Boulez on Cage

[sawyl]

Today's quote from Alex Ross' superlative book, The Rest is Noise, captures the falling out between Pierre Boulez and John Cage:

...this was too much for Boulez, who was soon speaking as witheringly of Cage as he had of so many others. By the seventies, he was calling his former friend a "performing monkey" whose methods have betrayed "fascist tendencies"— thereby putting Cage next to Strauss, Sibelius and Stravinsky in the crowded room of composers who had been labeled fascist for one reason or another.