Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

["Brooks, William F" <>]

Before Cage, there was Charles Ives. And before him, there were radicals like Johannes Gutenberg. The struggle over ownership of words, of creative acts, of ideas . . . is constant and unchanging. At the present moment, it is also sinister.

Hold the line. NO! Erase the line. “Nothing was lost when everything was given away."

William Brooks

Emeritus Professor of Music 
University of Illinois
Urbana, IL 61801
United States
(+1-217-417-4165)

William Brooks
Senior Research Fellow and Series Editor
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium


Take care of things. And people. 

On Dec 1, 2023, at 22:24, David Bellows <> wrote:

Hi John,

> This corroborates a lot of my own thinking on the topic of the commercialisation of the Cage brand and how this sits distinctly from his personal belief system. I'll need to think on this some more but this is really food for thought. 

I don't know if our interests in this particular subject are perfectly aligned but it is something I think about quite often. Let me quote the relevant parts from the letter:

"4. The free publication (or distribution) of music by the Public Libraries of this country. "... If it could be made to work it would provide a useful means for the advance of musical life that would continue. I am willing, that is, to give free of charge my music to the Public Libraries. I would give up the question of profit from it, only collecting (if I remain a member of ASCAP) royalties from its performance."

This really feels like a proto-Creative Commons type of idea but with libraries instead of the internet (which obviously didn't exist yet). Does it feel that way to others? Of course I understand that he needed financial stability and at this point in his life he was getting up there in years (I'm 54 and feel that pressure pretty intensely) so I'm not criticizing his decisions at all. It just seems like maybe he would have wanted a different approach if the infrastructure had been in place for it.

Dave Bellows

On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 2:27 PM John Hails <> wrote:

This topic really interests me because of my interest in the gulf between Cage as human being, and Cage as media personality; between Cage as Composer, and Cage as musician. Or what you might term "Cage as notation".

This corroborates a lot of my own thinking on the topic of the commercialisation of the Cage brand and how this sits distinctly from his personal belief system. I'll need to think on this some more but this is really food for thought. 

J

On Thu, 30 Nov 2023, 21:57 Rod Stasick, <> wrote:

Hiya folks,

Inside a copy of “A Year From Monday” that once belonged to John Edwards,

former head of the American section of the Music Division of the NY Public Library,

there is a typed and signed letter by Cage from 1959. I think I’ve tried to show

attachments in emails before, but they were always rejected, so I uploaded pix 

to my website this time instead, so I could share them with you (for a limited time):

https://stasick.org/113001.jpg

https://stasick.org/113002.jpg

happy reading,

R

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