The Saturday before last (May 22), I read a paper at the Music and the Moving Image Conference at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. What a great experience! Usually at conferences I have to hunt down the papers on topics that interest me. Here I had to make a number 0f painful decisions when two interesting presentations were being given simultaneously!

As usual, I’m posting the paper as I read it at the conference. Click here to download a PDF version of the paper. Slides and visual examples appear at the end of the PDF. A streaming video of my presentation can be found here (panel #18), but I haven’t been able to open the file.

Follow the jump to read an HTML version of the paper.

John Cage squeezing a rubber duck on I’ve Got a Secret, February 24, 1960

(Yeah, yeah… I know… It’s not a Zappa paper per se. But it is highly relevant to the chapter I’m currently working on that considers Cage’s influence on Zappa and his contemporaries. More to come!)

Continue reading “Laughter Over Tears: John Cage, Experimental Art Music, and Popular Television” →