John Cage

John Cage (1912-1992), American composer, who has had a profound influence on avant-garde music and dance. Born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, he studied at Pomona College in Claremont but left before graduating, spending 18 months touring Europe and studying the arts. Back in California he studied composition with Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold Schoenberg. He discovered two lifelong preoccupations in the 1930s: he began working with dance companies (at first as a rehearsal pianist), and he started writing music for ensembles of percussion instruments, a sound-world that few composers before him had really explored. In his three Constructions (1939, 1940, 1941, the first for six percussionists, the others for four), written for an ensemble of his own home-made instruments including tin cans and metal car parts, Cage built powerful musical structures from rhythm, instead of melody or harmony. Earlier, in 1938, he had invented the prepared piano, in which foreign objects, such as screws and pencil erasers, are placed between the strings to modify the sounds of the piano. The percussive nature of the instrument (which pianists are generally taught to hide) is used to create an entire percussion orchestra under two hands, as shown in works such as Amores (1943) and Sonatas and Interludes (1948).

In 1942 Cage settled in New York. In the late 1940s he became much influenced by the Zen Buddhist philosophy of adapting to the world rather than attempting to shape it. Cage therefore attempted to reduce the musical importance of the composer, seeking to find music in life and the environment, rather than to create it. He often used silence as a musical element, with sounds as entities hanging in time, and he explored ways of incorporating certain degrees of randomness in his music. So, in Music of Changes (1951) for piano, combinations of notes occur in a sequence determined by tossing coins, in accordance with the Chinese Book of Changes, Yijing. In 4′ 33′′ (1952), the performers sit silently at instruments; the unconnected sounds of the environment are the music. Like Theatre Piece (1960), in which musicians, dancers, and mimes perform randomly selected tasks, 4′ 33′′ dissolves the borders separating music, sound, and non-musical phenomena.

A whole series of Cage’s works utilized this concept of aleatory music, leaving a great deal of the creative (or simply functional) decisions to the performers, from pieces such as Water Music (1952), which included elements of visual as well as sound performance, to large-scale theatrical (though not narrative) events such as Musicircus (1967) and Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979) for tape, speaker (reading randomly selected excerpts from Joyce’s novel), traditional Irish musicians, and dancers. Many of Cage’s works from the 1940s onwards were written for performance with dance works by his partner, the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Their eventual working method was to produce music and dance to an agreed duration, but separately, without reference to each other; the two elements would then simply coincide during performance. A further extension of this idea led to the simultaneous performance of different works, such as the solo vocal piece Aria with the tape piece Fontana Mix (both 1958).

Such works, drawing on traditions of thought far removed from those of Western music, earned much hostility from those who saw them as mere anarchy. They were also vastly influential on a whole group of composers based at Darmstadt (where Cage taught in the 1950s), including Karlheinz Stockhausen, and on the aleatory techniques of, for instance, Lutosławski. In turn, Cage took from Darmstadt an interest in electronic music (such as in the tape pieces Williams Mix, 1952, and Fontana Mix) and graphic scores, in which conventional musical notation is replaced by diagrams of specially devised symbols (such as in Music for Carillon no. 1, 1952), or by pre-existing graphic entities (such as in Renga, 1976, which makes use of drawings by Henry David Thoreau).

In the last five years of his life Cage produced more than 60 works with titles relating to the number of performers involved, such as Four, for string quartet (1989), Twenty-Six, for 26 violins (1992), and 108 (1991), for large orchestra; many pieces also exist in several versions, such as Five³, for trombone and string quartet, and Five⁴, for 2 saxophones and 3 percussionists (both 1991). His books—mostly made up of lectures and stories, often assembled from similar principles of random construction as his music and presented in the form of acrostics or mesostics—include the classic Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1967), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983). Cage was also an authority on mushrooms, co-founding the New York Mycological Society and in 1959 appearing for five consecutive weeks on a knockout-style quiz competition on Italian television, answering questions on mushrooms as well as performing pieces he had written specially for the occasion. A performance of Cage's 20-minute piece entitled “Organ 2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)” began in Halberstadt, Germany, in 2001. The organ music is expected to last 639 years: the first three-note chord sounded on February 5, 2003; the next two notes will be heard on July 5, 2004, and so on until the scheduled end of the performance in 2640.