Where the Heart Beats

May 7, 2012
Part biography, part cultural history, and part adoring fan’s notes, journalist Larson’s inventive and contemplative reflections on Cage’s encounters with and absorption of Zen Buddhism opens new windows on Cage’s often complex yet always compelling, music. Weaving threads of the teachings of Zen Buddhist writer D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, along with Cage’s own reflections and writings on art, music, dance, and life, Larson patches together a brilliant quilt that covers Cage’s growing understanding of the nature of noise and silence and the roles that each plays in music. Although Cage studied with Suzuki, he admits that he didn’t understand Buddhism until one day when he was walking in the woods looking for mushrooms, the meaning of Suzuki’s teachings came to him. He lived from that moment practicing the Buddhist belief in the interpenetration of all things. By 1946, Cage was reaching out to the great contemplative traditions to comprehend the nature of his suffering self—his marriage was breaking up, and his relationship with Merce Cunningham was quickly developing—and to reflect his great love, music, in the mirror of a greater love. Larson’s thoughtful meditation on Cage offers a glimpse at the evolution of an artist who abandoned many of the musical structures of the past and opened new doors for several generations of musicians and artists. Agent, Anne Edelstein.

May 15, 2012
An unconventional biography of avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) and the profound influence Zen Buddhism had on his music. Cage is most famous for 4'33", a 1952 work whose audacity--essentially four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in which the only sounds are those of the performance environment--inspired a raft of experimental artists. The piece has also been mocked for its anybody-can-do-that simplicity. However, as longtime art critic Larson makes clear, it sprung from years of deep spiritual practice and hard thinking about the structure of music. Beginning his career on the West Coast, Cage studied with pioneering modernist composers Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell but broke free to find ways to integrate music with the noise of everyday life. At the same time, he grew enchanted with varieties of religious mysticism, studying under D.T. Suzuki, who helped promote Zen Buddhism in the West. In time, Cage's work acquired an openness that ultimately produced 4'33". Larson structures the book as a kind of call and response between Cage and his associates, alternating paragraphs of conventional biography with extended, often gnomic, quotations from Cage. The strategy is most effective when it shows the effect his uncanny calm had on others: Composers like Morton Feldman and Yoko Ono and painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were all influenced by Cage's thinking. However, Larson's approach does leave Cage's life as more of a mystery than a biography perhaps ought to. After the triumph of 4'33", she dwells little on the details of her subject's life, only briefly noting that Cage struggled with his homosexuality and kept his decades-long relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham a secret. Some wooly mysticism fogs up these pages but overall, a well-researched and thoughtfully framed study of an often misunderstood artist.

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Starred review from April 15, 2012

This excellent book takes its place among the several monographs on John Cage written in the run-up to the centenary of the American composer's birth in 1912; Kyle Gann (No Such Thing as Silence) and Kenneth Silverman (Begin Again) each contributed valuable studies of Cage. Larson, a practicing Buddhist and astute art critic, here considers in depth the Zen practices and philosophies that had a profound effect on Cage's music and writings from the late 1940s until his death in 1992. Throughout her biographical narrative, Larson includes lengthy discourses on the writings of Zen masters and other philosophers who influenced Cage. We also meet many post-World War II avant-garde luminaries whose work was inspired by Cage: musicians such as Earle Brown and Morton Feldman; artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yoko Ono; and dancer and life partner Merce Cunningham. Larson peppers her narrative with quotes from Cage as well as with epigrammatic and illuminating koans, a style much favored by Cage himself in his own writings. VERDICT This is a thoroughly researched and wittily written guide to Cage and the Zen mind. There are delightful surprises and revelatory anecdotes on nearly every page. Essential for all collections.--Larry Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
Using the life of composer John Cage (191292) as connective tissue, Larson chronicles the influence of Zen on avant-garde American music and fine art. She opens at the subject's ground zero, with the 1950s Beat writers' discovery of D. T. Suzuki, through whom Cage, recently immersed in Hindu mysticism, also came to Zen. Dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, and pop art all figure in, for Cage always associated with fine artists, even merging art and music in the graphic (i.e., drawn, generally without musical notation) scores he andbefore him, actuallyhis disciple, Morton Feldman, began making in the 1950s. Through Cage's life partner, Merce Cunningham, dance was involved in Cage's work, too. Before Zen, Cage made experimental music; after it and, as Larson represents it, to come to terms with homosexuality (whose social aspects dismayed him), he composed sound pieces without personality, without emotion, without any intent to communicate. A quilt of Cage's and his associates' words, of asides, anecdotes, and tangents, Larson's book is as enveloping and as light, intellectually, as air.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)