John Cage
John Cage was a groundbreaking American composer and influential figure in the avant-garde music movement, known for his innovative approaches to sound and composition. He initially studied composition under notable mentors, including Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, which shaped his unique musical perspective. Cage's work often incorporated elements of chance and unpredictability, reflecting his interest in Eastern philosophy and the Abstract Expressionist art movement. One of his most famous pieces, "4′33″," challenges traditional notions of music by inviting audiences to focus on ambient sounds during a period of silence.
Cage also created the "prepared piano," a technique that involved inserting objects into a piano to alter its sound, which expanded the sonic possibilities of the instrument. Throughout his career, he collaborated with prominent dancers like Merce Cunningham, further blurring the lines between music and performance art. His writings, particularly "Silence: Lectures and Writings," have inspired countless artists and thinkers across disciplines. Cage's legacy endures in contemporary music and arts, influencing a wide range of musicians and performance artists, and remains a central figure in discussions around experimental and avant-garde practices.
Subject Terms
John Cage
- Born: September 5, 1912
- Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
- Died: August 12, 1992
- Place of death: New York, New York
American classical composer
Cage is a significant contributor to the avant-garde music of increasing openness and vitality in which chance and improvisation play a central role.
The Life
In 1930 John Cage left college to roam in Europe and to decide what course to take for his professional life. Settling on music, he returned to America and began serious study in composition. His studies led him to the experimental composer Henry Cowell and later to Arnold Schoenberg.
Cage prided himself on his wise choice of teachers. From Cowell, Cage learned to value unexpected sound sources and radical methods. From Schoenberg, Cage learned a systematic approach to composition. In 1937 Cage began working as an accompanist for dancers, and this led him to an appointment to the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, where he met choreographer Merce Cunningham. Working with Cunningham and other dancers, Cage produced a body of innovative work that used recurring patterns of durations as a central organizing principle. For one of his collaborations with Cunningham, he found the theater too small for his percussion ensemble to play his music. He solved his problem in a creative manner emblematic of his early career: He inserted foreign objects, such as nuts and bolts, into the strings of the piano, effectively transforming their pitch and timbre to simulate the instruments of his percussion ensemble. He returned often to this instrument, which he called the prepared piano.
Eventually, his work brought him to New York City, where he taught at the New School for Social Research. Cage’s interest in Eastern philosophy (especially Zen Buddhism) and his contact with the Abstract Expressionist movement in the visual arts combined to lead him in a more radical direction, creating a series of works configured in part to erase the individual desires of the composer from the composition while functioning to “sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” His music from this point forward embraced elements of chance in the creation and execution of the work.
During the 1950’s he allied himself with piano virtuoso David Tudor; likeminded composers Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown; and minimalist La Monte Young to promote avant-garde music. In 1961 Cage’s compositions started to be published by C. F. Peters Editions, granting his ideas worldwide reach. His book, Silence: Lectures and Writings, published that same year by Wesleyan University Press, became required reading for artists and intellectuals drawn to his ideas of open music based on principles of chance and improvisation. From 1961 onward, Cage was in such high demand for new compositions and speaking and teaching engagements that he was forced to turn down many offers.
His winsome public persona and unusual lecture practices made him a celebrity at universities. As a guest lecturer, he prepared in advance answers to questions often posed by audience members, and then, while on stage, he would roll dice to randomly select an answer, trusting that chance would lead to answers of greater use to the questioner. He also on occasion recorded himself giving lectures, and then he would play the recordings while he lectured. He added lengthy pauses so that there would be many moments when there was only one Cage speaking. The resulting theater of a man competing with his mechanically recorded self made a wonderful impact on audiences. Of course, some were offended by his unwillingness to conform to the conventions of public speaking. However, their displeasure added to the amusement of his delighted fans and made him popular on the lecture circuit.
In the last five years of his life, his productivity as a composer soared, and he produced forty-three works. When he died of a stroke in 1992, Cage was an internationally celebrated artist and thinker.
The Music
First Construction (In Metal).Using the idea of structuring a work around recurring patterns of durations, this piece for six percussionists typifies the composer’s early output. In it, Cage enriches the timbral options available by introducing diverse objects not usually considered musical instruments (such as brake drums), utilizing instruments previously unused in classical composition (such as a Yavapai rattle), and addressing traditional percussion in new ways (such as a submerged gong drawn from water during the performance). This piece, like many he composed in the 1930’s and 1940’s, was meant for use in conjunction with dance.
Bacchanale.This was Cage’s first work for his invention, the prepared piano. He later created more celebrated compositions for this instrument.
Sonatas and Interludes.This large-scale work constitutes his most ambitious solo work for prepared piano. In this musical meditation on seven permanent emotions described in Hindi aesthetics (erotic, heroic, odious, angry, mirthful, sorrowful, and wondrous), each emotion is treated in a distinct sonata. In keeping with the Hindi origins, these emotions tend toward stasis, which Cage presents in the diffuse interludes. The piece prompted Time magazine to declare Cage “America’s most promising composer,” and the success of the piece earned him the Guggenheim Prize. Nevertheless, this work marks the end of a phase—using a durational system, as he did in First Construction (In Metal)—in his compositional output. After this, Cage favored chance operations to determine the content of his compositions.
