128–150. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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This essay relates the works after Musicircus (1968) to changes in Cage’s approach to his four-fold aesthetic for composition: structure, form, method, and materials. Brooks identifies both close and distant interrelations obtaining between various compositions, including Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts (1974); the series of etudes (1975–1990); works based on preexisting material by Satie, 18th-century composers, and others; and the Number Pieces (1987–1992).
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Fetterman, William. John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996.
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Drawing on a great deal of archival material and interviews, Fetterman presents an exhaustive survey of various Cage works that partake of theater, and also includes some of the first important discussions of performance practice in Cage’s work. Particularly valuable for its documentation of various performances of Song Books (1970), reminiscences of the HPSCHD premiere (1969), and an extensive investigation of Cage as a performer.
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Tenney, James. “John Cage and the Theory of Harmony.” In Writings about John Cage. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 136–161. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
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Referring to some of Cage’s remarks concerning harmony, Tenney uses a concept of harmonic space to move toward a harmonic theory that is descriptive, aesthetically neutral, culturally and stylistically general, and quantitative. His perception-oriented definition of harmony offers a useful model for considering many of Cage’s works.
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Specific Works, 1933–1960

The earliest studies of Cage’s music—like Pritchett 1989—focused primarily on the pre-compositional process: the series of possibilities Cage formulated for each aspect of a composition that were usually selected by chance operations. Bernstein 2002 extends this methodology to explore Cage’s shifting aesthetic position with respect to various kinds of modernism. Shultis 2002, Perry 2005, and DeLio 2009 all attend to the sounding surface of the music itself. Levitz 2005 offers extensive documentation of the first performance of Bacchanale (1940) to demonstrate Cage’s significant reliance on the dance it accompanied and the aesthetic choices of its choreographer. Davies 2003 summarizes philosophical approaches to Cage’s best-known work, 4′33″ (1952), and advances his own argument for its status as a musical work.

Bernstein, David W. “Cage and High Modernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 186–213. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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This essay presents detailed explanations of the compositional procedures involved in the String Quartet (1951), Prepared Piano Concerto (1951), Sixteen Dances (1951), and Music of Changes (1951). A concluding section notes the points of agreement and of disagreement with Boulez’s working methods, arguing that Cage enacts a complex dialogue with competing formulations of high modernism and modernism during this period.
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Davies, Stephen. “John Cage’s 4′33″: Is it Music?” In Themes in the Philosophy of Music. By Stephen Davies, 11–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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Davies claims that Cage’s anticipated audience response to 4′33″ (1952) —that the naturally occurring sounds be appreciated for their “naked” aesthetic properties—is impossible, since its compositional aspects make it into an artwork. He also repudiates Jerrold Levinson’s argument that 4′33″ is music because it is organized sound.
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DeLio, Tom. The Amores of John Cage. CMS Sourcebooks in American Music. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2009.
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DeLio posits that a central paradigm of modernism depends upon the opposition and interrelations of organic and inorganic form, using both approaches to analyze each movement of Amores (1943). His analytical method ranges widely, from a detailed timbral analysis of the prepared piano sounds to a statistical study of density in tom-tom attack points. Includes a CD of a 1961 recording.
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Haskins, Rob. “Differing Evocations of Buddhism in Two Works by Robert Morris and John Cage.” Perspectives of New Music 52.2 (2014): 345–358.
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Discusses D. T. Suzuki’s account of the Avatamsaka Sutra and Robert Morris’s music and essays to sketch evocations of four Buddhist ideas in Cage’s Music for Piano 21 (1955): Śūnyatā (“emptiness”), Tathatā (“suchness”), unimpededness, and interpenetration. Observing a wide variety of interrelationships in the work thus approaches an ideal kind of analysis for it that Morris describes as undivided attention.
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Levitz, Tamara. “Syvilla Fort’s African Modernism and John Cage’s Gestic Music: The Story of Bacchanale.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104.1 (2005): 123–149.
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Challenging the tendency for much of Cage’s music—even early works—to be viewed as sounds in themselves, Levitz explores the context for and making of Bacchanale (1940) for the choreographer Syvilla Fort. Cage’s score clearly responds to the movement and expressive stance of Fort’s dance, which itself enacts a particular form of modern dance that includes elements from Africanist choreography traditions.
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Perry, Jeffrey. “Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano: Performance, Hearing and Analysis.” Music Theory Spectrum 27.1 (Spring 2005): 35–66.
DOI: 10.1525/mts.2005.27.1.35 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Perry explores relationships between pitch (both prepared and unprepared), rhythm and motive, and gesture in the first four of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948). He employs various strategies that depend upon the thematic material and degree of interaction between the mentioned variables, and claims that a group of unprepared or nearly unprepared tones facilitate both short- and longer-range connections.
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Pritchett, James. “Understanding John Cage’s Chance Music: An Analytical Approach.” In John Cage at Seventy-Five. Edited by Richard Fleming and William Duckworth, 249–261. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989.
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Pritchett proposes a model in which analysis considers the compositional system Cage employs to make a given piece. Examples drawn from various works, including Two Pastorales (1952), Music for Piano (1952–1956), and Music of Changes (1951), demonstrate how Cage made different systems and, perhaps more important, how his taste continued to play a role in the actual realization of these systems.
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Shultis, Christopher. “No Ear for Music: Timbre in the Early Percussion Music of John Cage.” In John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Edited by David W. Patterson, 83–104. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Claims that Cage was very responsive to the sound in his music. His examination of the three Constructions reveals that timbre is at least as important as form in the first for its novelty; equally responsible (along with form) for the less successful second; and the single most important marker of compositional design in the third. Includes recommendations for performance.
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Specific Works, 1961–1975

