John Cage

John Cage (1912-1992), American experimental composer and leading figure of the avant-garde for more than half a century. John Milton Cage, Jr., was born in Los Angeles, the son of an inventor. He later said that seeing his father at work had influenced the way he wrote music, and Cage always considered himself an innovator and discoverer in the field of music. During the early 1930s he studied composition in New York City with experimental composer Henry Cowell and in Los Angeles with Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of twelve-tone music (music that is based upon all 12 notes of the chromatic scale).

As early as 1937 Cage predicted the use of noise (both intentional and unintentional) and electronically produced sounds in music. His work from this period—mostly for percussion ensembles, which he expanded to include such everyday items as pots, pans, and brake drums—is among the first to give noise equal status with musical tone. Typical early works include Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), for muted piano, cymbal, and frequency test recordings played on variable-speed turntables; and Credo in US (1942), for percussion quartet with piano and either radio or phonograph. Credo in US was the first of Cage's works written to accompany works choreographed by dancer Merce Cunningham, and it began a lifelong collaboration between the two.

In 1938 Cage invented the prepared piano, a standard grand piano that he altered by placing screws, bolts, strips of rubber, weather stripping, and wood between the strings. By changing the sound he turned the instrument, in effect, into a percussion orchestra played by one person. Cage's most important work for prepared piano is Sonatas and Interludes (1946-1948), a group of 20 pieces for which he won an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In recognition of his achievements he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949.

Around 1950 Cage studied Zen Buddhism with Japanese scholar Daisetz T. Suzuki, who was lecturing at Columbia University, and his compositional methods came under the influence of Eastern philosophical thought. As a result, Cage began to question the role of the composer and the place of music in society. Through his acceptance of the Indian belief that the purpose of music is, as he put it, 'to quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences,' and of the Zen concept that 'the highest purpose is to have no purpose,' Cage came to believe that music should 'imitate nature in her manner of operation.' This resulted in 4'33' (1952), a silent piece lasting 4 minutes, 33 seconds, which elevated incidental, unintended noise in the concert hall to the status of art. This new attitude about music also led Cage to begin composing by means of chance operations, primarily with the help of the ancient Chinese book of divination, the I Ching, or Book of Changes. Music of Changes (1951), Cage's four-movement, 43-minute work for piano, was written entirely with chance procedures, by asking questions of the I Ching and using the answers to determine—more or less randomly—the notes, their duration, and the sound quality of the piece. Cage's first book, Silence (1961), chronicles this development in his thinking.

Beginning in the 1960s, Cage's fame (or infamy, according to those who disdained his work) spread throughout the world. Simultaneously, his own work and influence moved beyond music into the areas of dance, art, poetry, and philosophy. In 1969 HPSCHD, for 7 harpsichords, 51 tapes, 7 film projectors, and 80 slide projectors, which Cage wrote in collaboration with early computer-music pioneer Lejaren Hiller, was premiered before 9000 people in the Assembly Hall of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1976 the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned and performed two pieces by Cage: Renga, with a score consisting of drawings by philosopher Henry David Thoreau (the musicians were to interpret the drawings in whatever way seemed appropriate to them); and Apartment House 1776, a mixed-media piece for musicircus (two orchestras and four vocalists). These works were later played by the New York Philharmonic. In 1987 the Frankfurt Opera in West Germany commissioned Cage's first opera, Europeras 1/2. In 1988 and 1989, Cage delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University, an honor previously accorded 20th-century composers Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein.

Cage continues to be important not only because he successfully explored new musical sounds from an inventor's point of view for more than 50 years. Just as significant, through his interest in Eastern thought and his acceptance of Eastern spiritual and philosophical practices in his music, he repeatedly challenged basic attitudes about the way music is made and heard.