A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

"[Cage's] ultimate aim was to produce a homogenized chaos that would carry no program, no plot, no reminders of the history of beauty, and no personal statement. Nowadays, of course, we can recognize in such an ideal the whole effort of pop art. But I do not think that pop art's obvious jokes and facile sentiments were a major motive. I think Cage wanted, had always wanted, to save music from itself by removing its narcotic qualities and its personalized pretentiousness, as well as all identifiable structure and rhetoric....A Year From Monday is a joke-book, the clownings of a professional celebrity who has admired Gertrude Stein and played chess with Marcel Duchamp."John Cage is the author of 'A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings', published 1967 under ISBN 9780819560025 and ISBN 0819560022.