New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s by Leonardo (review)

chips or swatches with close tolerances to the original chips many years later. The pigments used in the coating are also more lightfast than the pigments used in printing inks, so these samples will retain their colors longer than printed samples. The company also offers the same colors in both 8V2-x-llin and 17-x-2-in sheets. This is a very attractive and handy set of colors for those who need to specify or identify light, fairly neutral colors, and for artists whose work calls for careful color control. The notational system is easily learned since it is based on psychological parameters of hue, lightness and grayness. The matte or glossy Munsell Bookof Colorwill be more useful to individuals who need a full range of colors. I-VI byJohn Cage. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 1990. 452 pp., illus. with 2 cassettes. Trade, $34.95. ISBN: 0-674-44007-2. Reviewed fry Carter Scholz, 2665 Virginia St., Berkeley, CA 94709, U.S.A. For a composer of such evident originality and craft, it is astonishing how much public resistance and uneasiness John Cage has provoked over the years. A common response has been one of praising his writing and his 'ideas' while somehow dismissing the music that is their foundation. It is hard to understand how anyone could dismiss seminal works such as the Sonatasand Interludes, the String Q;tartet of 1950, Music of Changes, Atlas Eclipticalis, the Variations, the Freeman Etudes,and many many others from every period of Cage's career, unless explication is considered more important than listening. Cage has always been his own best explicator. The excellence of his prose is self-evident; most fulltime writers could learn lessons of clarity, honesty and acuity from Cage. But the strength of his writing comes directly from his musical thinking and his committed compositional practice; it is not a thing apart. Since Silence (1961), Cage's writing has moved ever closer to his musical practice, and away from prose exposition . Readers who still hope to avoid his music for his anecdotes and aphorisms will receive scant comfort from I-VI, the document of the 1989 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered by Cage at Harvard University . These lectures, to give them their full title, "MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy InterpenetrationImitationDevotion CircumstancesVariableStructure NonunderstandingContingency InconsistencyPerformance ", are all 'mesostics', a Cage-invented text-form in which the letters of a central word are written vertically like a spine, with fragments of text crossing them. In I-VI, the 'spine' words come from the long title, and the cross-text is selected by chance operations from published writings by Thoreau, Wittgenstein, Fuller, McLuhan, Cage himself and from daily newspapers. The only exposition in I-VIis a brief introduction , a transcription of question-andanswer sessions running as a footnote the length of the book and a 30-page appendix of the unmanipulated source text. Included are two 60-min audio cassettes, one of lecture IV, the other ofa question-and-answer session. In his introduction Cage writes, "I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking ofquestions.... If I know what I'm doing, I can do it in such a way that I know nothing about it." This statement, puckish at first glance, is scrupulously exact. The act of asking questions to which one does not know the answers instead of using compositional rhetorics to get the answers one desires comprises 'knowing nothing' about a situation. But Cage chooses his questions with unerring instinct, and in that sense he knows exactly what he is doing. Indeed, directly after stating "I gave up making choices", Cage continues for five pages describing in minute detail the multitude of choices he made in preparing these lectures. In light of this, there is an interesting moment on the question-andanswer cassette. Describing his preparations , Cage says at one point, "And then I took out the words I didn't like." A young man, sensing a contradiction with Cage's use of chance operations as a way to get past his 'likes' and 'dislikes', asks him about that word. Cage answers with care: "I used the word 'like'. It's because I'm in...