Cage’s music from 1960 poses considerable challenges to scholarship. The extreme indeterminate works of the 1960s demand novel new approaches for almost every aspect, while much of the music made from 1969 to 1975 returns to more conventional notation and, in some cases, to compositional choices made by Cage directly, without recourse to chance operations. Brooks 1982 examines the compositional materials for Song Books (1970) and reveals important aspects of Cage’s creative practices at this time. Shultis 2013 documents the detailed compositional process of Cage’s Empty Words (1974), following the model established by Pritchett 1989 (cited under Specific Works, 1933–1960). Miller 2001 and Cross 2012 document important works of the 1960s, while Hoover 2010 draws on the work of contemporary thinkers and considers Cunningham’s collaboration to offer important context for Variations V (1965).

Brooks, William. “Choice and Change in John Cage’s Recent Music.” In A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday. Edited by Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, 82–100. New York: C.F. Peters, 1982.
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With a detailed examination of the compositional materials for Song Books (1970), Brooks demonstrates that, in spite of conventional wisdom, Cage’s own taste and choices continued to play a prominent role in his chance music. Concludes that his compositional career has been characterized by a steadily growing openness to all kinds of techniques and approaches.
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Cross, Lowell. “Reunion: John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Electronic Music and Chess.” In Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp. Edited by Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle, 244–255. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012.
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This article documents the premiere of Reunion. Cross, who designed the chessboard and contributed music, describes the board’s design extensively, correcting erroneous information in other published accounts. He also chronicles the first performance and several others not involving Duchamp, including excerpts from contemporary reviews. A conclusion contextualizes Reunion with regard to Cage’s desire for art that resembles everyday life.
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Hoover, Elizabeth. “Variations V: ‘Escaping Stagnation’ Through Movement of Signification.” Current Musicology 90 (Fall 2010): 57–75.
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Hoover invokes Derrida’s concept of différance to interpret the fluid play of meanings conjured by the overlapping sounds and image in Variations V (1965). A close reading of Cunningham’s choreography for the final two minutes attempts to destabilize Cage’s compositional authority for the work and to exemplify the Derridean reading of signification in the work.
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Miller, Leta. “Cage, Cunningham, and Collaborators: The Odyssey of Variations V.” Musical Quarterly 85.3 (Fall 2001): 545–567.
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Drawing upon a wide array of primary sources and interviews with most of the original participants, Miller documents the origins, premiere, and short-term reception of the large-scale collaboration Variations V (1965). She concludes that the work would have benefited from more careful testing of the technology. Includes documentation of Atlas Eclipticalis (1962), Variations VII (1966), and Reunion (1968).
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Shultis, Christopher. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2013.
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Analyzes the compositional process in Diary: Audience 1966 (1966), Mureau (1970), and Empty Words (1974) to demonstrate Cage’s progress toward divesting language of intentional meaning, which Shultis likens to a similar progressive liberation of sounds in works from 4′33″ (1952) to Variations III (1963). Emphasizes the continuing role of Cage’s taste and choices in composition. First published 1998 (Boston: Northeastern University Press).
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Specific Works, 1976–1992

Cage’s commissions for the United States Bicentennial led him to make a number of works from 18th-century hymnody in which the harmony became unmoored through chance operations that eliminated some pitches (replacing them with silence) and extending others. Brooks 1993 reconstructs the compositional process for one of these works. The idea of harmony returns frequently in Cage’s last music; Weisser 2003 and Haskins 2009 consider the late Music for ___ (1984–1987) and Number Piece series (1987–1992), with special attention paid to the temporal design of the works and aspects of pitch relationships. Still other works continue the stylistic characteristics of earlier chance and indeterminate compositions. Pritchett 1994 documents the detailed compositional process of Cage’s complex Freeman Etudes (1977–1980/1989–1990), which followed on his earlier Etudes Australes (completed 1975). Kuhn 1994 employs the ideas of Buckminster Fuller as a context for the Europeras (1987–1991).

