Music I: to the late 1940s

Bernstein, David W.; Nicholls, David

doi:10.1017/ccol9780521783484.005

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The early career of John Cage followed a fascinating arc, beginning with a desire to find new sounds, followed by captivation with the very antithesis of sound (silence), which in turn fed into a near complete relinquishment of compositional control in favour of chance and indeterminacy. Cage's search for new sounds was exemplified by his Sonatas and Interludes of 1946-48 (age 34-36), a work for prepared piano widely acknowledged as the finest composition of his early period (Pritchett, 1993;Bernstein, 2002;Nicholls, 2007). This work is highly organised not only in terms of the sequence of pieces within it but also in its sophisticated proportional structures-a means of compositional organisation that Cage often employed, beginning with 1939's First Construction (in Metal).…”

Section: Leading Up To 1952mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age 40, Year of the ‘Signature Work’: The Cases of Cage, Reich and Adams

Fyr

2017

MJM

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The 'signature works' of John Cage, Steve Reich and John Adams-4'33", Music for Eighteen Musicians and Nixon in China, respectively-are widely considered landmarks in recent American music and also parallel one another in a fascinating way, as the completion of each signature work dates from the year its composer turned forty. This article investigates the role of each signature work in its composer's stylistic development, studies the factors that led to the works' creation, discusses what made these works so innovative, and examines common threads among the three composers' career arcs in order to explore how their fortieth years became so pivotal in the context of their overall output. Is this agerelated correspondence just an extraordinary coincidence or might it suggest broader correlations? Studies on age and creative achievement by psychologist Dean K. Simonton and others suggest that such correlations in fact exist and that the age of forty may be particularly significant, thus corroborating the significance of the intriguing age-related parallels among the careers of Cage, Reich and Adams.

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Section: Leading Up To 1952mentioning

confidence: 99%