Sound Pages: John Cage’s Publications

Divided into four sections, respectively, books, scores, records and scattered documents, “Sound Pages. John Cage’s Publications”, (the book that accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Museo Internazionale della Musica in Bologna) systematises an important part of the work of John Cage, addressing the various productions of which the American composer was an author, often overturning the traditional component parts and structures.Cage raised the question of making sound something perceptible to the eye: texts, books and music scores, then, become fully visual entities in which the artist tries to juxtapose syntactical links to a new location of characters on the surface of the sheet according to purely visual rules and criteria .Edited by Giorgio Maffei and Fabio Carboni, Sound Pages is a publishing project that shows how the complexity of John Cage’s thought, but also its disarming simplicity, added “beauty” to the printed page to prevent sound space from dissipating at the moment the sound is interrupted and fixing in time its translation into visual space.