If Louis Biancolli’s review exemplifies unbridled enthusiasm, Milew Kastendieck divides the devotees, who believe Cage is a prophet of musical futures, from the onlookers, who see him as merely a “sophisticated primitivist.” From here, the review is critical. Kastendieck suggests that Cage is highly indebted to non-Western music and describes his 1930s and ’40s works as struggling to keep up with various versions of the real thing (jazz drumming, Balinense gamelan, Kabuki theater). He refers, quite critically, to Concert for Piano and Orchestra as “sheer anarchy” and an “evolutionary cul-de-sac.” Ironically, the phrases might have pleased Cage, notwithstanding the reviewer’s critical intentions. Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) is compared to two other pressing cultural phenomena of the 1950s: horror films and air-raid sirens.
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Title | “Cage’s Music Still a Phenomenon,” New York Journal-American, 12 |
Maker | Milew Kastendieck |
Date | 16 May 1958 |
Type | press clipping |
Location | Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 62, folder 13 |
Cite
Kastendieck, Milew. “Cage’s Music Still a
Phenomenon,” New York Journal-American, 12,
16 May 1958. Getty Research Institute, David Tudor
Papers, 980039, box 62, folder 13. In
The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music,
Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John
Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025.
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