Brooks, William. “John Cage and History: Hymns and Variations.” Perspectives of New Music 31.2 (1993): 74–103.
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In the first section of this article, Brooks hypothesizes the compositional process for Hymns and Variations (1979) and tests its validity by means of statistics; in the second, he makes some analytical comments on the sounding result, with particularly important consequences for the work’s performance.
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Haskins, Rob. “On John Cage’s Late Music, Analysis, and the Model of Renga in Two².” American Music 27.4 (Fall 2009): 327–355.
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Discusses aspects of Cage’s final works, which attempt to reconcile the process-oriented approach of indeterminacy and object-oriented approach of chance composition as well as introduce a new, sustained interest in harmony. Includes an analysis of Two² (1989), which contains many recurring sonorities that recall Cage’s Themes & Variations (1979), an adaptation of Japanese renga poetry.
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Kuhn, Laura D. “Synergetic Dynamics in John Cage’s Europeras 1 & 2.” Musical Quarterly 78.1 (1994): 131–148.
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Kuhn claims that Europeras 1 & 2 (1987) poetically manifests synergy—Buckminster Fuller’s term for the way a complex of different systems behave together. It is also a hybrid transformational work (borrowing a term from Jerrold Levinson’s aesthetics) in which the principle of collage essentially revitalizes opera, and as a reflection of current science manifested by the development of quantum mechanics.
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Pritchett, James. “The Completion of John Cage’s Freeman Etudes.” Perspectives of New Music 32.2 (Summer 1994): 264–271.
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In 1989, Cage asked Pritchett to help reconstruct the process used in the Freeman Etudes (1977–1980/1989–1990) so that he could complete them. This article consists of the actual report Pritchett prepared, along with a few additional clarifying notes; it is a fascinating document of the sequence and complexity of activities Cage made in composing with chance operations.
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Weisser, Benedict. “John Cage: ‘. . . The Whole World Would Potentially Be Sound’: Time Brackets and the Number Pieces, 1987–1992.” Perspectives of New Music 41.2 (Summer 2003): 176–226.
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Weisser describes time brackets in Cage’s works after 1981 as both a notational device and a structural unit. Particularly in many of the Number Pieces, the time brackets provide for individual tones to coalesce in harmonies that alternately suggest chaos or coherence, thereby effecting Cage’s reconciliation with the idea of harmony broadly conceived.
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Performance Practice

This topic is relatively new to Cage studies and shows great promise. Most of the available work, including Pritchett 2000, Mumma 2001, and Holzaepfel 2002, documents the approach of Cage or David Tudor, whom Cage often acknowledged as his preferred interpreter. Miller 2009 argues that an appropriate performance practice for Cage’s music must leave room for the adaptation of his instructions to new technologies; the spirit of his aesthetic can be used to fashion informed but novel individual performer solutions. See also Thorman 2002 (cited under Writings and Text Compositions).

Holzaepfel, John. “Cage and Tudor.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 169–185. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CCOL9780521783484 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Holzaepfel characterizes Cage and Tudor’s association as “one of the most astonishing composer-performer relationships in the history of music” (p. 169). This is due in part to Tudor’s extraordinary curiosity; as an example, Holzaepfel relates Tudor’s discovery of Artaud, whose ideas soon became influential to Cage’s circle. The article concludes with a description of the extensive work Tudor did to realize his performing score of Winter Music (1957).
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Miller, David P. “Indeterminacy and Performance Practice in John Cage’s Variations.” American Music 27.1 (Spring 2009): 60–86.
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Considers the remarks that serve as instructions for Variations V (1965) and Variations VII (1966). It proposes a conception of “methodological practice,” a careful reading of the remarks to capture the spirit in which they originated, and to extend the descriptions to technologies and performance approaches of the present. Miller illustrates this approach through documentation of performances by the Mobius Artists Group.
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Mumma, Gordon. “Cage as Performer.” In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 113–119. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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Documents Cage’s performances in various media. Mumma recalls Cage’s piano performances of Satie’s music: lyrical and understated, with a subtle rhythmic lilt. In Cage’s performance of Mumma’s own Swarm (1973), Cage (performing on concertina) learned quickly and had a superior grasp of pitch and ensemble, belying the frequent claim that he had no ear for music.
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Pritchett, James. “David Tudor’s Realization of John Cage’s Variations II.” Rose White Music, 2000.
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Pritchett employs archival materials at the Getty research center to explicate Tudor’s approach to this 1963 indeterminate score. Although Tudor developed the notation of fifty events with fairly precise indications, he also performed in such a way that he could remain open to ongoing conditions as they arose. Thus Tudor’s approach resembles his own electroacoustic compositions.
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Writings and Text Compositions

Cage’s writing was admired throughout his career, though much scholarship before 1992 was general and often restricted to his earlier work. Perloff 1981 is thus a landmark study of Cage’s writings and important for its discussion of Cage as part of a larger tendency toward indeterminacy in poetry originating with Rimbaud. Conte 1991 focuses on the description of formal structures in a wide variety of postmodern poetry, with Cage once again considered as one example among many. Patterson 2002 clarifies Cage’s immense output and offers practical advice on using it in scholarship. Shultis 2013 is a wide-ranging study that places Cage squarely in a literary tradition beginning with Emerson and Thoreau; the author shows that Cage shares affinities with a number of contemporary poets. Thorman 2002 is, so far, the only significant study of the literary works, but its discussion does not devote much attention to, for instance, the large mesostics such as Anarchy (1988) or I–VI (1988–1989) and the series of writings through Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1976–1982). Thorman 2006 explores Satie’s impact on Cage through several mesostic works.

