Introduction

John Rockwell was born in Washington, D.C., in 1940 and was raised in San Francisco. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in German history and literature and received a PhD in cultural history from the University of California at Berkeley. After working as a classical music and dance critic for the Oakland Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he began writing about music of all kinds in increasingly influential capacities at the New York Times in 1972. From 1974 to 1980 he was the chief rock music critic and then became the classical music editor. He was director of New York's Lincoln Center Festival during 1994–96 and then rejoined the New York Times as Sunday arts editor, later becoming an arts columnist and currently serving as chief dance critic. He is a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters. His books include All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (1983) and Sinatra: An American Classic (1984); with Thomson he edited A Virgil Thomson Reader (1981); and he has written articles on a remarkable range of topics.

Interview

Approved by John Rockwell

PD Charles Hamm has claimed that Cage has had “a greater impact on world music than any other American composer of the twentieth century.” Your own approach in All American Music is very broad, but would you agree?

JR Probably, yes. My instinct is to start casting about among nonclassical composers to see if Little Richard could make that claim or Chuck Berry, but I don't think they could because there were so many early rock pioneers, and then the English wave arrived in the sixties. There are those who claim Duke Ellington was America's greatest composer, but I don't think he had a decisive influence. Cage's influence as a symbol of liberation for classical composers, overlapping to some extent into the art-jazz and art-rock scenes as well, has really been enormous. Even if you regard him as a symbol rather than a direct cause of change, as a philosophical stimulus rather than a model to be copied, the influence is huge and I think Hamm's statement could be sustained.