• artists' book
  • pictorial wrappers
  • offset-printed
  • sewn bound
  • black-and-white
  • 28 x 22.5 cm.
  • [unpaginated]
  • edition size unknown
  • unsigned and unnumbered
  • ISBN 0930794222

Themes & Variations

John Cage, Robert Mahon

description

Artist's book by John Cage. Photographs by Robert Mahon. "In Themes & Variations John Cage opens a new chamber in the work he has created 'out of a need for poetry' : a poem, a score for oral performance, a typographic experiment, a musical composition in which the words are notes and the ideas phrases, a series of mesostics determined by chance operations and combined with the traditional Japanese form of Renga. Root ideas fragment in musical phrases and rise again like apparitions. The text becomes a charged environment in which each 'thing' of language appears with the spontaneity and originality of a new world. In his mesostics, Cage uses the names of fifteen men who have influenced him, and he draws his content from one hundred and ten key precepts scattered throughout his books. The result is a startling recreation of his own intellectual and spiritual journey. Not least of the book's virtues is the almost personal connection its establishes with the work and poetics of our foremost experimental composer." Printed in black-and-white. Text in English.

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