Conte, Joseph. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
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In constructing a “systematic typology of postmodern poetic forms” (p. 1), Conte identifies two complementary methods: serial order that is “protean” and provisional, and procedural order that is “proteinic” through the employment of arbitrary constraints (p. 11); Cage is an example of the latter type. Includes an extensive discussion of Themes & Variations (pp. 255–265)—see Cage 1993 (cited under Text Compositions).
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Patterson, David W. “Words and Writings.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 85–99. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Indispensable survey of Cage’s writings and interviews. Patterson includes valuable context to aid understanding of the sources, offers critical assessment of the large number of published interviews, and explains Cage’s various modes of reference to other writers through which he shaped his own ideas.
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Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1981.
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Perloff traces indeterminacy in American poets primarily, though she includes extensive discussions of French literature and modern art as well. She construes poetry as “language art or ‘word-system’” (p. 43, italics in original), arguing that the unfolding creative process of the work is the source of its meaning. The final chapter (pp. 288–339) discusses Cage 1961 and Cage 1979 (both cited under Books).
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Shultis, Christopher. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2013.
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First published 1998 (Boston: Northeastern University Press). Situates Cage within the tradition of American literature and philosophy beginning with Emerson and Thoreau; Emerson’s advocacy of control over nature finds musical voice in Charles Ives, while Thoreau’s coexistence with nature continues as a crucial tenet in Cage. Includes discussion of 20th-century American poets who also represent this tradition.
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Thorman, Marc. “Speech and Text in Compositions by John Cage, 1950–1992.” DMA diss., City University of New York, 2002.
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So far the only scholarly overview of Cage’s text compositions. Considers the works from the standpoint of compositional procedures, their relationship to his shifting aesthetics, and aspects of performance. Includes the first discussions of a number of late pieces, including Letters to Erik Satie (1978), Stüfen (1989), and Muoyce II (1992).
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Thorman, Marc. “John Cage’s Letters to Erik Satie.” American Music 24.1 (2006): 95–123.
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This article, adapted from Thorman 2002, discusses the mesostic-related text composition Letters to Erik Satie and includes a detailed reconstruction of a performance Cage made from the second Letter to accompany Merce Cunningham’s Tango. Thorman includes comments on other text compositions beginning with 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971) and traces Cage’s extensive connection with Satie and its manifestations in two other Satie-related works.
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Social and Political Concerns

Beginning in the early 1960s, Cage increasingly devoted attention to reflection on social problems, called himself an anarchist, and insisted on solutions produced through the invention and collaboration of many autonomous individuals. Reponses to these ideas vary. Brooks 2002 offers an excellent introduction to the subject, with a useful survey of works to support his claims; Junkerman 1994 focuses on a specific realization of Cage’s Musicircus concept—an event in which many kinds of musicians assemble and perform simultaneously for no pay—to illustrate his social ideals; Bruns 1994 and Retallack 2003 focus on the idea of poethics (a combination of creativity and ethics) as a helpful way to contextualize his views. Katz 2001 examines Cage’s embrace of silence as an act that both maintains his closeted identity and becomes a strategy of resistance. Leonard 1994 allies Cage to a long tradition of American thinkers who emphasize the observation of the everyday existence in its complexity, ultimately claiming him as a religious figure. Heimbecker 2008 critiques Cage’s political naiveté through extensive documentation of HPSCHD (1969).

Brooks, William. “Music and Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 214–226. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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After offering trenchant readings of several Cage works that articulate a clear political viewpoint, Brooks groups Cage’s strategies regarding music and society into three categories: modeling a utopian society, asking performers to consider new ways of working, and emphasizing process and an awareness of the present moment.
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Bruns, Gerald. “Poethics: John Cage and Stanley Cavell at the Crossroads of Ethical Theory.” In John Cage: Composed in America. Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 206–225. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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The essay notes similarities between Cavell’s and Cage’s readings of Thoreau to argue for poetry and music as a way of abiding with (rather than knowing) reality. This act bridges the gap between analytic and Continental views of ethics as expressed by Martha Nussbaum and Emanuel Lévinas, respectively; Cage’s attitude toward silence has affinities with the Levinasian concept of the Other.
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Heimbecker, Sara. “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia.” American Music 26.4 (2008): 474–498.
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Heimbecker draws parallels between the multimedia aesthetic of HPSCHD and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Both aim to unify a fragmented society; both were made possible through patronage (Wagner by Ludwig II, Cage by the university); and both offered a state-of-the-art rhetorical apparatus bordering on coercion. Heimbecker criticizes Cage’s unawareness of specific social problems, concluding that HPSCHD reaffirms European ideals of modernism.
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Junkerman, Charles. “‘nEw/foRms of living together’: The Model of the Musicircus.” In John Cage: Composed in America. Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, 39–64. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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Junkerman describes the Musicircus-like event that took place during a Cage conference at Stanford University in 1992, which he likens to a three-part Hegelian dialectic: (1) a critical antithesis, in which familiar aesthetic codes are destabilized; (2) an affirmative thesis, in which the event itself creates a space to see the immanent world; and (3) a visionary synthesis modeling new kinds of political affiliations.
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Katz, Jonathan D. “John Cage’s Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse.” In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 41–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
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Katz relates Cage’s turn toward Asian spiritual traditions to his acceptance of his homosexuality and his relationship with Merce Cunningham. The nondualistic and quietist aspects of Asian traditions provide a congenial environment that, nevertheless, reinforces Cage’s closeted identity in the 1950s, but their manifestation in silence also becomes a tool of resistance differing from oppositional politics.
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Leonard, George J. Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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Leonard argues that the abandonment of the traditional artistic concept in favor of attending to everyday experience and objects as a site of aesthetic value can be traced to 19th-century figures such as Wordsworth, Ruskin, and Emerson. Cage’s Suzuki reception manifests this tendency so generally as to have widespread cultural importance; hence, Leonard claims Cage should be understood as a religious figure.
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Retallack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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This book collects writings that explore Retallack’s idea of poethics, an explicit connection of ethics with aesthetic formulations or creative actions. Its four essays on Cage include a discussion of Lecture on the Weather (1975) and an extensive account of the complex interactions obtaining between audience, weather, and music in a performance of One⁸ on July 17, 1992.
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Critical Appraisal

