Book Review

Anarchy. By John Cage. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6466-4 (cloth). 91 pp. $25.00

In 1967 John Cage dedicated his book A Year from Monday "to us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less." That dedication took on an eerily prophetic resonance on September 11, 2001, about the same time that Wesleyan University Press published this unassuming volume of Cageian "mesostics," written in January 1988, on the subject of anarchy. With the gradual removal of what might be called the "ego of the composer" from his work, beginning in the late 1940s, Cage's music inevitably took on a socially constructivist character through the 1950s and 1960s, as chance procedures aimed at fostering both individual discipline and communal consensus. By the late 1960s, Cage's books seemed to deal as much with working out Marshall McLuhan's "global village" media theory, the geopolitical futurism of R. Buckminster Fuller, and the equitable distribution of utilities as they did ostensibly "musical" issues.