"John Cage was one of America's most renowned composers and - from the 1940s until his death in 1992 - was also among the most influential thinkers in the field of twentieth-century arts and media. From a West Coast American background, as a kind of homespun avant-garde pioneer, Cage gradually achieved international acclaim." "The increasing numbers of performances, recordings, and studies of Cage's music demonstrate beyond question its relevance today. But he was also a much-admired writer and artist and a uniquely attractive personality, able to present his ideas engagingly wherever he went. As an interview subject he was a consummate professional." "CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage differs from some studies in that it originates from outside the United States. The main source of CageTalk is a panoply of vivid and eminently readable interviews by Peter Dickinson in the late 1980s for a BBC Radio 3 documentary about Cage, whom Dickinson met around 1960 when living in New York City. The original BBC program lasted an hour but the full discussions with Cage and many of the main figures connected with him have remained unpublished until now." "CageTalk also includes earlier BBC interviews with Cage by authorities such as literary critic Frank Kermode and art critic David Sylvester. And the editor Peter Dickinson contributes little-known source material about Cage's Musicircus and Roaratorio as well as a substantial introduction that explores the multiple roles Cage's varied and challenging output played during much of the twentieth century and continues to play into the early twenty-first."--Jacket.