Cage, John (1912-1992)
Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg. There he realized that the music he wanted to make was radically different from the music of his time. “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.’” But it wasn’t long before Cage found that there were others equally interested in making art in ways that broke from the rigid forms of the past. Two of the most important of Cage’s early collaborators were the dancer Merce Cunningham and the painter Robert Rauschenberg.
Together with Cunningham and Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College, Cage began to create sound for performances and to investigate the ways music composed through chance procedures could become something beautiful. Many of Cage’s ideas about what music could be were inspired by Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionized twentieth-century art by presenting everyday, unadulterated objects in museum settings as finished works of art, which were called “found art,” or ready-mades by later scholars. Like Duchamp, Cage found music around him and did not necessarily rely on expressing something from within.
Cage’s first experiments involved altering standard instruments, such as putting plates and screws between a piano’s strings before playing it. As his alterations of traditional instruments became more drastic, he realized that what he needed were entirely new instruments. Pieces such as “Imaginary Landscape No 4?(1951) used twelve radios played at once and depended entirely on the chance broadcasts at the time of the performance for its actual sound. In “Water Music” (1952), he used shells and water to create another piece that was motivated by the desire to reproduce the operations that form the world of sound we find around us each day.
While his interest in chance procedures and found sound continued throughout the sixties, Cage began to focus his attention on the technologies of recording and amplification. One of his better known pieces was “Cartridge Music” (1960), during which he amplified small household objects at a live performance. Taking the notions of chance composition even further, he often consulted the “I Ching,” or Book of Changes, to decide how he would cut up a tape of a recording and put it back together. At the same time, Cage began to focus on writing and published his first book, “Silence” (1961). This marked a shift in his attention toward literature.
In the ’70’s, with inspirations like Thoreau and Joyce, Cage began to take literary texts and transform them into music. “Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake” (1979), was an outline for transforming any work of literature into a work of music. His sense that music was everywhere and could be made from anything brought a dynamic optimism to everything he did. While recognized as one of the most important composers of the century, John Cage’s true legacy extends far beyond the world of contemporary classical music. After him, no one could look at a painting, a book, or a person without wondering how they might sound if you listened closely.
Cage is the author of Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983), all published by the Wesleyan University Press; Notations (with Alison Knowles, 1969), published by Something Else Press; Writings Through Finnegans Wake (1979), published by Printed Editions; For The Birds (conversations with Daniel Charles) (1981), published by Marion Boyars; Another Song (accompanying photographs by Susan Barron) and Mud Book (with illustrations by Lois Long), both published by Callaway Editions; and Themes and Variations (1982), published by the Station Hill Press. I - VI (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1988-89) was published by the Harvard University Press in Spring 1990. The book includes transcripts of the question and answer periods that followed each lecture, and an audio cassette of Cage reading one of the six lectures. The First Meeting of the Satie Society (with illustrations by Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Sol Lewitt, Mell Daniel, the author, and Henry David Thoreau as rendered by Benjamin Schiff) is in preparation by the Limited Editions Club. The texts, without illustrations, are also accessible by modem from the Art Com Electronic Network carried by WELL (Whole Earth `Lectronic Link), San Francisco.
John Cage's music is published by the Henmar Press of C.F. Peters Corporation. Recordings of his work are available from Wergo, Mode, New Albion, CRI, Columbia, Nonesuch, Folkways, Everest, Time, Cramps, C/P2 and many other labels.
John Cage died in New York City on August 12th, 1992
John Cage: Autobiographical Statement
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Resources
John Cage
Joseph Beuys
Pierre Boulez
Luc Ferrari
Egberto Gismonti
Charles Edward Ives: Central Park in the Dark
Gyorgy Ligeti
Olivier Messiaen
Steve Reich
Ad Reinhardt
Terry Riley
Jean-Claude Risset
David Tudor
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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[11] · Piano drone #1 [04:40]
[10] · Piano minimal #2 inspired by quaggy [13:06]
[09] · Piano minimal #1 [04:46]
[08] · Train Sonor: Piano NYC Subway #4 [10:17]
[07] · Cluster medicine [pianodrone #2] [18:54]
[06] · Flute stream [09:54]
[05] · Supernatural drone [guitardrone reverse] [17:02]
[04] · Piano minimal #3 [simultaneous] [08:50]
[03] · For Marjan K. [excerpt three] [05:44]
[02] · For Marjan K. [excerpt two] [05:40]
[01] · For Marjan K. [excerpt one] [06:21]
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