New Music in the United States (1950-1980)

HAVING RECENTLY MOVED TO A FASTER computer — iMac, 2 gHz — I've decided to start retooling my website. And having re-read, a couple of days ago, a longish article I wrote on Stockhausen fifteen years ago, I've been reconsidering some of the stuff I wrote back in the days I was doing that for a living.

One by one, as I get to them, and as I get permissions where needed, I'll be putting these things up on the website. I begin with an article written nearly thirty years ago for publication (in Italian translation) in a single-volume music encyclopedia, Storia della musica, published in 1982 by Arnoldo Mondadori. Here's the lede, to use the journalistic jargon

WHEN JOHN CAGE composed his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra in 1952 he completed the process, begun in 1946, by which his music was to form an apparently irreconcileable break between two concurrent streams of contemporary music.

You can find the article in two versions:
html
pdf

Happy reading.