Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Thomas Moore <>]

Title: Re: [silence] Re: The first meeting of the Satie society

Ah, that's good to know! I stand corrected. Still, too bad that the book/box publication of this interesting work has really not been made available.

TM

On 11/17/10 12:08 PM, "Nelson Rivera Rosario" <> wrote:

> However, this piece, with the prints and text and a broken glass box, was exhibited sometime during the late 80's at a NYC art gallery; the project was completed.
>
> 2010/11/17 Thomas Moore <>
> > On 11/17/10 11:16 AM, "Stefano Pocci" < <http://> > wrote:
> >
> > > Hi there, I've recently purchased MUSICAGE, the conversations between 
> > > Joan Retallack and John Cage, and I red of the transparent book on Satie 
> > > that Cage had in mind. A quick google search hasn't showed up any 
> > > particular result; it seems to me a multi-media piece that was 
> > > "entrapped" in a cd frame already and performed live too but it should 
> > > also, according to Cage's words, find a book-ish form. Could anybody 
> > > please tell me something about it? Will it be ever be published? It 
> > > "sounds" great!:-)
> >
> > The First Meeting of the Satie Society was available via the Art Com Electronic Network, hosted on The WELL (The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a bulletin board based in San Francisco, for a while back in the 1980s (this was way before the WWW existed, obviously) as a group of text files. If I remember correctly, John had hoped to make this version of the text broadly available to the public. (Somewhere I have all of these in both digital and print form, but I think they have long since disappeared from The WELL.)
> >
> > At the same time, a more lavish presentation was in the works, to be published by Limited Editions Club, organized by Benjamin Schiff, and (and here my memory is a little hazy) was supposed to be a box that would contain original artwork (i.e., numbered prints) by Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Bob Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt and John himself. The last I talked with John about it, if I'm remembering correctly, he said it was seeming impossible to get all the artists (there were others too) to get all the material together at the right time (Cy Twombly in particular I think). I can't remember the price Benjamin told me it would sell for, but it would have been out of the reach of casual readers -- I have some correspondence from him somewhere.
> >
> > André Chaudron's website says there is an item of this name available on a rental basis from Peters:
> > http://www.johncage.info/workscage/satiesociety.html
> > I'm not familiar with John's ideas on this as a performance piece, but all his other poetic works were certainly intended to be performed.
> >
> > André's page makes mention of a book published by Osiris Press in 1985, but searches for this don't seem to turn up anything available, although there seems to be something at the the NYPL dated c1994:
> > http://bit.ly/c7jB9l
> > Marc Thorman's interesting article, "John Cage's 'Letters to Erik Satie'", published in American Music in 2006 also references the Osiris Press publication, so it seems to exist somewhere. For those of you with access to JSTOR, Thorman's article is here:
> > http://www.jstor.org/stable/25046005
> > (Incidental note -- the artist Dove Bradshaw, a close friend of John, was commissioned by Osiris in the early 1990s to do some work for them.) 
> >
> > There are other materials related to the Satie Society at the NYPL as well:
> > http://bit.ly/aHE7V7
> >
> > So unfortunately this seems to be a project that never reached completion.
> >
> > Probably Andrew Culver, who was working for John at the time, and whose software John used to develop the Satie texts, or Laura Kuhn at the Cage Trust could provide more details.
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Tom Moore

-- 

Thomas Moore
Director, Arts Management
UMBC
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
410-455-3370