Writing

The Influence of Artaud’s Cruelty on Experimental and Durational Music

Susan Sontag’s 1973 introduction to Artaud’s complete works constitutes an eloquent and compelling argument for the importance of Antonin Artaud and his concepts for a Theater of Cruelty on the contemporary theater landscape. While there were of course many other modern-era artists and thinkers who made essential contributions to the Western theatrical landscape, Sontag points out that none of them upended the form itself quite as profoundly as Artaud:

Upon that art, theater, he has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater inWestern Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods – before Artaud and after Artaud. No one who works in the theater now is untouched by the impact of Artaud’s specific ideas about the actor’s body and voice, the use of music, the role of the written text, the interplay between the space occupied by the spectacle and the audience’s space. Artaud changed the understanding of what was serious, what was worth doing. (xxxviii)
Despite such high praise, Sontag’s analysis does not take Artaud’s influence beyond the scope of the theater. Though less discussed, it is curious that Artaud was not even introduced to the arts scene in the United States through theater practitioners. If it weren’t for a clique of experimental composers, musicians, and literary artists including David Tudor, John Cage, and Mary Caroline Richards, Artaud’s influence might have been significantly curtailed. Though Artaud’s name was circulating beyond France by the 1950s, there was no definitive translation of his work until Richards undertook the task in 1958. This translation had important implications for theater in the United States and it remains the de-facto English translation of The Theater and Its Double to this day. Further, the connection between Artaud and Tudor, Cage, and the experimental music scene in New York City in the 1950s contains interesting implications for Artaud’s influence beyond just the contemporary theater. Through this essay I plan on tracking the trajectory of Artaud’s influence beginning with Pierre Boulez in Paris and travelling through David Tudor, John Cage, M.C. Richards and eventually the Living Theater. Further, I will explore the influence that Artaud’s theories might have had on John Cage as he conceptualized what would become the 1963 presentation of Satie’s Vexations at the Pocket Theater in New York. This connection not only implies Artaud’s influence on experimental music. It suggests that Artaud’s theories for the Theater of Cruelty are an element (if even a small one) etched in the DNA of durational music from the 1960s onward.

Born in Marseille in 1896, Antonin Artaud spent much of his adult life in Paris where he penned essays, letters, and poetry, created (or attempted to create) stage plays, and acted in a variety of early movies before disavowing cinema all together. In 1931, he attended a performance of Balinese dance-theater at an exhibition in Paris which would heavily shape his thinking. Not long after this experience, he began writing his manifesto for the Theater of Cruelty. The manifesto (along with his other essays contained in The Theater and Its Double) outlined a radical new concept for theatrical performance inspired by his understanding (and in many ways appropriation) of Balinese theater. Amidst many exclamatory remarks and a variety of weighty denunciations, Artaud outlines many dramatic splits with Western theater of the time. One of his largest points was his intent to de-value spoken text. Artaud was not interested in using text to tell a story and explore a character’s psychology. Instead, his theatre was a visceral one and anything that involved psychological processing for performer or audience (including listening and responding to known spoken languages) was anathema. Artaud wished to create mass spectacles which would pulverize the sensibility of the spectator through “cries, groans, apparitions, surprises, theatricalities of all kinds…” (93). Artaud committed pages of writing to descriptions of the visceral sights, sounds, and feelings that his theater would evoke. The compilation and realization of these theatricalities in space would, he imagined, create a kind of anarchic poetry (where the relationship of known signs and significations are broken) or, as he called it, a sense of danger. This would in turn allow audiences “to see themselves as they are…and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it [the theater] invites them [the spectators] to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it” (31).

Unfortunately, Artaud would never realize these ideas. His theories exist on a very ideological and even mystical plane, and they ignore practical considerations. Artaud’s inability to realize his ideas has led many to call the theater of cruelty an “impossible theater” (Barber qtd. in Smigel 175). However, this impossibility did not and has not deterred other artists from engaging with his work. By the time Artaud was released from his stay in Rodez asylum in 1947, protégé’s of Artaud and artists of various mediums in Paris were already drawing inspiration from The Theater and Its Double. These artists, including the young composer Pierre Boulez, laid the groundwork for Artaud’s writing to cross the Atlantic Ocean and find resonance in the young pianist, David Tudor.

