Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

Larson, Kay

ISBN 10: 0143123475 / ISBN 13: 9780143123477

Published by Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2013

About this Item

Condition: Very Good.

Trade Paperback.

Light shelf wear and minor edge wear from normal handling and storage. Covers remain clean and bright with light rubbing and faint corner wear. Binding is tight and square. Pages are clean and unmarked with no writing, highlighting, or bookplates noted. Includes notes, bibliography, and index. Listing photos show the exact copy included in this sale.

An examination of composer and experimental artist John Cage?s intellectual and spiritual development, focusing on how Zen Buddhism transformed his ideas about creativity, artistic control, and the act of creation. Larson traces how Cage?s engagement with Zen and D. T. Suzuki helped him reconsider ego, intention, and attention, while his use of the I Ching gave him a practical method for introducing chance and allowing unexpected results to emerge. These ideas led to experiments with indeterminacy, environmental sound, and silence, including 4'33", and ultimately influenced artistic practices far beyond experimental music. The book explores questions that remain relevant to artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people: how to relinquish control without abandoning craft, how chance can generate new possibilities, how attentive listening can alter perception, and how the creative process changes when the artist stops trying to dictate every outcome.

Seller Inventory # W_185

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
• Publisher: Penguin Books, New York, NY
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143123475
• ISBN 13: 9780143123477
• Binding: Soft cover
• Printing: 5th or later Printing
• Condition: Very Good
• Dimensions: 5.51W x 8.39H x 1.1D inches 5.51 inches width by 8.39 inches height by 1.1 inches depth
• Weight: 1.038 pounds
• Seller catalogs:
  • Humanities
  • Biographies
  • Buddhism
  • Social Sciences
  • Biographies & Autobiographies
  • Religion and Spirituality Books
  • Creativity & the Creative Process

About this title

Synopsis

A “heroic” biography of John Cage and his “awakening through Zen Buddhism”—“a kind of love story” about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture (The New York Times)

Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself—and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. “Remarkably researched, exquisitely written,” Where the Heart Beats weaves together “a great many threads of cultural history” (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli were among those influenced by his ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching.’ Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.

About the Author

Kay Larson was the the art critic for New York Magazine for fourteen years and has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times. In 1994, she entered Zen practice at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York.