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Where the Heart Beats

John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

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Where the Heart Beats

By: Kay Larson
Narrated by: Jason Wineinger
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About this listen

A "heroic" biography of John Cage and his "awakening through Zen Buddhism" - "a kind of love story" about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture (The New York Times).

Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli were among those influenced by his "teaching" and "preaching". Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.

©2012 Kay Larson (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Art Buddhism Entertainment & Celebrities Spirituality Celebrity
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Larson's excellent account of Cafe's influences and influence on the creative and spiritual also the intellectual. It is subtle and profound, often, very beautiful. Have struggled to get to grips with the music of Cage Where the Heart Beats has me reaappraising my previous ideas and listening and thinking about it with appreciation. It is also broad. It is about Art and artists. It is about Zen without the feeling you are quite getting it: tangible. Bloody Good!

Between the beats.

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I knew little about John Cage and found this dazzling book utterly absorbing, not just as an introduction to Cage and his work, but as an accessible history of twentieth-century art and ideas, and the influences of Asian and European thought on the US. Kay Larson handles what at times is highly abstract and demanding content with a lightness of touch that is an absolute joy, and layers the warm, human stories of Cage and his contemporaries in a way that kept me absorbed and delighted from the first moment to the last.
Two points of criticism: firstly that the narration promises a full translation of the Heart Sutra at the end of the book which doesn't appear in the audio. Secondly Jason Wineinger's narration caused me many moments of grimacing as he mangled the considerable number of foreign-language quotes throughout. This book needed an American voice, and his reading is spot on for the bulk of the book, but his awful handling of the many names, terms and references in Japanese, French, Sanskrit and more let the reading down. With these caveats I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Cage, Zen, the art of the twentieth-century and the creative process: one of my favourites of 2020.

Dazzling Introduction to Cage!

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