John Cage

When the avant-gardist John Cage died, he was already the subject of many interviews, memoirs and discussions of his contribution to music, music theory and performance practice. This text includes a revisionist treatment of the way Cage himself has composed and been "composed" in America. A disciple of Duchamp and Schoenberg, Satie and Joyce, Cage created compositions that undercut some of these artists' central principles and then attributed his own compositional theories to their "tradition." Following the text of Cage's "Overpopulation and Art," delivered at Stanford shortly before his death, ten critics respond to the complexity and contradiction exhibited in his work. In keeping with Cage's own interdisciplinarity, the critics approach the work from a variety of disciplines: philosophy (Daniel Herwitz, Gerald L. Bruns), biography and cultural history (Thomas S. Hines), game and chaos theory (N. Katherine Hayles), music culture (Jann Pasler), opera history (Herbert Lindenberger), literary and art criticism (Marjorie Perloff), cultural poetics (Gordana P. Crnkovic, Charles Junkerman), and poetic practice (Joan Retallack).