Cage never lacked critics, as his music and writings challenged many assumptions about art and ideas of modernism. Boehmer 1997 translates a chapter from the author’s Zur Theorie der Offenen Form in der neue Musik (Darmstadt: Tonos, 1967) that remains one of the best-argued and thorough criticisms of Cage’s early work. Boulez 1991 and Hollander 1993 are classic diatribes about Cage and chance composition and indeterminacy, though few works are mentioned specifically; Nono 1975 is a 1959 lecture given at Darmstadt in the wake of Cage’s famous visit there in 1958; Nono excoriates Cage for his embrace of chance composition and his refusal to engage with history. Taruskin 2010 (originally published 1993), essentially an obituary-review, concludes that Cage was firmly allied with the high modernist zeitgeist immediately after 1945. Cardew 1974 articulates a neo-Marxist denunciation, while Shultis 2008 explores the systematic critique of Cage mounted by Norman O. Brown. Lewis 1996 initiated an important dialogue on Cage’s thoughts on improvisation and their implicit participation in an act of silencing Afrological perspectives of contemporary music.

Boehmer, Konrad. “Chance as Ideology.” Translated by Ian Pepper. October 82 (Autumn 1997): 62–76.
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A relentless condemnation that indicts Cage’s early works, 1950s chance compositions, and writings. Boehmer criticizes Cage’s rhythmic structure technique as abandoning the principle of mediation in favor of “mere arrangement” (p. 64), dismisses his collage techniques because they lack an ironic or critical function, and repudiates Metzger’s view of Cage’s work as social critique. He also argues that Cage’s influence has harmed composers, including Stockhausen and Pousseur.
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Boulez, Pierre. “Alea.” In Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship. Translated by Stephen Walsh, 26–38. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
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Originally published in 1957. Begins with a notorious indictment of Cage (who is never named) and his approach to chance composition, which he characterizes as hollow technique masking compositional weakness. By contrast, Boulez maintains that chance can be important in composition only when its possibilities are more actively shaped by a composer; so configured, chance revitalizes both performance and form in contemporary music.
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Cardew, Cornelius. “Criticising Cage and Stockhausen.” In Stockhausen Serves Imperialism and Other Articles. By Cornelius Cardew, 33–63. London: Latimer New Dimensions, 1974.
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Cardew castigates Cage’s music as embodying bourgeois ideology, its avant-garde status reinforcing hegemonic capitalist strategies. He applauds the New York Philharmonic’s revolt during their 1964 performances of Atlas Eclipticalis (1962). Later works, such as Cheap Imitation (1969), confirm Cage’s desires to dazzle and pacify the bourgeoisie. His claim that Music of Changes (1951) reflects capitalist society is especially persuasive.
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Hollander, John. “Silence.” In Writings about John Cage. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 264–269. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
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In his 1963 review of Cage 1961 (cited under Books), Hollander characterizes Cage’s work as “productions,” allying them with the world of entertainment. Offering only brief descriptions of Cage performances and the book, he concludes that accounts of Cage’s music are more interesting than the works themselves, and doubts that Cage possesses the agonizing seriousness that truly great art requires.
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Lewis, George E. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 16.1 (1996): 91–122.
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Lewis describes two traditions of improvised music, African American and European or European American. Much of the Eurological perspective, representing the dominant white power system, seeks tacitly to dismiss or erase any debt to the Afrological one, and thus retain its own political hegemony. Cage’s widely disseminated views on spontaneity, “sounds in themselves” (p. 119) reinforce Eurological perspectives. Recent improvisers offer an important corrective.
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Nono, Luigi. “Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik heute.” In Luigi Nono: Texte – Studien seiner Musik. Edited by Jürg Stenzl, 35–40. Zurich: Atlantis, 1975.
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This famous and controversial lecture was given at Darmstadt in 1959 (Helmut Lachenmann prepared the published version). It includes a sustained critique of Cage (including discussion of passages from Cage’s “History of American Music in the United States” and “Composition as Process III: Communication” in Cage 1961 cited under Books), concluding that his commitment to chance amounts to spiritual suicide.
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Shultis, Christopher. “A Living Oxymoron: Norman O. Brown’s Criticism of John Cage.” Perspectives of New Music 44.2 (2008): 67–87.
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Shultis characterizes Brown as Cage’s best critic. His use of chance operations “avoid(s) real uncertainty” (p. 70), leading toward an Apollonian idealism that fails to relate to Dionysian destructiveness. Shultis sees the tension between Cage’s idealistic views about his work and the work itself, as presented in Brown’s criticism, as one basis for criticism of Cage (see Brown 2007, cited under Reception).
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Taruskin, Richard. “No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage.” In The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays. By Richard Taruskin, 261–279. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
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Originally published in 1993, the essay reviews a number of recent books and CDs concerning Cage (including David Revill’s biography The Roaring Silence [1992] and the first edition of Kostelanetz 2003, cited under Interviews), but it is more importantly an obituary-overview and thoroughgoing critique of Cage’s works around 1950. These Taruskin views as evidence of Cage’s alliance with other high modernists active around 1950, including Babbitt and Boulez.
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Reception

The writings in this section principally concern the reception of Cage’s activities during his lifetime. Richards 1982 and Brown 2007 are personal remembrances. Bernstein 2002 explores Schoenberg’s influence, while Pepper 1997, Beal 2006, and Iddon 2013 consider his reception in Germany. Nyman 1999 (originally published 1974) examines his relationship to so-called experimental music around 1970. Gann 2002 documents the extraordinary range of his subsequent influence. Taken together, these works reveal Cage as an extraordinarily complex and sometimes contradictory figure whose impact on others took widely different forms.

