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Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage's career. As the commercially dominant media form in the twentieth century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. Cage's quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflect the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. This volume examines key moments in Cage's career where cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. The examples point to moments of rupture within Cage's own consideration of the musical artwork, pointing to newfound collision points that have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage's notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.
List of contents
- Introduction: Audiovisual(ity/ology)
- Chapter 1: The Spirit inside Each Object: Oskar Fischinger, Sound Phonography, and the "Inner Eye"
- Chapter 2: "Dreams that Money Can Buy": Trance, Myth, and Expression, 1941-1948.
- Chapter 3: Losing the Ground: Chance, Transparency and Cinematic Space, 1948-1958
- Chapter 4: Cinema Delimina: Post-Cagean Aesthetics, Medium-Specificity, and Expanded Cinema
- Conclusion: "Through the Looking Glass": Poetics and Chance in John Cage's One
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Richard Brown earned a PhD in musicology from the University of Southern California. He has published articles on John Cage, experimental music, sound art, film music and copyright in The Journal of the Society for American Music, Contemporary Music Review, Leonardo, and American Music Review.
Summary
Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage's interactions and collaborations with avant-garde filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience on Cage's career. The examples chosen highlight moments of rupture within Cage's notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.
Additional text
Richard Brown's meticulously researched and beautifully written book reveals that Cage's collaborations with experimental filmmakers transformed his aesthetics and compositional style. It presents a brilliant new interdisciplinary perspective on Cage's music of great interest to both Cage scholars and a broader audience of readers interested in crucial cultural changes during the twentieth-century.
Report
"This history asks us to re-engage with Cage's ideas about listening and perception through the lens of moving-image culture, while also encouraging us to re-read the history of experimental film from a sonic perspective. As a result, this is not just a book about Cage or avant-garde film. It's a book about the nature of collaborative creativity, the rise of audiovisual art and the emergence of new forms of intermedial culture in the Twentieth Century. Required reading for us all! Holly Rogers, author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art Music
