Composer, born in Los Angeles, California, USA. He studied with a number of teachers, including Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, who encouraged his avant-garde interests. He began writing all-percussion pieces in the 1930s and proclaimed the use of noise as the next musical horizon. In 1938 he introduced the prepared piano, an instrument whose sound is radically modified by various objects placed on the strings. While writing much for prepared piano in the 1940s, notably the sonatas and interludes, he also produced some pioneering electronic music. Widely influential was his idea of indeterminacy, music that is not strictly controlled, as seen in his 1951 Landscape No 4 for twelve radios the sound of which depends on what happens to be on the air. Later works, including the notorious 4?33? (1954), involve complete silence. He continued to develop such concepts and he also produced several quirky, engaging books beginning with Silence (1961). In his later years he was widely acclaimed as one of the most original American artists.
John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American experimental music composer, writer and visual artist.
Cage was an early composer of what he called "chance music" (and what others have decided to label aleatoric music)—music where some elements are left to be decided by chance; His works were sometimes controversial, but he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era, especially in his raising questions about the definition of music.
John Cage put his Zen Buddhist beliefs into practice through music. (Hence his favorite Japanese Zen Buddhist saying Nichi nichi kore ko nichi -Every day is a good day.)
Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector: he co-founded the New York Mycological Society with three friends.
Cage is also known as the inventor of the mesostic, a type of poem.
Early life and work
Cage was born in Los Angeles and was of English and Scottish descent. Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." Cage himself planned to become a minister at an early age and later a writer.
Although music was not clearly to be his chosen path, he said later that he had an unfocused desire to create, and his subsequent anti-establishment stance may be seen to have its roots in an incident while he was attending Pomona College. He dropped out in his second year and sailed to Europe, where he stayed for 18 months, working for some of this time as an architect's apprentice.
Apprenticeship
John Cage returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America being revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Schoenberg told Cage he would tutor him for free on the condition he "devoted his life to music". Cage readily agreed, but stopped lessons after two years. Cage later wrote in his lecture Indeterminacy: "After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. Schoenberg later described Cage as being 'not a composer, but an inventor- of genius".
As a result of these studies, Cage's earliest works show a preoccupation with serialism, which he somewhat idiosyncratically interpreted in quasi-social terms as being a “holistic and democratic ideal” insofar as no one pitch predominates over another. In 1935, Cage married artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff.
The Cornish School years
In the late 1930s, Cage went to the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington. He wanted to write a percussion piece, but there was no pit at the performance venue for a percussion ensemble and he had to write for a piano. While working on the piece, Cage experimented by placing a metal plate on top of the strings of the instrument. The Sonatas and Interludes of 1946–48 are widely seen as Cage's greatest work for prepared piano. Around this time the two composers struck up a correspondence, but this stopped when they came to a disagreement over Cage's use of chance in his music. However for Cage this was to be a wholly necessary step in his subsequent aesthetic evolution.
It was also at Cornish that Cage founded a percussion orchestra for which he wrote his First Construction (In Metal) in 1939, a piece that uses metal percussion instruments to make a loud and rhythmic music. Around this time, he met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became a major creative collaborator and his lifelong partner following Cage's split from his then-wife Xenia (the couple divorced in 1945 or 1946).
Asian aesthetics
While at the Cornish School, Cage became interested in many things that influenced much of his later work.
However it was Cage’s subsequent discovery of Taoism and ultimately Zen Buddhism, introduced to him by the Japanese scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki in the late forties, which was to have the greatest effect of all Asian philosophies upon his own. His music altered from exhibiting from the reduced, static expression of the Indian inspired works to that through which he aimed to dissolve personality, intention and expression altogether, via the use of chance techniques, first apparent in the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra of 1951.
Chance
After leaving the Cornish School, Cage joined the faculty of the Chicago School of Design. Cage then moved to New York City, but found it very hard to get work there. He toured America with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company several times, and also toured Europe with the experimental pianist (and later composer) David Tudor, whom he worked with closely many other times.
Introduced to him by Christian Wolff, Cage began to use the I Ching (Chinese “Book of Changes”) in the composition of his music in order to provide a framework for his uses of chance. Cage wrote very precise instructions in the score about how the performers should set their radios and change them over time, but he could not control the actual sound coming out of them, which was dependent on whatever radio shows were playing at that particular place and time of performance. Such pieces as the Variations series paradoxically placed great responsibility in the hands of the performer in the demands the music made in terms of realising indeterminate (chance) procedures.
The detailed nature of Cage's compositional use of chance remains poorly understood. Generally, Cage proceeded from the broadest aspects of a new composition to extremely specific ones. For all these decisions, he determined the number of possibilities for each aspect and then used chance to select a particular possibility: the number of possibilities would be related to one or a series of numbers corresponding to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. For instance, Cage might choose a musical pitch from three possibilities. The actual choice of an I Ching number, as described in the book itself when it is used as an oracle, was accomplished by tossing coins or (later) by running a computer program, initially the print-out of one designed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Lejaren Hiller and later one designed by Cage's assistant, the composer Andrew Culver. Cage called the generation of an I Ching number a chance operation....
Black Mountain, 4’33’’
In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. However, Cage repeatedly claimed that he composed 4′33″ in small units of silent rhythmic durations which, when summed, equalled the duration of the title--he further claimed that he might have made a mistake in addition.
Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and Black Mountain colleague, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, had, while working at the college, produced a series of white paintings. These paintings inspired Cage to use a similar idea, using the 'silence' of the piece as an 'aural blank canvas' to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance.
