A Year from Monday

This volume completes the corpus of the collected writings of the ebullient sage of modern American music, John Cage.

A Year from Monday moves beyond strictly musical concerns. With wit, humour and quiet seriousness Cage discusses the social implications of his anarchist aesthetics in relation to the work of Buckminster Fuller, Marshal McLuhan and his interest in Oriental spiritual disciplines. Most fascinating ofall are the opening sections of the continuing How to Change the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), an epic diary/poem in which quotations from many sources and Cage's pithy observations are juxtaposed, using techniques borrowed from The Cantos, with typography and line length decided by chance operations. The volume also contains Cage's reflections on the work of other artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives.