Composition in Retrospect.

There can be little doubt that John Cage's most controversial act as a composer was his adoption of chance techniques in 1951. It was the musical issue over which he and Pierre Boulez came to disagree most fundamentally and is thus central to (though curiously almost absent from) The Boulez-Cage Correspondence (for a review of the original French edition, see Music & Letters, lxxiii (1992), 148-9). Equally, it is the linchpin about which James Pritchett's study The Music of John Cage somewhat lopsidedly turns. Indeed, the notoriety and misunderstanding it brought Cage linger on even now: Pritchett needs to open his introduction with the words 'John Cage was a composer' and subsequently spends the best part of five pages justifying them. Conversely, Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his introduction appears, albeit covertly, to share Boulez's antipathy towards Cage's chance-based music.

The Music of John Cage, though by no means the definitive study of its subject, is an important book. Paul Griffiths's brief monograph Cage (Oxford, 1981) notwithstanding, there has been no previous attempt in the Cagean literature to discuss comprehensively what Pritchett terms 'the act of composing rather than the composer or the compositions'. Thus we find detailed, and generally thorough, consideration of not just Cage's music and the techniques it employs but also the sources of the ideological standpoints from which the music is derived. A good example of this approach occurs in Chapter 2 - '"To sober and quiet the mind . . ." (1946-1951)'. Pritchett first discusses Cage's indebtedness to the writings of Ananda Coomaraswamy, links this with his contemporaneous interest in Satie, then relates both to the techniques used in The Seasons (1947). Subsequently, he moves on to a consideration of the influence on Cage of Meister Eckhart, which in turn leads to a substantial analysis of the String Quartet in Four Parts (1949-50). The care with which Pritchett navigates the subtly changing currents of Cage's ideas during this period is in stark contrast to the jaunty attitude adopted by David Revill in The Roaring Silence: John Cage - a Life (London, 1992; reviewed in Music & Letters, lxxiv (1993), 625-6). However, Pritchett makes even less attempt than Revill to relate Cage's domestic crises at this time to his need for alternative philosophies, merely noting that 'The period of the middle …