Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

By Kenneth Silverman

A biography of major importance: the first comprehensive life of John Cage—musician, inventor, dance composer, poet, and central figure of the postwar avant-garde—who died in 1992 at the age of eighty. Award-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman follows Cage from his California childhood—his father was a successful inventor—through his vision-expanding stay in Paris in 1930–31 and his truncated studies with Arnold Schoenberg. We see his early experiments with sound and instruments, and we watch as he develops his signature work with prepared piano, radio static, random noise, and silence. We learn of his many friendships over the years with other composers, artists, philosophers, and writers; of his early marriage; and of his female and male lovers and his long relationship with Merce Cunningham, with whom he would collaborate on groundbreaking performance pieces that continue to be influential in the worlds of both music and dance. Drawing on interviews with Cage’s contemporaries and friends and on the entire archive of his letters and writings, and including photographs and facsimiles of musical scores, Silverman gives us a revelatory portrait of one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century.

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