A House Full of Music: Strategies in Music and Art

Famously described by Schönberg as “not a composer, but an inventor–of genius,” John Cage (1912-1992) was one of the great strategists and pioneers of twentieth-century music and art. A House Full of Music celebrates Cage’s one-hundredth birthday by examining 12 fundamental strategies through which art and music have informed each other: recording, collage, silence, destruction, calculation, coincidence, feeling, thought, belief, furnishing, repetition and playing. Starting with such key figures as Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, this book conjoins essays by art and music theorists with works by artists, musicians and composers. This landmark publication on a century-long “music circus” features everyone from Arnold Schönberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Carsten Nicolai and Robert Filliou to Laurie Anderson, Anri Sala, Einstürzende Neubauten, Frank Zappa and many others.