Paul Hillier

JOHN CAGE and the Music of Always

- 79 mesostics re and not re John Cage

Excerpt from Paul Hillier's after-words to the book:
I began these mesostics a day or so after reading that John Cage had died. I soon decided that there should be seventy-nine of them – one for each year of his life. Just as Cage had culled readings from the work of several writers, Thoreau and Joyce most prominent among them, I wanted in my turn to construct a little tribute by exploring various writings of and about Cage himself, and a handful of other writers whom I felt he would have enjoyed experiencing in this way. Among these additional source texts are The Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous 14th-century English); Heraclitus fragments; William Billings (his introductions to his books of psalmody), the composer from the time of the American Revolution, whose music Cage used for his Hymns and Variations; Russolo – The Art of Noises; Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the I Ching. For those new to the idea, a mesostic is like an acrostic, but with the subject or theme word down the middle instead of down the edge. Cage established special rules for working through a text to create a sequence of words, so that the selection would be limited and guided by chance rather than taste. In effect these sequences form a chain of short poems. Usually the theme word was the name of someone – very often the writer of the text itself. In this case, it is of course the name John Cage.

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