ABSTRACT
Major anthologies of English poetry and drama appeared, and a complete Shakespeare with great actors such as John Gielgud, Claire Bloom, and Richard Burton. More than 900 titles were in the catalog in the late 1980s. In 1987 Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) acquired the firm. Since 1989 the Caedmon material has been issued on audiotapes and CDs. [Roach 1988.]
See also Literary Recordings
Experimental composer and one of the 20th century’s most important musical “inventors.” Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage spent a childhood fascinated by both early radio and Grieg and 19th-century piano music. He is best known for 4’33”, a piece that was first performed in 1952. In this Cage took music to its most challenging, most questioning conclusion by instructing the performer to sit at the piano for four and a half minutes of nothingness. But this was not a performance of complete silence, as is the general conception of this composition. Instead it was supposed to inspire the notion in the audience that music was the random ambient sound around them, that the piece was made up of every noise they registered during that predetermined timespan. Aside from unquestionably challenging and provoking discussion on the very notion of music itself, the roots of latter-day ambient, electronic, and DJ/collage music can be traced back to Cage and his visions
Cage began working with phonographs in the late 1930s, using them as musical instruments (i.e., playing brief passages as part of a composition, anticipating modern turntablism). He employed this technique in his score Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). Cage worked most actively with recorded sound in the 1950s when he created several pieces by assembling short fragments of recording tape in the style of musique concrète. The best-known of these works was Williams Mix (1953), which was created by assembling bits of more than eight reels of tapes consisting of somewhere between 500600 individual sounds, according to Cage. Another, inventive work was Indeterminacy, an experiment in which Cage read 90 stories live in the studio while (beyond Cage’s hearing) David Tudor played short pieces on the piano as well as short selections from
another Cage tape composition, Fontana Mix(1958). Each reading and selection was randomly selected and performed for the same amount of time; Cage had to either read faster or slower (depending on the length of the selection) in order to meet the time limitations. The result was issued on Folkways Records in 1958, and became a landmark recording for avant-garde musicians (it has been reissued on CD as Smithsonian/Folkways 40804). Also in 1958, a 25-year retrospective concert was held at Town Hall in New York City, and subsequently a recording was issued on LP; this helped spread Cage’s music in the early 1960s among younger composers (it has been reissued on Wergo CD #6247-2).
