M

Writings, 1967-72

By: John Cage

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Paperback | 27 October 2000

At a Glance

Paperback
217 Pages

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 18.2 x 1.9

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Cage subjected the 26 letters of the alphabet to the I-Ching and came up with the letter "M," as the title for his latest writings which follow Mao Tse-tung's dictum: "It is right to rebel." Cage rebels through a musical, non-syntactical, freely-associative autobiographical cascade of words that express - indeed, celebrate - the anarchic self as they gracefully flow down the center of the printed page in over 700 different type faces and sizes. They cover the years 1962-72, and are interspersed with quotations from other soul-revolutionaries, e.g., Thoreau, Norman O. Brown, Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller - the latter being Cage's other chief influence along with Mao. As an anarchic composer, Cage believes in "music that requires no rehearsal," in short, a revolutionary music "made by everyone. . . based on noise, on noise's lawlessness." By the same token, he believes that words, like sounds, should emerge free of rigid relations or pre-fixed rules. Hence his attempt to demilitarize language through his inventive form, mesostics. The result can be intellectually simplistic, politically naive, ecologically obvious, philosophically self-contradictory to the point of the ridiculous, but it is always quintessentially Cage, for Cage is as always sui generis. (Kirkus Reviews)

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