John Cage
American composer who redefined music through silence and chance.
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, artist, and music theorist who became a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde. He pioneered indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments. His work challenged conventional definitions of music and influenced modern dance through his partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham.
Quick Facts
- Birth name
- John Milton Cage Jr.
- Born
- 5 September 1912
- Birthplace
- Los Angeles, California, U.S.
- Died
- 12 August 1992
- Place of death
- New York City, U.S.
- Occupation
- Composer
- music theorist
- artist
- philosopher
- Education
- Pomona College
- Notable works
- 4'33; Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano
Facts from the source article.
Life
John Cage was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an inventor whose projects included a diesel-fueled submarine and an electrostatic field theory of the universe. Cage noted that an ancestor named John Cage assisted George Washington in surveying the Colony of Virginia. At eighteen months, Cage ingested strychnine tablets but survived after a stomach pump was administered. He began piano lessons in fourth grade and enjoyed sight reading more than technique. During high school, he studied with Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, he wanted to be a writer and graduated as valedictorian from Los Angeles High School. That spring he gave a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans, anticipating his later work 4′33″. His father taught him that if someone says 'can't,' that shows you what to do. In 1944–45, Cage wrote two short character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad.
Music
Cage's earliest completed pieces have been lost. His first works were very short piano pieces using complex mathematical procedures. He later improvised and wrote down results until Richard Buhlig stressed the importance of structure. Works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet and Composition for 3 Voices, are highly chromatic and show interest in counterpoint. After studies with Schoenberg, Cage developed a tone row technique splitting the row into short motives that were repeated and transposed. This approach first appeared in Two Pieces for Piano and later in Metamorphosis and Five Songs. He began using a technique that placed rhythmic structure in the foreground, as in Imaginary Landscape No. 1, which has four sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars. First Construction (in Metal) uses five sections with nested proportions. Such nested proportions became a regular feature of his music in the 1940s and reached great complexity in Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, where many proportions used non-integer numbers.
Visual art, writings, and other activities
Cage began painting in his youth but gave it up to focus on music. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969 and includes lithographs and plexigrams with bits of words in different typefaces governed by chance operations. From 1978 until his death, he worked at Crown Point Press, producing prints each year. The first project there was Score Without Parts, based on drawings by Henry David Thoreau. That same year he created Seven Day Diary, drawn with his eyes closed but following a strict chance-derived structure. Between 1979 and 1982, he produced large print series including Changes and Disappearances, On the Surface, and Déreau. In 1983 he began using unconventional materials such as cotton batting and foam, and later used stones and fire for works like Eninka and Ryoanji. In the 1980s, he participated in the Mountain Lake Workshop, producing watercolors using controlled pours, chance-derived grids, and brushes made from feathers.
Reception and influence
Cage's pre-chance works from the late 1940s, such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim and were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. His adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him friendships and drew criticism from fellow composers. Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez criticized Cage for adopting a philosophy tinged with Orientalism that masked weakness in compositional technique. Iannis Xenakis considered the use of chance in music an abuse of language and an abrogation of a composer's function. Michael Steinberg's article Tradition and Responsibility criticized avant-garde music generally. Douglas Kahn acknowledged Cage's influence but noted that his silencing techniques had the effect of silencing the social. Despite controversy, Cage influenced many composers, artists, and writers. Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis all adopted chance procedures in some works, and Stockhausen's later Klavierstücke were influenced by Cage's Music of Changes. Other composers who adopted chance procedures include Witold Lutosławski and Mauricio Kagel.
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