Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

John Cage has been described as the most influential composer of the last half of the twentieth century. His work and ideas - about silence, indeterminacy, nonintention, art's role in bringing the everyday object to our attention, the singularity of performance - have had influence not only in the world of music but also in dance, painting, printmaking, video art, and poetry. As an exponent of Zen Buddhism since the early fifties, he has had an important role in introducing Zen spirituality to the American artworld and general culture. Among his friends and collaborators have been longtime associate Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Those who have acknowledged his influence in their work range from minimalist composer Philip Glass to rock musicians David Byrne and Brian Eno. The Roaring Silence is the first full-length biography of John Cage. Written with Cage's full cooperation, it documents his life in unrivaled detail, interweaving a close account of the evolution of his work with an exploration of his aesthetic and philosophical ideas. David Revill never assumes specialist knowledge on the part of the reader, but sets Cage's work in the context of his personal development and contemporary culture. He draws on numerous interviews with Cage and his associates. Paying due attention to Cage's inventions, such as the prepared piano, and his pioneering use of indeterminate notation and chance operations in composition (utilizing the I Ching), Revill also illuminates Cage the performer, printmaker, watercolorist, expert amateur mycologist, game show celebrity, and political anarchist, and discusseshis pronouncements on social and environmental issues. The biography includes comprehensive chronologies of his musical and visual works. Arnold Schoenberg once called Cage, his former student, "not a composer but an invent

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Arnold Schoenberg referred to the recently deceased Cage as ``an inventor--of genius,'' and indeed he was, as manifested through his musical and visual compositions. Avant-garde is a term that comes to mind when considering his complex gifts. Always the optimist, Cage focused throughout his life on an astonishing assortment of endeavors. Besides his never-ending quest toward perfection of sound (including a unique realization of silence), Cage delved into such eclectic areas as Eastern philosophy, edible wild foods (particularly the wild mushroom), printmaking, dance, and poetry. This book was written with Cage's cooperation and was to have been published to coincide with his 80th birthday. This definitive biography is a fine companion to Cage's Silence: Lectures & Writings (1961). It is recommended for academic and special libraries.-- Kathleen Sparkman, Baylor Univ., Waco, Tex. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In this sympathetic biography, composer John Cage, who has devised scores for percussion ensembles, radios tuned at random, electrical instruments and pianos ``prepared'' with objects attached to the strings, is acclaimed as ``a man of joyous integrity'' who leans towards the ascetic and the transcendent. Revill, a music critic for the Times of London and the Guardian , seeks to show that Cage's life, work and ideas are all of a piece. His astute analyses of individual compositions are occasionally clarified by his discussion of Cage's dabblings in Zen, Eastern philosophy, anarchism, ecology and social thought. Although Revill had Cage's cooperation, his portrait of the avant-garde composer/painter/ poet as a sunny, spontaneous radical individualist seems strangely impersonal. Accounts of Cage's relations with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Arnold Schonberg, Pierre Boulez, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg and other luminaries round out this study of the composer's continually evolving ideas. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Revill, English musician/writer, completed this biography with the full cooperation of his subject, the most notable provocateur of the arts in the 20th century. Like other such sanctioned works, it is anything but definitive. Revill adopts a chronological approach, interrupted only by a chapter devoted to the concepts of Zen, which so influenced Cage. The narrative is descriptive as well as sequential; that is, it is nonanalytical and certainly, noncritical. The descriptions are culled from Cage's scores, writings by Cage and others, reviews, and other sources. There are some curious implications posed, among them many more references to Arnold Schoenberg than would seem justified by earlier reports of the relationship between the two men; and an anecdote comparing the reaction to Cage's 25-year retrospective concert in 1958 with that of the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring stretches the reader's credulity. Rough edges show in the writing with, for instance, a change of scene from London to New York in successive paragraphs with no transition, causing the reader to wonder why the occasions are juxtaposed. The source notes are a further trial, with no indication in the text that a source is identified, with some quotations left unattributed, and with interviews and discussions with Cage himself and unidentified friends admittedly left unacknowledged. The book can be recommended for being the first to cover the whole life of its subject, but surely others will follow to fill in more adequately the outlines provided here. R. Stahura; Ripon College

Booklist Review

John Cage, who would have turned 80 this month but died last month, was to twentieth-century American music what, say, Whitman was to nineteenth-century American verse, or what Picasso and Braque inventing cubism were to Western painting. He rethought the essentials of music--not just sound and time, but meaning. So at least from the day in 1952 when pianist David Tudor seated himself before the keyboard and did not touch it in any of three movements whose duration added up to 4'33", attending a Cage performance was likely to be as much an ethical and metaphysical as an aesthetic experience. To most, including many staunch admirers, Cage's pieces didn't sound like music at all. They were and are experiences, and many find they teach how to experience or find an attitude toward experience that enables intellectual, aesthetic, even spiritual satisfaction. This biography is good at describing the hows and whys of Cage's music, considerably less successful at making a compelling story or interpretation of the man's life. Of course, Cage was notoriously reticent about himself, preferring to discuss his convictions and ideas. Acquire Revill's effort to meet immediate curiosity in the wake of Cage's passing, but expect better future biographies. ~--Ray Olson

Kirkus Book Review

Published to coincide with the 80th birthday of the controversial avant-garde composer, Revill's lengthy biography of John Cage may prove as puzzling to readers as the composer's musical experiments have proved to concert-goers over the years. Curiously reticent in presenting the details of his subject's personal life (Cage's homosexuality is airily dismissed, for example, as ``not important given the aims of this book''), Revill, a British musicologist, composer, and musician, devotes page after page to the minutiae of Cage's highly unorthodox methods of composition. For readers who are neither professional musicians nor well versed in math, these extended passages will prove heavy going. Cage himself, moreover, isn't a particularly appealing protagonist, coming off here as pontifical, intolerant, and emotionally detached yet given to faddish enthusiasms (the I Ching, macrobiotic diets, acupuncture, McLuhan's ``global village''). And much of his writing, at least as presented by Revill, has qualties of hand-me-down Gertrude Stein. During his long career, Cage has associated with such figures as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Igor Stravinsky, John Lennon, and Yoko Ono. But in Revill's hands, these personalities remain sketchy, lifeless walk- ons in a narrative stuffed with lists of music festivals, academic seminars, and personal appearances that provide little insight into Cage's life or world. Revill swings from near-hagiography to surprisingly blunt criticism; neither cuts the mustard. (Thirty-six b&w photographs- -not seen.)