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John Cage
by Rob Haskins
Critical Lives Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2012
In this new biography, Rob Haskins explores Cage’s radical approach to art and aesthetics and his belief that everyday life and art are one and the same. Scrutinizing Cage’s emphasis on chance over intention, which rejected traditional artistic methods and caused an uproar among his peers, Haskins elucidates the ideas that lay behind these pillars of Cage’s work. Haskins also demystifies the influence of Eastern cultures, particularly Zen Buddhism, on Cage, including his use of the Chinese text I Ching as his standard composition tool in all his work after 1951. Adding to our understanding of the art, music, and ideas of the twentieth century, this book provides an engaging look at a man who continues to challenge and inspire artists worldwide.
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 | "Distance and Disembodiment: Harps, Horns, and the Requiem Impulse in Schumann and Brahms." Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 47-89
by Daniel Beller-McKenna
abstract: In his final book, Crossing Paths, John Daverio identified a common "Requiem Idea" in the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Both composers, Daverio argued, focused more the survivors of the deceased than on the souls of the dead and on consolation rather then grieving. Whereas works by Schumann and Brahms that represent Daverio's Requiem Idea take many forms and fall into various genres, a notable number of these pieces are untied by their use (literally or figuratively) of two distinctly romantic instruments--primarily the harp and secondarily the harp, instruments which Daverio labeled ""emblems of distance and disembodiment." Borrowing on both the Osssianic/bardic tradition of the late eighteenth century and on the spiritually tinged associations of the harp among German Romantics, Schumann, and later Brahms used this instrument to convey separation and mediation between the dead and the living, the underlying paradigm that informs the consolatory nature of the Requiem Idea. Frequently allied with the harp in such situations is the horn, which carries its own associations with distance and thereby separation. This essay surveys several pieces by each composer that partake of the Requiem Idea and utilize one or both of these instruments.
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 | Brahms and the German Spirit
by Daniel Beller-McKenna
Harvard University Press, 2004
excerpt from book cover: The music of Johannes Brahms is deeply colored, Daniel Beller-McKenna shows, by nineteenth-century German nationalism and by Lutheran religion. Focusing on the composer's choral works, the author offers new insight on the cultural grounding for Brahms's music. In comparison to the overtly nationalist element in Wagner's music, the German elements in Brahms's style have been easy to overlook. This nuanced study uncovers those nationalistic elements, enriching our understanding both of Brahms's art and of German culture."
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 | "Beatle-John's Alter Ego." Music & Letters 80 (1999): 254-268
by Daniel Beller-McKenna
abstract: Few artists have encouraged us to examine their lives through their art as adamantly as did John Lennon. Beginning with his Beatles songs In My Life and Strawberry Fields, songs that refer to his youth in Liverpool, Lennon came more and more to use the rock song as a self-conscious, public diary. By contrast his early songs are usually understood to be unreflective love songs that owe more to standard format pop lyrics than to any circumstances in Lennon's own life. In this paper I seek to redefine how we know John Lennon through his songs, arguing that his later autobiographical songs and abundant public comments on his life provide us with too much information to form our own critical perception of the "real" John Lennon: that person has been reinterpreted for us by the "public" John Lennon. By the same token, some of his supposedly earlier songs bare the traces of a struggle between that real (unknowable) person and the public persona of Beatle-John, as Lennon worked to express some of his individuality against the facade he had created with Paul McCartney and the Beatles. |
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