CAGE, John. Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.1961.
4to. Original publishers’ black cloth with facsimile Cage signature in blind to front board and orange title lettering to spine; black price clipped dust wrapper with a series of black and white photographs to rear panel; endpapers with musical score design lifted from a part of Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra for Elaine de Kooning, pp. [xiv], 3-276, bumping to head and tail of spine and corners, rubbed with a few minor abrasions to front panel of dust wrapper and slight closed tear to head of dust wrapper spine with scuffing to tail; otherwise very good.
First edition
“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”
John Cage (1912-1992) is heralded as one of the expert authorities of the Post-War Avant-garde, a theorist (often hailed prophet) who described music in a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music as, "an affirmation of life — not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living". This vital collection brings together his essential views on alternative music, including his theories on the merit of ambient noise and the use of electronic sound.
Included is the famous Lecture on Nothing in which he subtly uses his relationship with Zen Buddhism to form a musical/textual score. By separating his words into four divided columns, 4 "measures" per line are created which can be experienced as either silence or text, thus mimicking his own method of experimental composition.
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