No composer was more controversial, prolific, or more misunderstood than John Cage (1912-1992). No critic has spent more years defending Cage and his work than Richard Kostelanetz. This work summarizes a lifetime's study of Cage's music, literary works, art, and philosophy. It both introduces Cage to the neophyte and offers valuable insights for the seasoned listener.

John Cage Ex(plain)ed

Biographies & Memoirs

Kostelanetz, Richard

Arts & Literature

Schirmer Trade Books

Thirty-five essays explore major topics in modern music, including Machine Art, Electronic Art and the Aesthetics of Technology; Perspectives on Composers and Modern Society; Sound Space, and Meaning; Twelve-Tone and Serial Composition; Music Among the Arts; and Jazz and Popular Music. Includes contributions from Ives, Gershwin, Varése, Schoenberg, Babbitt, James Joyce, Amiri Baraka, and more.

Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music: A Continuing Symposium

Arts & Photography

Darby, Joseph

Music

Wadsworth Publishing

B.B. King, the household name for blues, has been the most fortunate and unusual of bluesmen: a success on his own terms, and in his own time. He remains perhaps the best-known blues musician, respected and loved by both the knowledgeable fan and the occasional listener. The B.B. King Companion draws on articles, interviews and reviews to give readers an inside look at the guitar playing, blues singing, Grammy Award-winning King of the Blues.Richard Kostelanetz is writer and/or editor of a number of Schirmer Books titles including Fillmore East, John Cage (ex)plain(ed), Writings on Glass, The Frank Zappa Companion, and Classic Essays on Twentieth Century Music

The B. B. King Companion

Kostelanetz, Andre

This interdisciplinary guide covers the most influential avant garde art movements of the past 150 years, ranging from futurism to free-jazz. It has been updated and revised to include greater coverage of women artists, and the internet and other emerging technologies.

Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes

History & Criticism

Schirmer

For three short years, from 1968 to 1971, New York's Fillmore East, housed in an abandoned second run movie house on New York's Lower East Side, was the greatest rock palace in the world. The best acts played there; it had its own resident light show presenting some of the most exciting visual images ever seen; and it was managed by the imaginative Bill Graham, who specialized in introducing the audience to new acts. Fans came from around the world and across the neighborhood; one dedicated audience member, then-twenty-eight-year-old performance artist and writer Richard Kostelanetz, attended religiously, keeping notes on the performances, interviewing the musicians, and documenting the shows. Now, he has pulled together these documents, along with original program notes and memories of other regulars, to produce the complete history of the theater. Photographer Raeanne Rubenstein, who got her start as a teenage news photographer, has opened her files to provide many never-before-seen performance photos of the greatest acts. This is a must-have for those who were there and all those who wish they could have been!

The Fillmore East: Recollections of Rock Theater

Schirmer Reference

The edge of adaptation: man and the emerging society (The Human futures series)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

PRENTICE/HALL

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's diversified approach to art embraced work in painting, sculpture, graphics, film, "light machines", stage design, typography and commercial art. "Fine Art" - the museum object - was peripheral to Moholy's purpose. Believing that "everybody is talented", he attempted to invent forms and images that would be meaningful to all. In his passionate concern with the individual and his faith in the social values of art, Moholy was one of the inspired teachers of our century. Moholy was also highly articulate and a number of his most forceful writings, drawn from all periods of his life, form the core of this collection. Essays reprinted here touch on his theories of art, his social vision, his principles of education, the potentialities of motion pictures, still photography and light as a self contained medium of expression. Also included are essays by a number of important figures in art and architectural history. More than 80 photographs show how Moholy realized in physical form the concepts and theories expressed in his essays. "Moholy-Nagy - An Anthology" aims to be both a reference work and a stimulating experience for anyone interested in 20th-century art and culture.

Moholy-nagy

Da Capo Press

One of America's most distinguished independent artists/intellectuals, Richard Kostelanetz, has written a prescient volume that uses, as a starting point, the philosopher Robin Collingwood's notion that the historian and the novelist have much in common, for both attempt to define the largest lines of historical development. Aside from the introduction and conclusion, which were specifically written for this publication, these insightful chapters on four outstanding African-American novelists were composed and appeared in journals in the late 1960s. Kostelanetz saw the writing on the wall and told readers about it more than twenty years ago. In his analysis of the novels written by pioneering Black novelists James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Richard Wright (1908-1960), and Ralph Ellison (1914-), Kostelanetz culls their political meanings and interprets experience suggestive of political meanings. Kostelanetz places these meanings into a chronological framework that transforms the book from a political or literary history into a history of ideas in literature. This painstaking analysis of fiction--to deduce themes that are then interpreted as intellectual history--is an original scholarly approach to these novels.
After presenting a typology of political alternatives for African-America, Kostelanetz looks at the work of writer/diplomat/editor James Weldon Johnson, whose groundbreaking novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, appeared in 1912. Chapter three analyzes the novels of writer/editor/teacher W. E. B. Du Bois, whose work promoted greater understanding of African-Americans. Richard Wright, hailed as the most eloquent spokesman for African-Americans of his generation upon publication of his powerful first novel, Native Son, is considered in the following chapter. Chapter five is devoted to Ralph Ellison whose first novel, The Invisible Man, won the National Book Award and achieved prominence as a primary text on the experience of Blacks in America. This close reading of fiction for political implications closes with an appendix of two essays also written in the 1960s about the figures and issues discussed in this study. The novels treated here retain a kind of eye-witness account from the front immediacy that, combined with Kostelanetz's enduring insights, will make Politics in the African-American Novel an important addition to courses in American history, African-American politics, or African-American literature. Informed general readers will also find much to ponder in this book.

Politics in the African-American Novel: James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Praeger

Seeing through shuck (A Ballantine Walden edition)

Ballantine Books

Soho: The Rise and Fall documents how a little-known industrial neighborhood in New York became, through one of the accidents of history, a nexus of creative activity for a brief but intensive period. Such an ideal situation--entirely unplanned--could not last forever; the author shows how market forces squeezed out this art utopia, to be replaced by a shadow of its former self.

Soho

Routledge

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Books by Kostelanetz, Richard