Beal, Amy C. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
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Carefully researched account of West German musical institutions after World War II and their patronage of so-called experimental composers from Cage to Steve Reich. Considers the nuanced cultural implications of this patronage. Describes Cage’s connections to various festivals and concludes with an optimistic description of the ongoing performance of Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP (1987) in the town of Halberstadt.
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Bernstein, David W. “John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, and the Musical Idea.” In John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Edited by David W. Patterson, 15–45. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Bernstein examines Schoenberg’s writings from the years of Cage’s study with him to understand what Cage might have learned from him. In addition to Cage’s interest in twelve-tone technique (demonstrated in various early works), Schoenberg’s flexible concept of the musical idea has implications for Cage’s chance music and could suggest a methodology for its analysis.
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Brown, Carolyn. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2007.
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Brown’s memoir details her acquaintance with Cage and Cunningham, performance with Cunningham’s company, the critical reception of his works, and her own biography and increasing professional stature. The book also includes important context for Cage’s acquaintance with Zen (Brown attended some of Suzuki’s lectures and read some of the same books as Cage) and Cage’s not infrequent anger over events that he felt threatened Cunningham.
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Gann, Kyle. “No Escape from Heaven: John Cage as Father Figure.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 242–260. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Gann’s survey describes a number of composers, primarily Americans, who have been influenced by Cage in various ways, focusing on (1) particular models of structure and sonority in the 1940s works; (2) chance as a means to create unexpected results in the composition; (3) the use of collage as a fundamental technique; and (4) Cage’s general attitudes and approach to art. Gann emphasizes composers born after 1940.
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Iddon, Martin. New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139519571 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A meticulously researched chronicle of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse under its first director, Wolfgang Steinecke, from 1946 to 1961. Iddon’s work describes a variety of musical styles in play there, including various compositional approaches to serialism. The second part of the book (pp. 165–303) explores the impact of Cage’s 1958 visit and the gradually deepening quarrels among Darmstadt’s leading members.
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Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. 2d ed. New York: Schirmer, 1974. Foreword by Brian Eno. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Nyman’s book was the first to attempt a systematic definition of experimental music. He draws on Cage’s concepts, and explores how general principles related to Cage influenced American and British composers in the 1960s and 1970s. A composer himself, Nyman offers idiosyncratic views of the music he discusses, making the monograph an important reception document.
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Pepper, Ian. “From the ‘Aesthetics of Indifference’ to ‘Negative Aesthetics’: John Cage and Germany 1958–1972.” October 82 (1997): 30–47.
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This essay introduces translations of three German texts —by Heinz-Klaus Metzger (1958), Konrad Boehmer (1967), and Hans G. Helms (1972)—all of which illustrate the complex reception of Cage in Germany. Adorno’s writings on new music form an important context to these texts. A closing section critiques Cage’s formulation of anarchism and its reception by Mark Swed and others.
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Richards, M. C. “John Cage and the Way of the Ear.” In A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday. Edited by Peter Gena and Jonathan Brent, 38–49. New York: C.F. Peters, 1982.
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Richards, a participant in the Black Mountain Event (1952), discusses Cage’s social importance through “The Future of Music” (Cage 1979, cited under Text Compositions) and Lecture on the Weather. She sees the cultural habits that Cage challenged as addictions; acceptance of all sounds heightens awareness of an interiority transcending cultural habits and brings humanity toward a new conception of being.
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Miscellaneous Criticism

The breadth of Cage’s interests and work has led naturally to a variety of widely ranging critical studies that take a variety of forms. Bernstein 2001a, Bernstein 2001b, and Williams 2002 continue an ongoing inquiry into Cage’s status as either a modernist or postmodernist, offering nuanced views on the debate and the nature of the terms themselves. Brett 2002 directly confronts the issue of Cage’s sexuality with the goal of initiating sustained dialogue on this subject. Morris 2010 is one of several noteworthy essays that apply techniques of Cage’s music and aesthetics while making new connections, especially between music and Buddhism. Corbett 2000 criticizes Cage through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, while Crooks 2011 examines a close reading of Cage’s interactions with Coomaraswamy’s writings, offering along the way a more nuanced and developed discussion of Cage’s Orientalism, again with reference to Said. Reidy 2010 addresses Cage’s relationship to Joseph Campbell and his employment of various myth narratives to establish his post-1950 artistic persona.

