Amazon.com essential recording
Hard to believe that as early as 1958 there was a 25-year retrospective concert of John Cage's music. But this 3-CD set documents both the concert and its meaning for the history of New Music. Organized by no less than Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Emile de Antonio, the event sparked heated controversy--some of it documented in the crowd's reaction to Cage's early tape- music piece,
Williams Mix. The expansive booklet accompanying the CDs includes loads of prescient commentary, much of it from Cage himself. Most telling is the simple formulation: "New Music. New Listening. Just an attention to the activity of sounds." Cage's earliest-prepared piano sonatas are abbreviated with clangorous, percussive results, and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra sprawls noisily in myriad directions. The sound is broad and warm for a 40-year-old live recording, and this is a cornerstone document of post-World War II art.
--Andrew Bartlett