Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition

Silence, John Cage’s first book and epic masterpiece, was published in October 1961. In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching. Fifty years later comes a beautiful new edition with a foreword by eminent music critic Kyle Gann. A landmark book in American arts and culture, Silence has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold over half a million copies worldwide. Wesleyan University Press is proud to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication with this special hardcover edition.

• Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
• Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
• Grapefruit
• Give My Regards To Eighth Street (Exact Change)
• Composition in Retrospect
• John Cage: Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
• The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century)
• A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings
• Interviews with Francis Bacon