John Cage

Classical music's spring brings festivals and much more

2013-03-08 07:00:00

Spring is, as always, a season for festivals. The big one in Los Angeles this year is the ongoing celebration of the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, initiated by Los Angeles Opera. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's weeklong Brooklyn Festival in...

Review: Encounter with postwar giants at Southwest Chamber Music festival

2013-02-25 00:00:00

Southwest Chamber Music's 2013 L.A. International New Music Festival, in progress at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall, is doing its attentive bit to broaden international musical relations. We hear too little music from Mexican, Korean or even...

Grammys 2013: Marlow Rosado y La Riquena win for tropical Latin album

2013-02-10 18:35:00

The catch-all tropical Latin album category is one of the fuzziest, encompassing everything from salsa and cumbia to bachata, reggaeton and merengue. But there's nothing vague or soft-edged about this year's winner, Marlow Rosado y La Rique�a, who won the...

Riffing on the highs and lows of the sonic landscape

2012-12-02 09:00:00

The quirky violist known as Ljova, an ingratiating fixture on the New York new music scene, has just released a recording called "Melting River." You can purchase and download it for as little as $2 on the artist-friendly website Bandcamp as either an...

The year of John Cage

2012-12-23 07:00:00

Once, when asked how he thought history would consider his work, John Cage responded that he had made so much, getting rid of it all would be very difficult. Twenty years after his death he has been spectacularly proven right. This year marked the 100th...

A cross section of John Cage compositions

2012-08-31 18:03:32

John Cage's Los Angeles

2012-08-31 18:03:32

Elliott Carter dies at 103; inventive American composer

2012-11-06 00:00:00

Elliott Carter, the great American composer who was born in the horse-and-buggy era but whose music persistently looked ahead by reflecting and unabashedly celebrating the intricacies of modern life, died Monday of natural causes at his home in New York,...

Mark Morris chooses the Bad Plus, John Cage for Ojai festival

2012-11-14 14:14:00

Renowned choreographer Mark Morris will bring his signature modern sensibility to the Ojai Music Festival in June with a program that will feature pieces by Lou Harrison, John Cage and Henry Cowell. Organizers said Wednesday the Mark Morris Dance Group...

Review: 'Reinventing Bach' by Paul Elie casts a wide net

2012-09-30 00:00:00

-------------------- Reinventing Bach Paul Elie Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 498 pp., $30.00 -------------------- Halfway through reading Paul Elie's "Reinventing Bach," I suddenly got dizzy. An earthquake? All-purpose angst? Or could it be that Bach...

John Cage: A multimedia appreciation on his 100th birthday

2012-09-05 06:58:00

What Jean-Luc Godard is to film and Marcel Duchamp was to the visual arts, John Cage was to music -- a radical experimentalist who constantly sought to reinvent the art form. Boldly conceptual -- and to many, frustratingly impenetrable -- his pieces stand...

In art as in music, John Cage reveals the world within

2012-09-01 10:24:00

John Cage was a leading avant-garde composer for 40 years, but he also made spare watercolors, drawings and prints, plus the occasional painting, especially in the final decades of his life. Infused with the same spirit that characterizes his work as a...

Michael Tilson Thomas conducts 'The Seasons' in the New World Symphony's John Cage festival.

2013-02-12 15:26:00

For its celebration of the John Cage centenary, Jacaranda actually came up with a premiere. This was the first simultaneous performance of all five of the composer's curiously indeterminate pieces from the 1950s, collectively known as "Ten Thousand Things.

2012-12-13 14:45:00

John Cage pictured right, with Alvin Lucier, center, and Christian Wolff, left.

2012-11-26 12:38:00