Musicians - John Cage

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	Musicians - John Cage

John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American experimental music composer, writer and visual artist. He is most commonly known for his 1952 composition 4'33", whose three movements are performed without playing a single note.

Cage was an early composer of what he called "chance music" (and what others have decided to label aleatoric music)—music where some elements are left to be decided by chance; he is also well known for his non-standard use of musical instruments and his pioneering exploration of electronic music. His works were sometimes controversial, but he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era, especially in his raising questions about the definition of music.

John Cage put Zen Buddhist beliefs into practice through music. He described his music as "purposeless play", but "this play is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord."

Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector: he co-founded the New York Mycological Society with three friends. He was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Cage is also known as the inventor of the mesostic, a type of poem.

Early life and work

Cage was born in Los Angeles and was of English and Scottish descent. His father was a somewhat eccentric inventor of largely useless devices who told him "if someone says 'can't', that shows you what to do". Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." It was not obvious from his early life that he would become a composer; he was born into an Episcopalian family, and his paternal grandfather regarded the violin as the "instrument of the devil". Cage himself planned to become a minister at an early age and later a writer.

Although music was not clearly to be his chosen path, he said later that he had an unfocused desire to create, and his subsequent anti-establishment stance may be seen to have its roots in an incident while he was attending Pomona College. Shocked to find a large number of students in the library reading the same set text, he rebelled and "went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly." He dropped out in his second year and sailed to Europe, where he stayed for 18 months, working for some of this time as an architect's apprentice. It was there that he wrote his first pieces of music, but upon hearing them he found he didn't like them; he left them behind on his return to America.

Apprenticeship

John Cage returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America being revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There he took lessons in composition from Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell at the New School for Social Research, Adolph Weiss and, famously, Arnold Schoenberg whom he "literally worshipped". Schoenberg told Cage he would tutor him for free on the condition he "devoted his life to music". Cage readily agreed, but stopped lessons after two years. Cage later wrote in his lecture Indeterminacy: "After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall'." Schoenberg later described Cage as being 'not a composer, but an inventor- of genius".

As a result of these studies, Cage's earliest works show a preoccupation with serialism, which he somewhat idiosyncratically interpreted in quasi-social terms as being a “holistic and democratic ideal” insofar as no one pitch predominates over another. He soon began to experiment with percussion instruments, as well as non-traditional instruments as sound-producing devices, and gradually came to use rhythm as the basis for his music instead of harmony. More generally, he structured pieces according to the duration of sections. These approaches owed something to the music of Anton Webern, and especially Erik Satie, one of his favourite composers.

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Musicians - John Cage

Early life and work

Apprenticeship

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