As Eric Smigel points out in his article Recital Hall of Cruelty, before an English translation of Artaud’s work existed, a young David Tudor procured a copy of The Theater and Its Double while rehearsing the United States premiere of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata. Tudor had been struggling how to approach Boulez’s sonata as the piece was “devoid of conventional hierarchies” (Smigel 172) and lacked a clear form in the traditional Western classical sense. In his preparation of the score, Tudor studied French to learn more about Boulez through the composer’s writings. During this study, Tudor came across Boulez’s article “Propositions,” published in 1948. In the article, Boulez (qtd. in Smigel) directly references Artaud in relation to his own musical practice: “I think that music should be collective hysteria and magic, violently modern-along the lines of Antonin Artaud” (172). Not only did Boulez’s writing help Tudor understand the Second Sonata’s intent, but it also introduced him to the work of Artaud.

Boulez himself seems to have come across Artaud in two key places. First, at twenty-two years old, Boulez attended one of Artaud’s last public readings after his release from the Rodez (Smigel 175). Second, Boulez was exposed to dramatic work in the style of Artaud while working at the Théâtre Marigny as musical director beginning in 1946. The theater’s director was Jean-Louis Barrault, a mime and performer who worked directly with Artaud and infused many of Artaud’s ideas into his company. Barrault clearly defines his relationship with Artaud’s work in Reflections on the Theater (1949) where he states that “The Theater and its Double is far and away the most important thing that has been written about the theater in the twentieth century…” (49). As Smigel points out, Boulez had been working with Barrault for two years when the Second Sonata was completed. It can be inferred that by this point the young composer had been immersed in Artaud’s ideas both theoretically and practically.

Before the premiere of the Second Sonata, Tudor managed to procure a French copy of The Theater and Its Double. This text would become quite important to the young pianist. He states that in order to play Boulez’s sonata, “I recall how my mind had to change in order to be able to do it… All of a sudden I saw that there was a different way of looking at musical continuity, having to deal with what Artaud called the affective athleticism. It has to do with the disciplines that an actor goes through. It was a real breakthrough for me, because my musical consciousness in the meantime changed completely… I had to put my mind in a state of non-continuity-not remembering-so that each moment is alive” (qtd. in Smigel 173). On one hand, this was a profound revelation for Tudor. He later defined this time period as a breakthrough in his practice where he “became aware another kind of musical continuity was possible.” (qtd. in Smigel 173). On the other hand, the practical nature of the inspiration Tudor gleaned from Artaud is not clearly defined. Not only is Artaud’s theoretical writing highly abstract and lacking in practicalities, but Tudor’s location in the United States meant that he was only dealing with Artaud in an exclusively theoretical capacity. Unlike Boulez in Paris, it can be assumed that Tudor had no means of working with anyone like Barrault who was exploring Artaud’s ideas on the stage. Further, given Artaud’s relative obscurity outside of France at that time, it is unlikely that David Tudor was even able to attend any performance utilizing Artaud’s concepts. Despite these practical concerns, Tudor’s writing makes it clear that he underwent a change of sensibility in the early 1950s which was informed by the theories of Antonin Artaud.

It was also around this time that David Tudor and composer John Cage developed a friendship and began collaborating on Cage’s Music of Changes, a piece specifically written for Tudor. Cage had met Boulez a few years before during his travels to Paris in 1949 and began writing to Boulez as he worked with David Tudor on Music of Changes. In fact, Cage seems to have introduced Boulez to David Tudor. In December 1950, Cage wrote to Boulez where he praised Tudor’s performance of Boulez’s Second Sonata and provided a short preamble to Tudor and his work. It is also through Cage and Boulez’s letters that we first hear of John Cage’s contact with the work of Artaud. In May 1951, Cage writes “…I have been reading a great deal of Artaud (This because of you and through Tudor who read Artaud because of you)…I will soon send you a copy of the first part of the piano piece [Music of Changes]. The essentially underlying idea is that each thing is itself, that its relations with other things spring up naturally rather than being imposed by any abstraction of an artist’s part. (See Artaud on an objective synthesis.)” (75).