The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952 as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The piece had passed without a note being played and without Tudor having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon, that “There is no such thing as silence. Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds. Anybody listening intently would have heard them: while nobody produces sound deliberately, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds in the anechoic chamber at Harvard).
While it may challenge the definition of music, it does not challenge any definition of composition — the earliest score was written on conventional manuscript paper using graphic notation similar to that used in Music of Changes, with the three movements precisely scored to reflect their individual lengths. Cage himself refers to it as his "silent piece" and writes; (in John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings).
It is a potential problem though if one wishes to regard the unpredictable sounds as constituting the music in this piece. If the sounds during the parts are the music, then the sounds between the parts are not, and then the Amadinda recording is true to its source.
John Cage's publishers later sued Mike Batt for having created a track at his album, Classical Graffiti, with one minute of silence. The track was named "A One Minute Silence" and credited to John Cage. An out of court settlement was reached, with Batt paying a six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust. Fluxus
John Cage's 'Experimental Composition' classes from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social Research have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, the international network of artists, composers, and designers. Several famous pieces came from these classes: George Brecht's Time Table Music, and Alice Denham's 48 Seconds.
Conceived in 1952, Theater Piece No. 1 consisted of Cage collaborating with Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where the performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings", as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October of 1960, Mary Baumeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of his 'Etude for Piano' cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.
On May 9, 2006 at Christie's in New York City, a work of art by Robert Rauschenberg titled "Cage," dedicated to John Cage, sold for $1,360,000, a record for a Rauschenberg piece on paper.
Subsequent works
Cage’s work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs (many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors), with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.
Two years prior to this piece was the first Musicircus (1967), conceived by Cage and essentially an extension of the “Happenings” from the fifties. This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979)- a many-tiered rendering in sound of both his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake and traditional musical and field recordings made around Ireland.
During the seventies and eighties, Cage's compositions took on a variety of guises, from the overtly political and polemic Lecture on the Weather (1975- based on the texts of the naturalist-anarchist author Henry David Thoreau), through to the hyper-virtuosic- an example being the Freeman Etudes- Books I and II (1980), composed for the violinist Paul Zukovsky. Cage conceived the latter as a useful social demonstration of the performer practically surpassing his own abilities.
Between 1987 and 1990 Cage composed a major series of works entitled Europeras, numbered 1 to 5. Due to the initiative of Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn who became the chief dramatic advisors of the Frankfurt opera under Gary Bertini in 1987, Cage had been invited to compose the first two works for the Frankfurt Opera as a critical deconstruction of the operatic form, yet the degree of superimposition and complexity of the works makes them difficult to define as simply parodic, in any straightforward sense. Cage even went so far as to hand out two separate sets of librettos to the audience at the premiere, themselves culled from previous operatic works. Being overtly based as they are upon previous models, the Europeras provide one of the most intriguing examples of Cage defamiliarising the familiar, rendering a complex new web of symbols and meanings overlapping across conventional aesthetic domains.
Yet other works, such as Cheap Imitation (1972), Hymns and Variations (1979), and Litany for the Whale (1980) resemble the less radical works of his early career. In two groups of compositions from his last years — Music for _____ and the Number Piece series — Cage attempted to reconcile the experimental, process-oriented character of his mature compositions with the idea of a musical work or object. In the Number Piece series in particular, Cage believed that he had finally discovered a way to write music that had harmony, which he now defined as sounds noticed at the same time.
Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt; in an imaginative and controversial interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece to be played "As Slow As Possible", the performance, being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi, is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001.
Europeras 3 & David Revill, in his biography on John Cage ("The Roaring Silence"), writes, "Europeras 3 &
While at the Almeida Festival in London during the premiere of Europeras 3 & 4, Cage described hearing Pindemonium, a "comic opera" by William Le Page, in Boston in April of 1989. Based on the comic strip character Zippy the Pinhead created by Bill Griffith, Pindemonium is scored for upright piano, string quartet, soprano, tenor, and bass-baritone, radio, television and tape, toy piano, and three percussionists playing toy trumpet, toy saxophone, slide whistles, barnyard animal sounds, and household kitchen items.
One of Cage's last works entitled One11, written only several months before his death in 1992, is a silent work entirely composed of images of the chance-determined play of electric light. Cage said of this work, of which a film was directed and produced by Henning Lohner, "Of course the film will be about the effect of light in an empty space.
Writings and visual art
Cage was also highly prolific as a writer, producing a series of increasingly experimental texts that were largely incorporated into several books published during his lifetime. In these books, featuring writings stemming from straightforward essays to diary entries and latterly the ‘writing through’ in mesostics of texts such as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Cage employed chance methodologies to create texts which were often presented spatially on the page in a striking variety of font sizes, typefaces and layouts- an approach towards creating an increasingly visual dimension to text, perhaps inspired by the experimental poetry of e.e.
In addition a series of intriguing interviews between Cage and the critic Daniel Charles are collected in the book For the Birds (1981), whose title is a reference to one of Cage's favorite sayings, which is typical of his often subtle, self-referential humor: "I am for the birds, not for the cages people put them in."
From the late sixties Cage was also active as a visual artist, working on annual projects at Crown Point Press, from which he produced a series of drawings, prints and watercolours. One of his most striking visual pieces is the 1969 work Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, which is comprised of a complex array of superimposed type encased within plexiglas panels. However, as Cage pointed out, he aimed to remain faithful to his promise to Schoenberg to devote his life to music.
John Cage died in New York City, only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organised in Frankfurt by the composer Walter Zimmermann and the musicologist Stefan Schaedler was due to take place;
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