Music of Changes.Taking its name from the Chinese I Ching (or Book of Changes), an ancient book used for divining wisdom, this work for solo piano in four sections presents an early attempt to efface the composer’s desires from the composition. Creating a matrix of possible events that constantly changes and consulting a Chinese system of random number generation rooted in the use of the I Ching, Cage used chance to determine the specific events of this work. The result is not a true effacement, since the matrixes exemplify a musical style drawn from Cage’s desires. Nevertheless, the work did initiate his lengthy search for methods that might detach his compositions from his musical desires, with the purpose of creating pieces of “sound come into its own.” 4′33″.This work calls for the performer or performers to make no sounds for the titular duration of the piece. First presented at a concert featuring David Tudor in Woodstock, New York, it became one of Cage’s most celebrated pieces. This so-called silent piece is not completely silent; it comprises all the accidental and ambient sounds in the performance room, including the respiration of the audience members. Cage’s ambitious effort to rethink the act of composition is often misunderstood, and the piece sparked challenges to his credentials as a composer.
Variations I.Cage composed several works over several decades titled Variations, and these pieces constitute some of his most radical compositions. These scores contain no specific instructions to performers on what pitches or rhythms to execute. Instead, Cage regulates the duration of the work, and he guides performers in choosing how dense the materials might be. These materials can be made up of anything the performers may select. The only limitation Cage composed into his score is the density of material, not the material itself.
Cheap Imitation.This work comprises fragments of Erik Satie’s work Socrate. For it, Cage uses chance to reorganize Satie’s ambling harmonic and melodic work into a less goal-oriented composition. Despite its self-deprecating title, it was an act of sincere homage for a composer who inspired Cage for his quiet and simple audacity.
Two.Like many works from Cage’s later life, this finds small amounts of material isolated in pools of silence. This work calls for flute and piano, and it allows for careful, studious listening to modest quantities of sound.
Musical Legacy
Cage’s influence continues in the innumerable performances his compositions receive worldwide each year. Diverse composers have creatively explored the ideas presented by the avant-garde composer, and the members of the alternative rock bands Sonic Youth and Radiohead acknowledge Cage’s influence. Performance artists, such as Brenda Hutchinson and Scot Jenerik, draw from Cage’s innovations. While his impact outside of music history may be little felt in the music academies, Cage and his techniques are studied for their practical applications to aesthetic theories in dance and fine art.
Principal Works
chamber works:First Construction (In Metal), 1939 (for six percussionists); Second Construction, 1940 (for four percussionists); Third Construction, 1941 (for four percussionists); Two, 1987 (for flute and piano).
experimental works:Imaginary Landscape No. 1, 1939 (for two variable-speed turntables, frequency records, muted piano, and cymbal); 4′33″, 1952 (for any ensemble or number of players); Fontana Mix, 1958 (for four-channel tape); Variations I, 1958; Music for . . ., 1984 (any combination of one to seventeen instrumental parts).
keyboard works:Bacchanale, 1940 (for prepared piano); The Perilous Night, 1944 (for prepared piano); A Valentine out of Season, 1944 (for prepared piano); Music for Marcel Duchamp, 1947 (for prepared piano); Dream, 1948 (for piano); Experiences No. 1, 1948 (for two pianos); In a Landscape, 1948 (for piano or harp); Sonatas and Interludes, 1948 (for prepared piano); Suite for Toy Piano, 1948; Music of Changes, 1951 (for piano); Cheap Imitation, 1969.
orchestral works:Concerto, 1951 (for piano and chamber orchestra); Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961 (for orchestra; parts for eighty-six musicians).
vocal works:The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, 1942 (for voice and closed piano); Aria, 1958 (for solo voice); Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake, 1979 (for voice, tape, and combination of instrumental parts); Ryoanji, 1983-1985 (for voice, flute, oboe, trombone, contrabass, percussion, and chamber orchestra).
Bibliography
Cage, John. Empty Words. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979. In this volume of lectures and essays covering the bulk of the 1970’s, Cage reveals his evolving musical sensibility, and he shares insights into his methods and aims.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. Cage’s collection of essays and anecdotes is full of humor and insight into the avant-garde art and music of the 1960’s.
Duckworth, William. Talking Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Among the excellent interviews with experimental composers is one with Cage, which forms a thorough introduction to his art and ideas. Cage comments on the seeming contradiction of continuing to compose in the wake of 4′33″.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. New York: Kindle Editions, 2007. Kostelanetz takes snippets from dozens of Cage’s interviews to construct a book-length insight into the composer.
Nyman, Michael. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. This important volume identifies Cage as the catalyst for an international movement in music toward greater experimentation. The author, an important composer, provides a penetrating first attempt at writing the history of a movement as it is unfolding. The book is especially remarkable in linking Cage with the minimalist movement.
Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. This exemplary scholarly work is a comprehensive effort to take stock of Cage’s career. Cage’s important works are discussed in vivid terms that will enlighten both professional musicologists and the curious.