Author: Kay Larson
Title: Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner LIfe of Artists
Publisher: Penguin Press, NY, NY
Country: USA
Format: book (illustrated. 474 pages)
Price: $29.95
Publishing date: September 5, 2012

John Cage ‘s immense contribution to the arts – and to music by Brian Eno and Philip Glass, Morton Feldman and Pierre Boulez, Nam June Paik and La Monte Young – has a crucial yet invisible Zen component.

A new biography, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Life of Artists (Penguin Press, 2012), by critic Kay Larson (New York Magazine, the New York Times), makes visible the music of Cage’s Zen path.

In the 1950s, Cage heard lectures on Zen by the great Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki. These ancient teachings spoke to Cage as though meant just for him. He wrote music based on Zen principles of indeterminacy and chance, and a “silent piece” (4’33”) that honors Suzuki’s teachings. Cage’s transformation became ground zero in a new international postmodern art, music, and performance avant-garde that still honors him as pioneer.