John Cage. By Rob Haskins
Mark Delaere · Music and Letters · 2013
In addition to documentary studies, three main areas of research can be distinguished more or less successively in John Cage scholarship. Philosophical approaches range from esoteric speculations to profound reflections on Cage’s reconceptualization of music. Music analytical publications based on sketch studies offer information on how compositions are made (‘poetics’), the two most comprehensive contributions being James Pritchett’s The Music of John Cage (Cambridge, 1993) and Paul van Emmerik’s ‘Thema en variaties: Systematische tendensen in de compositietechnieken van John Cage’ (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 1996). Recently, music analytical studies based on the perceivable outcome of the composer’s actions have appeared (‘aesthetics’), for instance Benedict Weisser’s ‘ … The Whole Paper Would Potentially Be Sound: Time-Brackets and the Number Pieces (1981–92)’, Perspectives of New Music, 41/2 (2003), 176–225; and Rob Haskins’s ‘An Anarchic Society of Sounds’: The Number Pieces of John Cage’ (PhD diss., University of Rochester/Eastman School of Music, 2004).