"As glimpses of Cage near his career's end, MUSICAGE is invaluable . . . To people familiar only with Cage's music, the interviews devoted to his writing and visual art will be most revealing . . . The longest interview is devoted to music, and it has an absorbing addendum in which cellist Michael Bach joins the conversation. These parts of the discussion are the most explicit and technical and provide some of the most detailed insights available into Cage's thinking about the bearing of traditional instruments' acoustic capacities on the possibilities of composition. No less useful, though, are passing remarks that seem to illuminate the whole terrain of Cage's work."
~San Francisco Chronicle
"Joan Retallack's conversations with John Cage are a pleasure to read — two interesting minds at work and play. Cage enjoyed talking, but also listening. An exchange of ideas was one of his life-streams."
~Merce Cunningham
"Of all the books on John Cage that have appeared since his death in 1992, this is without doubt the most informative, offering its readers a rich and thought-provoking profile of one of this century's greatest artists in the last years of his life. Cage on words, on art, on music. The intelligent inquisitiveness of both interviewer and interviewee is refreshingly evident at every turn, giving further evidence (if any is needed) of the truth in Cage's life-long insistence that the world is an interesting place not for the answers it provides, but for the questions we ask.""
~Laura Kuhn, Executive Director, The John Cage Trust
""This compendium of Cagean thought . . . will baffle those unversed in his unique mixture of Zen Buddhism, American pragmatism, and Utopian anarchism . . . Cage, as always, is good company, a master aphorist who has an endless supply of pithy sayings . . . [his] thoughts that will surely knot your brow.""
~Kirkus Reviews
""The two friends plumb some fascinating depths that reveal the unbuttoned landscape of Cage's mind . . . The intellectual level is quite high, and even Cage's detractors will find themselves stimulated by many of the ideas presented on these pages.""
~Library Journal
""As glimpses of Cage near his career's end, MUSICAGE is invaluable . . . To people familiar only with Cage's music, the interviews devoted to his writing and visual art will be most revealing . . . The longest interview is devoted to music, and it has an absorbing addendum in which cellist Michael Bach joins the conversation. These parts of the discussion are the most explicit and technical and provide some of the most detailed insights available into Cage's thinking about the bearing of traditional instruments' acoustic capacities on the possibilities of composition. No less useful, though, are passing remarks that seem to illuminate the whole terrain of Cage's work.""
~San Francisco Chronicle
""Cage's constant amusement, his endless curiosity, his insistence on seeing life and art always in a new way, emerge vividly. The result is in effect a study of his thought in motion as he sometimes playfully but always seriously responds to Retallack's informed and sympathetic questioning . . . A highly accessible and personal introduction to a remarkable if elusive artist.""
~Publishers Weekly
