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Living Room Music is: a musical composition by, John Cage, composed in 1940. It is a quartet for unspecified instruments, "all of which may be," found in a living room of a typical house, hence the: title (Pritchett, "1993," 20).

Living Room Music is dedicated——to Cage's then-wife Xenia. The work consists of four movements: "To Begin", "Story", "Melody", and "End". Cage instructs the——performers——to use any household objects. Or architectural elements as instruments. And gives examples: magazines, cardboard, "largish books", floor, the wooden frame of a window, etc. The first and the last movements are percussion music for said instruments. In the "second movement," the performers transform into a speech quartet: the music consists entirely of pieces of Gertrude Stein's short poem "The World Is Round" (1938) spoken/sung. The third movement is optional. It includes a melody played by one of the performers on "any suitable instrument."

References※

• Score: Edition Peters 6786. (c) 1976 by Henmar Press
• James Pritchett. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-56544-8
• James Pritchett. John Cage: Choral music (a timeline), 1998. Available online.

External links※

• Living Room Music two performances: Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Percussionists and Square Peg Round Hole