Vybrané dopisy – Cage John (2018)

Composer and conceptualist John Cage is one of the most prominent figures in 20th-century music, with influences extending into many other areas of art. A comprehensive selection of his correspondence, under the stark title The Selected Letters of John Cage, was published in 2016 and serves as an adequate substitute for his nonexistent autobiography. The book contains over five hundred letters from his creative beginnings to the end of his life. The first is from 1930: Cage was seventeen or perhaps eighteen years old – the exact date of sending is missing. He writes to his relatives from a trip to Europe, during which he also made a stop in Algeria – it is from there that the first of the selected letters originates. The last letter is dated July 28, 1992, just two weeks before Cage's death. The recipient is the French pianist Martine Joste, and the letter concerns the performance of the piece Two and several others. On a personal level, one can piece together Cage's biography from a number of letters perhaps better than if he had actually written it in old age. The reader has before them messages unclouded by unreliable human memory and exaggerated self-stylization.