MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music by John Cage, Joan Retallack

Cage, John, in conversation with Joan Retallack. MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

A great value of Joan Retallack’s interviews with John Cage, MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words * Art * Music, recorded just before the musician’s death in 1992, is Cage’s clarification of the extent to which chance operations, whether at the moment of composition, performance or audition, do not necessarily eliminate craft and quality. Speaking of the beautiful double bass playing in one performance of his Ryoanji, he tells of the many musicians faced with the freedom his notation and directions provide: “Where I give them a little freedom, they take more, and so on, until the piece is quite out of reach of my original work” (278). In another instance, he speaks of having attended a concert of his work performed by a pianist who reportedly said that he preferred playing Liszt; when the concert ended, Cage said, “We’d better go. I’m afraid I will say something very bad if I have to talk to him” (203n).