Four American Composers, Vol. I: John Cage

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🎙️ EPISODE 416: 03.08.22 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟎-𝐕𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐦𝐞 RANKING GREENAWAY 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 These four 50-minute works are the closest thing Greenaway ever got to making a straight-forward documentary.They all, for the most part, focus on single run of performances in London by each artist. The first volume works especially well because avant-garde composer John Cage was in the middle of a retrospective show, covering select highlights from different moments throughout his long and industrious career. This film is buoyed by excerpts from Cage's Indeterminacy, "190 Zen Stories," which is exactly what it sounds like: musings narrated with accompaniment by the man himself (I found this cool site, which generates one of these at random, which is a perfect use of change operations). So, in a sense, it works as a decent primer on Cage's work as much as it does a prolonged snapshot of a moment in time.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 415B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 416B ⫸

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Four American Composers is a 4-part documentary that follows four different contemporary composers performing/creating/building their shows. Peter Greenaway leads us through the creative process of 4 very different composers in style: sound and noise (John Cage) repetition and discipline (Philip Glass), poetry and musical freedom (Robert Ashley) and vocal experimentation (Meredith Monk) who are all framed under the same musical genre, contemporary music. It was released on May 1, 1983.