Through The Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass examines John Cage’s interactions and collaborations with avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, and in turn seeks out the implications of the audiovisual experience for the overall aesthetic surrounding Cage’s career. As the commercially dominant media form in the 20th century, cinema transformed the way listeners were introduced to and consumed music. Cage’s quest to redefine music, intentionality, and expression reflects the similar transformation of music within the larger audiovisual experience of sound film. This study covers a wide variety of topics, ranging from Cage’s father, John Cage Sr.’s patents in infrared and military technology during World War II, theories of dance aesthetics, film and television theory, visual music, information technology, copyright, and the postwar position of the American Neo-Avant-Garde. This volume examines key moments in Cage’s career in which cinema either informed or transformed his position on the nature of sound, music, expression, and the ontology of the musical artwork. The examples point to moments of rupture within Cage’s own consideration of the musical artwork, pointing to new-found collision points that have a significant and heretofore unacknowledged role in Cage’s notions of the audiovisual experience and the medium-specific ontology of a work of art.