BEAUTIFUL NOISE

The story of a composer and performer who didn’t just push musical envelopes…he shredded them.

Rogers presents the bad boy of 20th-century art music as an inveterate experimenter who was, from childhood on, hyperaware of the ambient urban sounds all around him and dedicated himself to finding new ways to make and use them. In this he might sound a lot like Charles Ives in Mordecai Gerstein’s What Charlie Heard (2002), but Cage ventured much further than Ives into weirdness—by tucking random junk into piano strings, for instance. Whether accidentally setting himself on fire, as he did once (commenting “Isn’t that marvelous?”), writing music that resulted in alienated audiences walking out midway through a performance, or offering a piece consisting entirely of over four and a half minutes of silence, he “was serious,” the author argues, “about asking people to accept new ideas, recognize music in everyday life, and be still enough to hear sounds in silence.” Na incorporates a self-developed vocabulary of dots, squiggles, and slashing lines, assembled in a labeled glossary at the end, into evocatively vivid and jumbled scenes of city streets, explosions of color creeping into drably hued rooms, and images of concert halls filled with racially diverse, stunned-looking audiences and musicians. Young readers may not be attracted to Cage’s music but will come away with a strong sense of his liberating open-mindedness. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Tantalizing glimpses of a composer who challenged the very definition of music.