We can understand Cage’s reference to “objective synthesis” through some of Artaud’s writings in The Theater and Its Double, a book Tudor had seemingly shown Cage by the time of the letter. “It is in the light of magic and sorcery that the mise en scene must be considered, not as a reflection of a written text… but as the burning projection of all the objective consequences of a gesture, word, sound, music, and their combinations. This active projection can be made only upon the stage…and the author who uses written words only has nothing to do with the theater and must give way to specialists in its objective and animated sorcery” (73). For Artaud, prescribed, pre-written text was the enemy to a true, pure, and energizing theater. Cage seems to relate Artaud’s idea (the burning projection of objective consequences of a gesture, word, etc.) to his own interests in chance operations and indeterminacy. In a letter to Tudor describing Music for Changes he suggests that “the guiding principle for performance should be to act so that each action is itself (that means infinitely different and incomparable, single, never before or ever later to occur, so that each moment makes history.)” (qtd. in Smigel 181). Artaud expresses a very similar concept in No More Masterpieces. “all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, that a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and that the theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice” (75).

Cage and Artaud are further connected by their mutual interest in spirituality. Both artists defined a spiritual component to their artistic work. In the first place, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty was highly influenced by his viewing of Balinese theatrical performance, a style that has a history of being performed as a ritual to commune with or invoke spirits (Lieberman). Further, all of Artaud’s concepts for theater and art revolve around a spiritual center and a desire for humans to reconnect with a kind of spirituality or magic. “And the question we must now ask is whether, in this slippery world which is committing suicide without noticing it, there can be found a nucleus of men capable of imposing this superior notion of the theater, men who will restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe” (32). Likewise, Cage’s clear and well-documented embrace of Zen Buddhism was important to his artistic life. Not unlike Artaud’s spiritual interests, Zen places importance on the present moment asking us to work against psychological processing. Cage clarifies the relationship between Zen and his artistic work clearly in the foreword to Silence.“What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen. I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. I shall continue making them, however” (xi).

This is not to say that Artaud necessarily served as an inspiration for Cage to start working with indeterminacy or spirituality in his practice. Cage began attending the lectures of the Zen educator Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki at Columbia University from as early as 1949, before he encountered The Theater and Its Double through Tudor. Even before discussing Artaud, he references Teitaro and Zen in the Boulez correspondence (65). Additionally, he was given an English translation of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, by Christian Wolff in 1951, around the same time he wrote to Boulez discussing Artaud. While Cage’s connection with Artaud is somewhat suggestive, the I-Ching’s influence on his work is quite clear and far more defined. He says as much in an interview in 1972, “But when I wrote Music for Changes, derived by chance operations from the I Ching, I had ideas in my head as to what would happen in working out this process…they didn’t happen…but I accepted them, admitting I was “not in charge” but was “ready to be changed” by what I was doing” (Cage and Kostelanetz 112). While Artaud may not have been a dominant influence on Music for Changes in the way the I-Ching was, we know that Cage was at least engaging with Artaud around the same time frame. Further, his comment on Artaud’s objective synthesis suggests that he was at least somewhat inspired by Artaud’s work in the context of creating Music for Changes with Tudor. Admittedly, this inspiration was potentially less about the totality of Artaud’s theater and more about fitting Artaud’s theories into his new musical ideas.

Unlike Artaud’s speculative influence on Cage and his work with indeterminacy, David Tudor’s interest in Artaud and the Theater of Cruelty had a clear and potentially wider reaching trajectory. In 1951 Tudor was invited to his first residency at Black Mountain College where he showed his manuscript of the Theater and its Double to Mary Caroline Richards, a poet and writer teaching at the college at the time. Richards would later publish the first and still most definitive English translation of the collection. Given their mutual friendship and Richards growing work on the translation, we can potentially infer that Richards, Tudor, and Cage had ample opportunity to discuss Artaud while at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951 and again when the three of them returned in 1952. Further, according to Richards, in the summer of 1952, John Cage composed an event titled Theater Piece No. 1 which was inspired by a closer reading of her translation of Artaud. In Richard’s account,

[The event was] composed by John Cage, who announced it as a lecture: while he lectured at a podium in a somber black suit, all hell broke loose, with the audience seated squarely in the middle of it: David Tudor played the piano, Merce Cunningham danced, Bob Rauschenberg played a grind-up victrola, I climbed a ladder and recited a poem…If the consternation of the audience was any clue – prevented, as it thought, from hearing the lecture clearly – instead, submitted to a black magic, as one of them complained – we did SOMETHING. (qtd. in Smigel 185)
We do not only have to take Richard’s word for the alignment of this event with Artaud’s concepts for theater because there are many obvious aesthetic similarities. The audience was surrounded and even overwhelmed by a variety of gestures and events presented without narrative. The words spoken in the event were not comprehensible and if they were, were unimportant. What prevails is a sense of chaos, a “diffusion of action over an immense space,” (97) as Artaud puts it in his manifesto. Though there are some clear distinctions between this happening and Artaud’s theatrical ideals, specifically in the seeming lack of coordination or precision of the gestures in the happening, it is not a stretch to believe that such an event was generated with the influence of Artaud in mind.

