Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

A biography of major importance: the first comprehensive life of John Cage—musician, inventor, dance composer, poet, and central figure of the postwar avant-garde—who died in 1992 at the age of eighty.

Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman follows Cage from his California childhood—his father was a successful inventor—through his vision-expanding stay in Paris in 1930–31 and his truncated studies with Arnold Schoenberg. We see his early experiments with sound and instruments, and we watch as he develops his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. We learn of his many friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers; of his early marriage; and of his female and male lovers and his long relationship with Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate on groundbreaking performance pieces that continue to be influential in the worlds of both music and dance.

Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the entire archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs and facsimiles of musical scores, Silverman gives us a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

Recordings from Mode Records

Eleven of the discussions of works by John Cage in the book contain bracketed inserts headed TRACK 1, TRACK 2, etc. They refer to recordings of the works, extracts of which can be heard below. All the tracks come from recordings produced by Mode Records. A list of the Mode album numbers and of the performers can be found at the end of the biography.

Excerpts courtesy of Mode Records.

1. Bacchanale (1940), Mode 180/81

2. Sonatas I – III (1946-1948), Mode 50

3. Music of Changes (1951), Mode 147

4. Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), Mode 57

5. Cartridge Music (1960), Mode 24

6. Series re Morris Graves (1973), Mode 84/85

7. Freeman Etudes I – II (1977-1980), Mode 32

8. Apartment House 1776 (1976), Mode 41

9. Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), Mode 28/29

10. Europera 3 (1990), Mode 38/39

Performed by the Long Beach Opera. Audio

11. Two6 (1992), Mode 100

About the Author

Born and raised in Manhattan, Kenneth Silverman is Professor Emeritus of English at New York University. His other books include A Cultural History of the American Revolution, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss, and Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F.B. Morse. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America, and the Christopher Literary Award of the Society of American Magicians.

Photo © 2003 Nancy Crampton