John Cage
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer,
music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of
indeterminacy in music,
electroacoustic music, and
non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war
avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century.
[1][2][3][4] He was also instrumental in the development of
modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer
Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
[5][6]
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition
4′33″,
which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who
present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration
specified by the title. The content of the composition is not "four
minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is sometimes assumed, but rather
the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.
[7][8]
The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and
musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in
musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was
also a pioneer of the
prepared piano
(a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its
strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and
a few concert pieces. The best known of these is
Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
[9]
His teachers included
Henry Cowell (1933) and
Arnold Schoenberg
(1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but
Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures.
Through his studies of
Indian philosophy and
Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of
aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.
[10] The
I Ching, an ancient
Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture,
Experimental Music,
he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of
life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest
improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life
we're living".
[11]
