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John Cage: Composed in America. Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-22666056-7 (cloth); ISBN 0-226-66057-5 (pbk.). Pp. x, 286. $45.00 (cloth), $16.95 (pbk.).
In the last two decades, a succession of compilation volumes on the subject of John Cage has appeared in print. The earliest of these typically assumed the form of the popular tribute volume, in which essayists were predominantly friends and colleagues. (See, for example, A John Cage Reader [New York: C. F. Peters, 1982], or John Cage at Seventy-Five [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1989].) These publications amply documented Cage's status as idol to succeeding generations of artists, bearing witness to the fierce admiration held for him in certain quarters of the artistic world. However, in actuality, their contents often proved to be not so much essays about Cage as they were highly subjective responses to him; further, these responses accepted at face value Cage's own recollections of his historical and aesthetic development, recollections that today we recognize as faulty in numerous instances, The nature of these early publications poignantly reflected the condition of the musical community at large at the time, a community that, whether in its exaltation or vilification of Cage, seldom gathered enough reliable factual information to justify either such extreme position.
In that it comprises the first volume of essays on Cage written by members of the scholarly community, the recent collection edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman is groundbreaking. As the editors themselves qualify from the outset in their introductory essay the collection is "less a book about Cage the performer-composer or Cage the poet than it is about Cage the thinker who, 'beginning with ideas,' worked and lived his entire life in their constant and intimate presence" (p. 3). The ten essays that follow are based on presentations delivered during a week-long Cage Festival at Stanford University in January of 1992, each contributed by...