Lectures on the Weather, John Cage's writings through Henry David Thoreau

Edited by Ben Estes

Introduction by Jeffrey Lependorf

When John Cage (1912-1992) discovered the writings of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), he found a philosophical companion whose ideas echoed his own revolutionary vision of art, nature, and freedom. Captivated by the nineteenth-century naturalist's vision of deliberate living, environmental humility and anarchistic political philosophy, Cage remarked that in reading Thoreau he'd discovered “any idea I'd ever had worth its salt.” From that moment on, Cage was inspired to make an extraordinary body of work that transformed Thoreau's words and ideas into innovative music, visual art, performances, poetry, and experimental texts.

This anthology, Lectures on the Weather, features a selection of Cage's many works that use Thoreau's writing as raw material. For example, in the works Song and Mureau, Cage uses chance operations to jumble, break, and strip Thoreau's Journal to transform them into an unforgettable and original poetry of striking images of nature and, at times, pure music. Or, as in Lecture on the Weather (published here for the first time in the United States, but commissioned for its bicentennial in 1976), Cage writes through Thoreau's On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, delivering a fierce comment on America, writing that the United States is the "most powerful, the most destructive, the most feared" country in the world, and suggested that by looking back to Thoreau we might be able to steer the nation back toward human decency.

Cage's writings through Thoreau offer a radical vision of our world that blends the ideas of two of America's most revolutionary thinkers, exploring themes of environmental awareness, political resistance, and creative freedoms.

John Cage (1912–1992), one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, created genre-expanding works encompassing music, performance, writing, and visual art, including his landmark 4’ 33”—a work where a performer or performers simply exist without intentionally making any explicit sounds—which alone redefined the very concept of what music might be. His oft-quoted phrase “there is no such thing as silence” is synonymous with his influence. From his work while teaching at Black Mountain College to his decades of collaboration with Merce Cunningham, much of Cage’s output developed and offered concepts and methods of using indeterminacy, non-intention, and experimentation with materials that have significantly expanded the boundaries of music and other forms of art-making. Beginning with his early, rhythmic works for percussion ensemble through to his late, uniquely spacious, time-based “number pieces,” Cage’s output remains actively performed around the globe. His experimental, curious, and generative thinking, not only about music, art, philosophy, and literature, but also about how to live one’s life, continues to influence and invite new ways of art-making and being. His poetry and performance texts represent a unique contribution to the literary canon.

Jeffrey Lependorf serves as Executive Director of the John Cage Trust. A performer, composer, and visual artist, he also directs the Art Omi: Music international musicians residency, a program that he created. He received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin Conservatory and his masters and doctorate degrees from Columbia University, where he taught music history for a number of years. He is a certified master of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute, and he has performed, and his music has been performed, around the globe—literally, in fact: a recording of his "Night Pond" for solo shakuhachi was launched into space when the shuttle Atlantis took off on May 15, 1997 and remained for a year aboard the Russian space station Mir. National Arts Strategies named him a national arts leader, providing him a fellowship to their prestigious Chief Executives Program, and he has received numerous grants, awards and honors.

Ben Estes lives in Kingston, NY and is the author of the poetry collections ABC Moonlight and Illustrated Games of Patience. Ben has also edited Together & Alone: The Photographs of Karlheinz Weinberger; The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield; and the poetry anthology On The Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing. With Alan Felsenthal he runs The Song Cave, and together they edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind, the Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton.