Much of what makes Cage Cage also makes New Age New Age. That discussion—framed around New Age sensibilities or not—is key to an honest portrait of John Cage. And the root of that particular conversation is Cage’s deep interest in Buddhism.

One of the fundamental aspects of Berio’s compositional approach is his use of pre-existing composition, from Mahler to folk song, to his experiments in tape collage and other forms of electronic manipulation—and the copyright aspect of that is never touched on in David Osmond-Smith’s Berio.

One of the aims of this book is to help those younger artists in dealing with the richness of the legacy that they carry, as well as in understanding what has been achieved, what was shown to be possible, and what remains to be realized.

John Cage’s 4’33″ is one of the most misunderstood pieces of music ever written and yet, at times, one of the avant-garde’s best understood as well.

In The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference, composer and pianist David Cutler collects strategies and success stories from 165 composers and musicians working in these musical arenas and sprinkles them throughout this slickly designed A-to-Z guide covering everything from building up a career to planning for retirement.

Terry Riley’s In C seems to stand the whole idea of musical “progress” on its head.

Robert Carl, author of Terry Riley’s In C, describes how the adaptability of Terry Riley’s In C to performance among musicians of a wide variety of stylistic backgrounds provides an excellent road map for the future of music.

Weighing in at 300+ heavily inked pages, Notations 21 carries both the intellectual heft of an academic text book and the intrigue of a good coffee table read.

But past the The Listen’s straightforward concept of thinking and writing about nine different pieces of music, what authors Christopher Jon Honett and Peter Gilbert are really engaging in here is a new type of criticism—and it’s actually kind of subversive.

It was never our intention to write a ‘historical’ or musicological study so we had the luxury of being able to pick and choose what interested us or what we thought was important.