Richards’s subsequent 1958 translation of The Theater and Its Double would go on to have significant impacts on avant-garde theater in the United States. In 1958, Richards introduced her translation to Julian Beck and Judith Malina, founders and leaders of the Living Theater (Tytell 148). This exchange between friends would turn out to be a pivotal moment for Beck and Malina. Both artists were very drawn to Artaud and his work would inspire them to create some of their most notorious projects including “The Connection” and “The Brig.” These works would cement the Living Theater’s status as the first American theater company to engage directly with Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and to this day the Living Theater remains one of the most if not the most important artist collective to engage with Artaud’s ideas in the United States. Their legacy would go on to inspire later theater-makers like Richard Schechner, Richard Foreman, and most notably Peter Brook who created a Theater of Cruelty Season at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England in 1964. (Di Ponio).

Artaud aside, John Cage’s relationship to the theater in general is well documented. In Cage’s own words from his 1957 address to the Music Teachers National Association, “Where do we go from here? Towards theater. The art more than music resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we are alive to use them” (Silence 12). Specifically, Cage shared a high degree of overlap with Beck and Malina of the Living Theater. In fact, Music of Changes, the piano work for David Tudor discussed earlier, was premiered at a Living Theater concert series at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York on January 1, 1952 (Tytell, 79). Cage’s connection with the Living Theater also contains implications for his work in musical duration. According to John Tytell in his book on the Living Theater, Judith Malina and Julian Beck met John Cage through the composer Lou Harrison at a dance concert in either May or June 1951. A few months later in August 1951, Cage would attend a performance Malina and Beck presented in their living room. In September 1951, Beck and Malina visited Cage and Merce Cunningham, who would go onto be a life partner of Cage’s in a romantic and artistic capacity, at their apartment. Cage and Cunningham “had expressed an interest in sharing a place that could be used for concerts and dance recitals.” At this meeting, Cage proposed staging a “piece by Satie that consisted of eight hundred and forty repetitions of a one-minute composition” (72). This seems to be a direct reference to Cage’s staging of Satie’s Vexations which would be presented about 12 years later in 1963. During the performance, Cage, with a host of friends (including David Tudor), performed 840 repetitions of Satie’s theme over eighteen hours and forty minutes.

Despite not being presented until 1963, John Cage learned about Vexations in 1949 when an associate of Satie’s brough it to his attention (Sweet 4). This meeting in 1951 between Cage, Malina, Beck, and Cunningham suggests that he was already considering a durational presentation of the composition in the early 50s. What is interesting is both the timing of this meeting in September 1951, only a few months after Cage’s letter to Boulez mentioning Artaud, and the fact that he proposed this staging to Malina and Beck, two known experimental theater practitioners. It is not implausible to imagine that Cage was drawing influence from his readings of Artaud as he proposed this staging to these two theater artists. Perhaps he was already drawing parallels between the potential of durational work to Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. While this is speculative, the relative timing of these events at least suggests that The Theater and Its Double was an influence on Cage and drew him towards Vexations. Further, a small side comment Cage made in a letter printed in Musical America in April 1951 shows that Cage had Artaud on his mind as he engaged with Satie’s works. The letter was in response to an article about Satie by Abraham Skulsky. In it, Cage defends Satie and takes a swipe at the arts industry, “Now, for Mr. Skulsky’s information (and incidentally Musical America’s too), let it be said that art is not a business; if it is, it is a “swinishness” (I quote Antonin Artaud) and nothing more” (qtd. in Shlomowitz). Though primarily a somewhat snarky comment, it reveals that Artaud had some form of conscious or unconscious seat alongside Satie in the mind of John Cage in 1951 when he proposed Vexations to Beck and Malina of the Living Theater.

It should be clarified that Cage’s interest in Satie and duration as a structure far predates his engagement with Artaud. Cage arranged Satie’s Socrate for Merce Cunningham in 1945 and went on to stage a festival of Satie’s music at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948, at least two years before he ever heard of Antonin Artaud (Shlomowitz). We also know that Cage considered duration to be foundational to Satie’s work at this time. During the 1948 festival, Cage gave a pre-concert talk which was not printed until 1968 in Richard Kostelantez’s book John Cage under the title “Defense of Satie.” In this talk, Cage argues that “the only new structural idea to emerge since Beethoven is to be found in the work of Satie (and early Webern), where structure is defined in terms of time lengths” (qtd. in Shlomowitz). Cage goes on to argue that sound and silence only share one core element which is that of duration.

