Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Between May 1949 and August 1954 the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of remarkable letters which reflect on their own music and the music and culture of the time. This correspondence, together with a further letter from 1962 and various other relevant documents, have been edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and appear here for the first time completely in English. At the time Cage and Boulez were great friends and these amicable letters reflect their differing ideas on the course new music should take. While Boulez was thinking about forms of serialism, Cage was moving in the direction of ever greater compositional freedom and chance procedures. Professor Nattiez has written a full introduction to this collection of documents and the meticulous and detailed annotation of every letter makes this a volume of extraordinary value for our understanding of the development of both Cage and Boulez and the music of their time.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface to the English edition
• TranslatorG++s introduction
• Introduction: Cage/Boulez: a chapter in music history
• Correspondence
• Glossary of names

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This small but heavily annotated correspondence between French composer Pierre Boulez and recently deceased American composer John Cage contains letters dating from 1949 to 1954, as well as supplementary documents. The age difference between the two men is apparent, and the older Cage often assumes the role of teacher and mentor. The letters contain no striking personal revelations, but they record the activities and musical ideas of the composers, who at the time were moving in different directions. Often technical, the letters contain graphs and tables of sounds, durations, amplitudes, and more. The friendship between the composers later cooled, but these documents provide a historical record of the musical climate during the era of their relationship. Recommended for academic libraries.-- Debora Richey, California State Univ.-Fullerton Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

This book memorializes the moment in the early 1950s in which the two leading enfants terribles of composition sought to bridge the gap between American experimental music and the more traditional world of the European avant-garde. Boulez and Cage both believed in breaking with the past, and each was committed to thorough change. Cage, elder of the two, was established in New York but espoused the open attitudes of a Californian, while Boulez was at the forefront in Paris. Their letters detail an intense interchange and illuminate the differ~ences between the frankly eclectic Cage, who was then deepening his acquaintances with Zen Buddhism, dada, and abstract expressionism, and Boulez, who was immersing himself in his notions of mathematical control of his composition. Eventually, Boulez broke off the exchange, and each man, in his own way, went on to fame--Cage as father figure to the 1960s counterculture, Boulez as a conductor and a guru for younger European composers. ~--John Shreffler

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Composer John Milton Cage, Jr., is best known for his avant-garde music, including pieces such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) in which 12 radios are turned on intermittently. His 1943 premiere concert of percussion buzzers, pottery and scrap metal, all chosen for their potential sound.

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and studied music privately, becoming a teacher at the Chicago School of Design in 1941. Between 1944 and 1966, he was musical director at Merce Cunningham and Dance Co., and in 1949 he won a Guggenheim fellowship.

Cage wrote Virgil Thompson: His Life and Music (1959). His essays and lectures on music were collected into several books, including Silence: Selected Lectures and Writings (1961) and A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967).

030