A House Full of Music

Before John Cage (1912-1992), there was hardly anyone as consistent as he was in questioning the boundaries of music and its connections to other fields of art and the everyday world. Along with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys, Cage is one of the greatest strategists and pioneers of twentieth-century music and art. Starting with these key figures, this publication examines twelve fundamental strategies of art and music since 1900: recording, collage, silence, destruction, calculation, coincidence, feeling, thought, belief, furnishing, repetition, and playing. Interdisciplinary essays by art and music theorists as well as exemplary works and original sources by artists, musicians, and composers are featured alongside visual documentation, showing the impressive diversity of parallel and overlapping activities between music and art from Laurie Anderson and Robert Filliou to Anri Sala and Iannis Xenakis.