Cage’s interest in duration remains an essential element of his work from this period on and his relationship with Satie’s music is a large part of this. However, it is plausible to imagine that Artaud might have been an influence as Cage conceptualized the durational presentation of Vexations. Not only was he engaging with the Theater of Cruelty and Satie’s work somewhat concurrently, Cage’s interest in the durational nature of Vexations has a clear aesthetic relation to Artaud’s writing in The Theater and Its Double. In Richard Kostelanetz’s 1987 composite interview of Cage (in which Kostelanetz compiles a variety of Cage’s “choices comments” together as if they were parts of a full conversation), Cage discusses the nature of repetition in the performance. “As it continued, we heard that it does not [repeat] – that each time it was played, it was different. As we heard that piece over and over again, our attention became very sharp, very clear; so that every slightest deviation from what it had been became clear” (115). Once again, Cage’s statement can be related to Artaud’s idea that theatrical gestures can never truly be repeated. Additionally, Cage’s discussion of how the repetitions of Vexations worked on one’s attention and focus also finds resonance in Artaud’s writing. “What is important is that, by positive means, the [audience’s] sensitivity is put in a state of deepened and keener perception, and this is the very object of the magic and rites of which the theater is only a reflection” (91). While Artaud did not discuss duration in detail, through extending the duration of Satie’s work (or performing it faithfully as written depending on one’s interpretation of the score), Cage was taking Artaud’s thoughts on gesture and repetition to a fuller potential. Not only does the seemingly endless repetition of this singular phrase showcase the variation and difference of each repetition, but the mere fact that one becomes aware of these differences over time shows an increased focus in the attention of the listener.

Though we can never know for sure how successful Cage was at eliciting such reactions in spectators, Sam Sweet’s somewhat cheeky New Yorker article on Vexations from 2013 provides a secondhand account. According to Sweet, those who sit through the entirety of Vexations“tend to agree on a common sequence of reactive stages: fascination morphs into agitation, which usually morphs into all-encompassing agony. But listeners who withstand that phase enter a deep state of tranquility. “Vexations” veterans often say that reentry into the natural world is thrilling because they are able to hear sound as if for the first time” (5). This description fits neatly into Artaud’s theatrical ideas. Like Artaud would have wished, Vexationstook a gesture to its extreme and in doing so surrounded its audience. However, this was done not by an onslaught of stimuli, but by time and duration itself. As Sweet describes, listeners, enveloped by time, were taken through an experience that did attack their sensibilities and created actual discomfort. One could argue that based on this kind of audience response, the durational aspect of this performance is cruel in the Artaudian sense even if it does not employ the same means of generating cruelty that Artaud advocated for.

Artaud would likely be the first to admit that the sensorial bombardment he advocated for in his manifestos was a means to an end and not an end in itself. As he explained many times and in many letters, he was not interested in cruelty solely for the sake of blood, gore, or even for provoking visceral reactions in spectators. He believed that by utilizing theatrical cruelty, one could unlock a kind of heightened sensibility in a spectator which would inspire them “to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it” (32). As Sweet mentions, listeners who make it through the “agony” of the work have the potential to find a very meaningful and potentially spiritual state. Cage describes a similar experience after the initial showing in 1963.

I think that the experience over the eighteen hours and forty minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them, or the realization that they were going to happen. For them to actually happen, to actually live through it, was a different thing. What happened was that we were very tired, naturally, after that length of time and I drove back to the country and I slept…an unusually long period of time; and when I woke up, I felt different than I had ever felt before. And furthermore, the environment that I looked out upon looked unfamiliar even though I had been living there. In other words, I had changed and the world had changed, and that’s what I meant by that statement. It wasn’t an experience that I alone had, but other people who had been in it wrote to me or called me up and said that they had had the same experience. (Kostelanetz and Cage 116)
Using an artist’s description of how they personally felt after a presentation of a work they coordinated as a part of one’s argument is potentially quite flawed. However, if we take Cage’s word that he and friends of his experienced a change of some kind after the performance of Vexations, then we can connect this outcome with Artaud’s desire for a transportive experience. As he outlines in his first manifesto for the Theater of Cruelty, “for all this magnetism, all this poetry, and all these direct means of spellbinding would be nothing if they were not used to put the spirit physically on the track of something else” (91). By performing Satie’s piece as 840 repetitions over an eighteen-hour period, Cage may have potentially coordinated a heightened and even magical or spiritual experience akin to what Artaud wished for the theater. Finally, though not a substantive piece of evidence in proving the influence of Artaud on John Cage, it is quite amusing that only one audience member stayed through the full eighteen hours and forty minutes (and received a full refund of $3). This person was, according to the New York Times, Karl Schenzer, “an actor in the Off Broadway production of The Brig.”

