Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Rob Haskins <>]

My take is that most of the people with his political views don't know or care who John Cage is, and those who do have a great number of stunning writings about him. Keep in mind, too, that Cage was a prolific writer and speaker—his words are an important and often readily understood aspect of his work.

Warm greetings.

On Sun, May 19, 2024 at 1:02 PM Ralph Lichtensteiger <> wrote:

Dear all,

I just accidentally stumbled across this crazy and defamatory text about John Cage online.

The text is an excerpt from a book by author Tom Sora. He makes absurd and defamatory claims about John Cage's person and work in this book. Is the silence community known to this work?

Greetings from Germany

R. Lichtensteiger

[[ Cage's desire to abolish competence and excellence and even to ban the words they name is (also) due to resentment. A deep-lying envy is one of the reasons for his hatred of culture. His easy solidarity with the underdogs is not as altruistic as it seems at first glance. Cage has certainly not thought too much about the well-being of the disadvantaged - be it composers, students or other allegedly discriminated categories. He argued primarily from his own perspective, as a composer, because he considered himself an "underdog", a "discriminate" in the context of "old music".

Cage knew that the large audience definitely and completely rejected his art. He also knew with certainty that he was by no means one of the "big" composers and not even one of the less "big" ones, and, as we saw, he admitted that himself. His defiant sentence quoted in the previous chapter that he is "not a musician" - is basically a bitter insight. His rejection of "old music" was partly a consequence of this insight. That's why Cage has tried a "revaluation of values" in many ways. ]]

https://www.achgut.com/artikel/john_cage_und_der_neid_der_kulturkaempfer

--

Rob Haskins, DMA., PhD

Professor and Chair, Department of Music

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