John Cage

John Cage (born September 5, 1912, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died August 12, 1992, New York, New York) was an American avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.

Early life

The son of an inventor, John Cage briefly attended Pomona College and then traveled in Europe for a time. Returning to the United States in 1931, he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolph Weiss, and Henry Cowell. While teaching in Seattle (1938–40), Cage organized percussion ensembles to perform his compositions. He also experimented with works for dance, and his subsequent collaborations with the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham sparked a long creative and romantic partnership.

Career

Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg. Starting about 1939 he began to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the prepared piano (a piano modified by objects placed between its strings to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects). Cage also experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. The concert he gave with his percussion ensemble at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1943 marked the first step in his emergence as a leader of the American musical avant-garde.

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In the following years Cage turned to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and concluded that all the activities that make up music must be seen as part of a single natural process. He came to regard all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminacy in his music. He used a number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element of personal taste on the part of the performer: unspecified instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds and entire pieces, inexact notation, and sequences of events determined by random means such as consultation with the Chinese Yijing (I Ching). In his later works he extended these freedoms over other media, so that a performance of HPSCHD (completed 1969) might include a light show, slide projections, and costumed performers alongside the seven harpsichord soloists and 51 tape machines for which it was scored.

Major works and legacy

Among Cage’s best-known works are 4′33″ (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds; 1952), a piece in which the performer or performers remain utterly silent onstage for that amount of time (although the score actually leaves the amount of time up to the performer); Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) for 12 randomly tuned radios, 24 performers, and conductor; the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) for prepared piano; Fontana Mix (1958), a piece based on a series of programmed transparent cards that, when superimposed, give a graph for the random selection of electronic sounds; Cheap Imitation (1969), an “impression” of the music of Erik Satie; and Roaratorio (1979), an electronic composition utilizing thousands of words found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939).

Cage’s experimentation with the perception of musical time continued, and in 1985 he composed ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) for piano. He adapted it for organ as Organ²/ASLSP in 1987. He dedicated this version to the German organist Gerd Zacher. Organ²/ASLSP posed a unique challenge: How literally should one take “as slow as possible”? A 1997 organ symposium in Trossingen, Germany, brought together philosophers, organists, musicologists, and organ makers to find an answer. After much debate it was concluded that the composition could be interpreted and performed for an infinite amount of time. The only limitations would be the lifespan of an organ and the willingness of future generations to sustain the performance. The concept eventually took form in Halberstadt, Germany, where a performance of Organ²/ASLSP intended to last 639 years began at St. Burchardi Church on September 5, 2001. The performance is set to end in 2640. The duration is a callback to the 639-year period between 1361 and 2000. According to music theorist and composer Michael Praetorius, an organ with the first modern keyboard arrangement was invented at Halberstadt Cathedral in 1361. The difference between 2000 and 1361 is 639, and thus this span of years was adopted as the duration of the Halberstadt performance.

Cage also published several books, including Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961) and M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973). His influence extended to such established composers as Earle Brown, Lejaren Hiller, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. More broadly, his work was recognized as significant in the development of traditions ranging from minimalist and electronic music to performance art.

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