It is well understood that the introduction of Zen Buddhism and the I-Ching into the life of John Cage fundamentally influenced his artistic work and aided in the creation of pieces like Music for Changes and 4’33’’. However, Cage’s relationship with Antonin Artaud, which began around the same time, should not be taken for granted. According to M.C. Richards, their mutual readings of Artaud helped inspire the now infamous theater Piece No. 1. From there, Cage continued to exploration durational work in a variety of ways, eventually presenting Satie’sVexations, which was at the time, according to The New York Times, “The longest concert since Homer sang the entire “Illiad” and “Odyssey” (Ericson et al.). While Cage’s practice of Zen may have been a greater influence on him when he conceived of this performance, we cannot rule out the influence of Artaud. We know that Cage was actively discussing Artaud’s theories with friends including M.C. Richards, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez in the same year he brought up Vexations with the directors of the Living Theater. Further, the audience reaction to the performance of Vexation aligns in many ways with what Artaud hoped to inspire through his theatrical productions. Cage has remained a salient influence on a variety of composers from the early 1960s up until today, many of whom work extensively with durational composition. Although Artaud may have glossed over durational structures in his theatrical theories, this connection through Cage and Vexations suggests that Antonin Artaud plays at least a tangential role as an influence on music which engages in extended durations.

Works Cited

Books
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards, Grove Press, 1958.

Artaud, Antonin and Susan Sontag. Antonin Artaud Selected Writings. Translated by Helen Weaver, University of California Press, 1976.

Barrault, Jean-Louis. Reflections on the Theater. Translated by Barbara Wall, Rockliff Publishing, 1951. 49-50.

Boulez, Pierre and Cage, John. “The Boulez-Cage Correspondence: Selections.” The MIT Press, vol. 65, 1993, pp. 52-76. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/778763. Accessed 18, April 2023.

Cage, John. Silence. Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Tytell, John. The Living Theater: art, exile, and outrage. Grove Press, 1995.’

Articles
Antliff, Alan. “Poetic Tension, Aesthetic Cruelty: Paul Goodman, Antonin Artaud and the Living Theater.” Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies, no. 1 & 2: Anarchist Modernities. https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/17179. Accessed 22 April 2023.

Cage, John and Kostelanetz, Richard. “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 9, no. 4, 1987, pp. 102-130. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4335884. Accessed 20 April 2023.

Di Ponio, Amanda. “After Artaud: Peter Brook and The Theater of Cruelty Season.”Early Modern Theater of Cruelty and Its Doubles. Artaud and Influence (Avant-Gardes in Performance), Palgrave Macmillan, 22 August 2018, pp. 212-232.

Ericson, Raymond, et al. "Music: A Long, Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano." The New York Times, 11 Sept. 1963, p. 45.

Smigel, Eric. “Recital Hall of Cruelty: Antonin Artaud, David Tudor, and the 1950s Avant-Garde.” Perspectives of New Music, vol. 45, no. 2, 2007, pp. 171–202. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25164662. Accessed 18 April 2023.

Sorkin, Jenni. “The Pottery Happening: M. C. Richards’s “Clay Things to Touch…” (1958).” Getty Research Journal, no. 5, 2013, pp. 197-202. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41825359. Accessed 22 April 2023.

Sweet, Sam. “A Dangerous and Evil Piano Piece.” The New Yorker, 9 September 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-dangerous-and-evil-piano-piece. Accessed 23 April 2013.

Web
“History.” The Living Theater, https://www.livingtheater.org/detailed-history.

Lieberman, Frederich. “Relationships of Musical and Cultural Contrasts in Java and Bali.” UCSC,http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/lieberman/contrasts.html. Accessed 24 April 2023.

Shlomowitz, Matthew. “Cage’s Place in the Reception of Satie.” University of California at San Diego, https://www.shlom.com/?p=cagesatie. Accessed 22 April 2023.