Bernstein, David W. “‘In Order to Thicken the Plot’: Toward a Critical Reception of Cage’s Music.” In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 7–40. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001a.
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Referring to Charles Jencks’s formulation of postmodernism as “double-coding”—whereby postmodernism implies a complex interaction with modernism—Bernstein examines Cage’s renewal of avant-garde aesthetics as an act in harmony with the modernist project since the Enlightenment. Likewise, discussions of a number of early works reinforce Cage’s dependence upon and imaginative rethinking of techniques of musical modernism.
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Bernstein, David W. “Techniques of Appropriation in the Music of John Cage.” Contemporary Music Review 20.4 (2001b): 71–90.
DOI: 10.1080/07494460100640301 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Bernstein traces Cage’s appropriation of past music in various works, including Cheap Imitation (1969), Song Books (1970), Apartment House 1776 (1976), and the Europeras series (1987–1991). He argues that such appropriation is not ironic (as in one current of postmodernism), but is rather a means to create new models of subjectivity, bringing about a return to writing “expressive” music.
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Brett, Philip. “Cage, John (1912–1992).” In Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia. Edited by George Haggerty, 160–162. New York: Garland, 2002.
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This short encyclopedia entry configures many of Cage’s ideas in the context of his sexuality; Brett wonders, for instance, if his interest in chance originated in the cruising activities of his youth. Brett rightly notes the preliminary status of work on Cage’s sexuality, calling for a more thorough investigation of its cultural implications. See also Jones 1993, cited under Aesthetics, and Katz 2001, cited under Social and Political Concerns.
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Corbett, John. “Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 163–186. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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Drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Corbett considers a wide range of composers whose work might be viewed as appropriating the Asian cultural Other in a colonializing and essentializing manner. Corbett claims that Cage’s music exemplifies “conceptual Orientalism”; regarding Ryoanji, he maintains that Cage’s compositional approach makes its Orientalist orientation opaque but no less problematic.
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Crooks, Edward James. “John Cage’s Entanglement with the Ideas of Coomaraswamy.” PhD thesis, University of York, 2011.
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This dissertation explores Cage’s reception of the ideas of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Joseph Campbell as he forged his own aesthetic identity in the late 1940s. Attention to the conservative ideologies of Coomaraswamy and Campbell helps to emphasize the incongruity between Cage and his models. The concluding chapter (pp. 245–285) employs Said’s theories of Orientalism to critique Cage’s appropriation of Asian ideas.
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Kotz, Liz. “Cagean Structures.” In The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art. Edited by Julia Robinson, 118–135. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009.
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Kotz characterizes Cage’s project from 1938 to 1952 as an unsystematic series of fragments, even crises, and reemphasizes its fundamentally radical stance. Examples include Williams Mix (1952), where Cage’s painstaking attempts to measure precisely were frustrated by circumstances beyond his control.
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Morris, Robert. “Cage Contemplating/Contemplating Cage.” In The Whistling Blackbird: Essays and Talks on New Music. By Robert Morris, 3–26. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010.
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Originally published in 2000, this essay synthesizes quotations from Cage with criticism and Morris’s own observations on Buddhism and his compositional relationship with Cage’s ideas. The essay is arrayed in two columns, exemplifying different degrees of connections between the two and encouraging a variety of reading strategies that also reflect some of Morris’s own music.
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Reidy, Brent. “Our Memory of What Happened Is Not What Happened: John Cage and Myth.” American Music 28.2 (Summer 2010): 211–227.
DOI: 10.5406/americanmusic.28.2.0211 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Contextualizing two of Cage’s most famous reminiscences (Schoenberg’s pronouncement of him as an inventor and his experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard) with respect to Joseph Campbell’s work on myth and recent research on metaphor, Reidy claims that Cage reception benefits from retaining these reminiscences as a mythological understanding of Cage’s legacy operating alongside the factual account.
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Williams, Alastair. “Cage and Postmodernism.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Edited by David Nicholls, 227–241. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Characterizing postmodernism as “an ensemble of discourses that is not only internally diverse but also contradictory in its relationship to modernism” (p. 227), Williams argues that Cage participates in and helped form these discourses. His discussion situates pieces from the 1930s through the 1990s with respect to construction, discourses, multimedia, and institutions, concluding that Cage’s work inhabits a singular space between modernity and postmodernity.
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Art

At present, there is no art-historical treatment of Cage’s visual work; the available scholarship largely takes the form of surveys. Brown 2000 and Lewallen 2001 discuss his work in printmaking; Kass 2011, watercolors; Herzogenrath 2002, installations; and Lohner 2001, film. Kass and Pike 2011 moves toward critical reaction to the works themselves. No studies offer a significant critical consideration of Cage’s contemporaries, or of his position with respect to the history of visual art generally.

Brown, Kathan. John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind. San Francisco: Crown Point, 2000.
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Brown, the founder and director of Crown Point Press, surveys Cage’s visual art from 1969 to 1992 (HV2). Contains color plates of many works, including all thirty-eight prints of Déreau (1982), as well as detailed documentation of compositional process employed for Changes and Disappearances (1979–1982) and Déreau. Nicholls 2002 (cited under Collections of Essays) includes an essay adapted from this monograph.
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Herzogenrath, Wulf. “John Cage: An Artist Who Accepts Life.” In Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves. Edited by Wulf Herzogenrath and Andreas Kreul, 2–23. Tacoma, WA: Museum of Glass, 2002.
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Largely an introduction to Cage’s aesthetic ideas, with contextual references to artists or art movements with which he can usefully be connected, the essay is important for its documentation of the museum exhibits Cage organized at the end of his life, which Herzogenrath sees as revolutionary in the fine arts.
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Kass, Ray. “Diaries and Notes: John Cage at the Mountain Lake Workshop.” In The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors. Edited by Ray Kass, 40–85. Roanoke, VA: Taubman Museum of Art, 2011.
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This essay offers fascinating documentation of the watercolors Cage made during his visits to the Mountain Lake Workshop. It includes a full description of the steps taken in the compositional process, the materials used, the interactions between choice and chance operations, and Cage’s own thoughts about technical aspects of the work.
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Kass, Ray, and Jerrie Pike. “John Cage: The Watercolors in Context.” In The Sight of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors. Edited by Ray Kass, 10–39. Roanoke, VA: Taubman Museum of Art, 2011.
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This wide-ranging essay introduces Cage’s visual works through a summary of his musical background and achievements, traces the purely graphic character of Cage’s musical notation, and surveys the visual works themselves. This survey occasionally goes beyond mere description of the techniques he employs, and concludes with a useful discussion of Zen influences in the content and Cage’s own technique.
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Lewallen, Constance. “Cage and the Structure of Chance.” In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 234–243. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226044873.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Describes the structure of chance operations used to complete Cage’s prints and paintings, with particular emphasis on Ryoku (1985), 75 Stones (1989), The Missing Stone (1989), and River Rocks and Smoke (1990).
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Lohner, Henning. “The Making of Cage’s One¹¹.” In Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. Edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, 260–297. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226044873.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Often including Cage’s own words, this essay documents the planning, fund-raising, and creation of One¹¹ (1992), a 90-minute film of an empty studio and its available light in which all aspects of the production, filming, and subsequent editing are determined through chance operations. Lohner also includes reminiscences of Cage’s conversations with himself and others.
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Aesthetics

