The Year of John Cage

Abstract

The publication of PAJ 102 coincides with the worldwide celebrations of John Cage’s birth on September 12, a century ago. We highlight his extraordinary legacy in a special section of the journal that brings together Claire MacDonald’s fascinating account of Cage’s influence in England, and the transatlantic exchanges at the experimental school Dartington Hall (Devon), among European, Asian, and American artists and thinkers. Her essay reveals the numerous groups of artists, patrons, intellectuals, and teachers drawn from the east and west coats of the U.S. and from abroad, who laid the foundation for the making of modernity in the American arts in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his commentary on the world of Cage exquisitely detailed in the new biography by Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, George Quasha brings his own poetic gifts and understanding of the spiritual in revealing Larson’s knowing exploration of Cage’s rootedness in Buddhist principles. Her book is both an historical document and a manual for living, and in every sense a profound opening to the life and mind of Cage. I have also included in the section my own essay “The Mus/ecology of John Cage,” written shortly after his death, since it appears in the new reprint of my Ecologies of Theater (1996) as well as being timely in today’s attention to biopolitics, one of the underlying links in Cage’s work well before the concept was formulated in contemporary terms.