Photographs by Roberto Masotti, Lelli e Masotti Forewords by Joan La Barbara, Franco Masotti, Veniero Rizzardi . The book "John Cage, in a landscape" is based on a rich photographic material taken to the American composer and theorist between 1977 and 1991, mainly by Roberto Masotti and in the remaining part by Lelli and Masotti, both during events that took place in Italy and abroad, like in his New York house.
To John Cage correspond such a multiplicity of aspects that it is even difficult to orientate yourself. If you are not unfamiliar with the variety of paths that his thought has taken, resulting in one of the most influential and decisive of the twentieth century, you might think, wrongly, that he was a character out of the box, an eclectic, an "inventor", so he judged him Schoenberg. His compositional and design activity in the musical field has proved increasingly important and remains permeated by his thought as well as by his vision of art and life. Aesthetics and philosophy are open to the world, to that of sounds in particular, to nature, to chance. His path started from the happening, which transgressed the theater, and from the invention, like that of the prepared piano.
Cage continued to transform the idea of art and music until the end, relentlessly. The coexistence of silence and noise, the contrast between them and, within visual procedures, the transparency and lightness of intimately poetic minimal gestures are themes and characters that mark a path full of many points of no return.