Sheet music $33.00

Original

John Cage and the Music of Always.

Translation

John Cage and the Music of Always.

Original

John Cage and the Music of Always composed by Paul Hillier. Book. Published by Edition Samfundet. PE.ED49. ISBN 87-90056-89-2. I began these mesostics a day or so after reading that John Cage had died. I soon decided that there should be seventy-nine of them - one for each year of his life. Just as John Cage had culled readings from the work of several writers, Thoreau and Joyce most prominent among them, I wanted in my turn to construct a little tribute by exploring various writings of and about Cage himself, and a handful of other writers whom I felt he would have enjoyed experiencing in this way. Among these additional source texts are The Cloud of Unknowing. anonymous 14th-century English. Heraclitus fragments. William Billings. his introduction to his books of psalmody. , the composer from the time of the American Revolution, whose music Cage used for his Hymns and Variations. Russolo - The Art of Noise. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. and the I Ching. For those new to the idea, a mesostic is like an acrostic, but with the subject or theme word the middle instead of down the edge. Cage established special rules for working through a text to create a sequence of words, so that the selection would be limited and guided by change rather than taste. In effect these sequences form a chain of short poems. Usually the theme word was the name of someone - very often the writer of the text itself. In this case, it is of course John Cage. Gradually I built up a stock of mesostics from which I selected those that appealed to me - sometimes patching together interesting portions from two failed mesostics to form a new one. I was thus rather freer in my approach than Cage normally was. Apart from the possibility of interesting results, I found this to be a fascinating way of approaching any text which I already esteemed, and of experiencing it afresh, finding not only new or hidden meanings, gut a kind of hand-made crystallization of the text itself. The Music of Always" was a fragment gleaned from this same process too good to pass up. Paul Hillier. 79 mesostics re and not re John Cage.

Translation

John Cage and the Music of Always composed by Paul Hillier. Book. Published by Edition Samfundet. PE.ED49. ISBN 87-90056-89-2. I began these mesostics a day or so after reading that John Cage had died. I soon decided that there should be seventy-nine of them - one for each year of his life. Just as John Cage had culled readings from the work of several writers, Thoreau and Joyce most prominent among them, I wanted in my turn to construct a little tribute by exploring various writings of and about Cage himself, and a handful of other writers whom I felt he would have enjoyed experiencing in this way. Among these additional source texts are The Cloud of Unknowing. anonymous 14th-century English. Heraclitus fragments. William Billings. his introduction to his books of psalmody. , the composer from the time of the American Revolution, whose music Cage used for his Hymns and Variations. Russolo - The Art of Noise. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. and the I Ching. For those new to the idea, a mesostic is like an acrostic, but with the subject or theme word the middle instead of down the edge. Cage established special rules for working through a text to create a sequence of words, so that the selection would be limited and guided by change rather than taste. In effect these sequences form a chain of short poems. Usually the theme word was the name of someone - very often the writer of the text itself. In this case, it is of course John Cage. Gradually I built up a stock of mesostics from which I selected those that appealed to me - sometimes patching together interesting portions from two failed mesostics to form a new one. I was thus rather freer in my approach than Cage normally was. Apart from the possibility of interesting results, I found this to be a fascinating way of approaching any text which I already esteemed, and of experiencing it afresh, finding not only new or hidden meanings, gut a kind of hand-made crystallization of the text itself. The Music of Always" was a fragment gleaned from this same process too good to pass up. Paul Hillier. 79 mesostics re and not re John Cage.