‘A Quiet Corner Where We Can Talk’: Cage's Satie, 1948–1958

Perry, Jeffrey

doi:10.1080/07494467.2014.998415

Cited by 7 publications

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“…[1.7] By 1970 Cage had played and studied Satie's music for several decades. His idiosyncratic understanding of how Satie's music moved through time was central to his compositional practice and his understanding of rhythmic structure (Nyman 1973, Perry 2014. During the summer of 1948 he delivered the lecture "Defense of Satie" at Black Mountain College during a series of concerts that consisted primarily of him playing Satie's works on piano (Cage 1970a, 77-84).…”

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confidence: 99%

Cage’s Imitation Game: Cheap Imitation and Song Books through the sketches

Perry

2021

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The theme of John Cage’s Song Books (1970), according to Cage, is contained in the statement “We connect Satie with Thoreau” (".fn_cite($cage_1970).", 1). Previous studies of Cage’s Song Books have not asked what I feel to be obvious questions: how, precisely, does Cage connect Satie with Thoreau? To what end? And how does Cage connect to Satie and Thoreau (and to the other sources from which he borrows)? I make use of Cage’s sketch materials to seek answers. I examine three of the Solos for Voice from Song Books that make use of the cheap-imitation procedure that Cage had devised for his work of that name in 1969. Because Song Books is a work for vocalists while Cheap Imitation is a work for solo piano, Cage needed to apply analogous processes of textual “imitation” and mixture to the words of Thoreau to accompany the cheap imitations of the music of Satie. This article explores the persistence of compositional choice in Song Books as revealed by the sketches, in so doing exploring themes of duality in Cage’s pursuit of “poetry as I need it” in the music of Erik Satie, the words of Henry David Thoreau, and in the imitation game that he devises to connect them with one another.

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confidence: 99%