Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[John McDonough <>]

Cage said that "With Joyce, we are entering a world that is more unfamiliar." I think this unfamiliarity inherit in Finnegans Wake coincides with Cage's wanting to be surprised by his own compositions, rather than hearing them in his head before they were written or performed.

Plus, Cage really enjoyed 2 types of compositions: those with too little notes and those with too many notes. If any book could be said to contain too many words, it would be Finnegans Wake.

On Apr 14, 2012, at 2:53 PM, Jared Steward wrote:

Hi everyone,

I just read this from Richard Kostelanetz's John Cage. In the first interview of the book "Conversation with John Cage", Kostelanetz said, "He [Norman Brown] seemed to be entering the world of Finnegans Wake, where everything is a symbol for something else." This statement intrigues me. I've not (yet!) read Finnegans Wake, but it seems funny to me that Cage so much liked this book when he was not interested in having his compositions be symbolic of anything else. As he said often, he wanted sounds be heard simply as sounds, and not having any other meaning. Since Cage cataloged over 2000 different sounds mentioned in FW, I suppose that was part of what he liked about the book along with the writing technique that Joyce used. Do any of you have any thoughts on this?

Jared Steward

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