Although Cage frequently criticized the practice of aesthetics, his own writings and art offer novel and significant contributions to current understanding of the field. Patterson 2002 demonstrates that Cage’s reception of Ananda Coomaraswamy was important to his own developing aesthetic, but that many of the details actually challenged Coomaraswamy’s precepts. Joseph 2002 examines the early journal transition as an important source for Cage’s aesthetics, while Jones 1993 and Bernstein 2002 consider his relationship with the abstract expressionists. Along with Kim 2008, these two works usefully extend the discussion to experiences of subjectivity in Cage’s practice and work, a fruitful area for future work.

Bernstein, David W. “John Cage and the ‘Aesthetic of Indifference.’” In The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts. Edited by Steven Johnson, 113–133. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Some of Cage’s 1940s works have affinities with the expressive volatility of the abstract expressionists, while Moira Roth and others have described later ones as expressing an “aesthetic of indifference.” Bernstein argues that Cage’s free interpenetration of autonomous sounds models social change that can heal society, as did the abstract expressionists. Subjectivity is never far from the surface in Cage’s later music.
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Jones, Caroline A. “Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego.” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 628–665.
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Jones argues that Cage’s aesthetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s critique the hypermasculine, self-centered subjectivity of abstract expressionist artists and their search for a natural sublime. Silence offers a powerful metaphor for a mobile subjectivity of difference that Jones suggests is allied with a homosexual aesthetic.
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Joseph, Branden W. “‘A Therapeutic Value for City Dwellers’: The Development of John Cage’s Early Avant-Garde Aesthetic Position.” In John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Edited by David W. Patterson, 135–175. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Joseph traces influences on Cage from various avant-garde sources, in particular the journal transition. Eugene Jolas, one of transition’s editors, advocated a modernist project that demolished the reliance on timeworn materials in order to create a new, organic art that would unite humanity while respecting the autonomy of the individual. Cage’s Prepared Piano Concerto represents a milestone in the realization of these ideas.
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Kim, Rebecca Y. “In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2008.
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Examines the theory and practice of indeterminacy as a complex dialogue between American and European traditions. Kim widens the inquiry beyond Cage to include discussions of Cage’s contemporaries, European colleagues, and successors. In the final chapter, Kim charts Cage’s return to the vocal medium in Song Books (1970), triggering a “modified subjectivity” that restores the communicative potential of vocal music (pp. 318–410).
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Patterson, David W. “The Picture That Is Not in the Colors: Cage, Coomaraswamy, and the Impact of India.” In John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention, 1933–1950. Edited by David W. Patterson, 177–215. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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Revision of a chapter from Patterson 1996 (cited under Chronology), presenting the first detailed investigation into the aesthetic writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy and their impact on Cage’s developing aesthetic. Through a close reading of both figures, Patterson demonstrates the points of both agreement and disagreement between them, and reveals that some of Cage’s writings are direct responses to Coomaraswamy’s criticism of modern art.
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John Cage
by
Rob Haskins
LAST MODIFIED: 29 April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0027

Introduction

General Overviews

Cage’s Writings

Books

Essays and Lectures

Text Compositions

Interviews

Exhibition Catalogues

Sources and Bibliography

Chronology

Collections of Essays

Music

Specific Works, 1933–1960

Specific Works, 1961–1975

Specific Works, 1976–1992

Performance Practice

Writings and Text Compositions

Social and Political Concerns

Critical Appraisal

Reception

Miscellaneous Criticism

Art

Aesthetics

Music

Article

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section John Cage

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Other Subject Areas

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John Cage byRob HaskinsLAST MODIFIED: 29 April 2015DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0027

Introduction

General Overviews

Cage’s Writings

Books

Essays and Lectures

Text Compositions

Interviews

Exhibition Catalogues

Sources and Bibliography

Chronology

Collections of Essays

Music

Specific Works, 1933–1960

Specific Works, 1961–1975

Specific Works, 1976–1992

Performance Practice

Writings and Text Compositions

Social and Political Concerns

Critical Appraisal

Reception

Miscellaneous Criticism

Art

Aesthetics

Music

Article

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

John Cage
by
Rob Haskins
LAST MODIFIED: 29 April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199757824-0027