Dickinson has gathered a most useful array of interviews with and about Cage. If you want to know more about Cage than you can glean by listening to his music, this is surely the place to go — more useful, in my opinion, than Cage's own writings.
Most of the important people connected with Cage are interviewed: Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Virgil Thomson, Paul Zukovsky, Earle Brown, Karlheinz Stockhausen, La Monte Young and more. Each has insights that add to our in-the-round picture of Cage.
What picture emerges? He does not come across as a charlatan, although he was often accused of being one. Nor does the charge of inconsistency hold up, except inasmuch as Zen practitioners enjoy inconsistency. Everyone seems to agree that Cage had not only charm but also a serious devotion to what he was doing. He felt himself to be a composer above all, and there is ample evidence that he was serious and consistent about that. One doesn't seek composition lessons with Arnold Schoenberg otherwise!
Schoenberg, however, said that Cage had no feeling for harmony; Stockhausen said "he doesn't hear". Cage was starting with a disconnection from the musical world as it had existed. But he didn't lack a desire to create "useful" music, as witnessed by his lifelong collaborations with dancers.
I was intrigued to learn that his "prepared piano" came about because he was intent on writing for gamelan, which he thought was the ideal solution to a request he'd received from a dancer. On being told that there was no budget for a gamelan, and finding an assortment of bolts and other hardware lying near the piano, he devised the next-best thing.
I was surprised that there is little mention of his chess playing. He was a very good player all his life. This refutes any accusation that he was simple-minded or lacking in competitive instinct. As with many charmers, there was a very strong ego underneath.
Now that Cage and his wide eyes and big grin and charming personality are gone, we are left with his works: compositions, etchings, writings and philosophy. Many people are charmed by them still, while others find them boring or annoying. To my mind they all stem from an "attitude", which is worth thinking about.
Throughout music history, the appearance of a new attitude has often provoked a crisis, a questioning of all that had been certain, and fresh insights into how things could be done. I think of the medieval composers who dared us to listen to two things at once — a bold step that many cultures still have not accepted. Bach's sons rejected their father's highly developed counterpoint and opted for a simplification that led to the Classical style of Haydn and Mozart. Debussy and Schoenberg found ways of liberating harmony from centuries-old rules. Stravinsky innovated not just in rhythm but also in finding ways to fracture continuities. Without any of these once-new attitudes we would be poorer.
Would we be poorer if Cage had not existed? Of course we would, but not on the grand scale he imagined. His attitude (which was not new) was that we should change the way we listen, in a big way, bigger than the changes asked by Bach's sons or Schoenberg. He wanted us not only to accept that the sounds around us are worth paying attention to (another unoriginal idea) but to celebrate meaninglessness and shun "intentionality". He said that Western music had taken a wrong turn centuries ago, and he felt that Beethoven was the epitome of what we should not do.
I cannot subscribe to an attitude which says that meaninglessness is better than Beethoven.
The world, it seems to me, does not need an increase of meaninglessness. Putting a random assortment of musicians into a room and having them play what they like for as long as they like — which describes Cage's piece musicircus — and asking us to have "fun" there is going to leave a sour taste soon enough, especially for someone whose life contains difficulties such as Cage never faced. As for anarchy, which Cage espoused, he never had to live with it, and surely would not enjoy life in present-day Libya.
But I recommend this book. It makes one ask big questions about one's philosophy of music.