JOHN CAGE
LIFE OVERVIEW

John Cage was the son of an inventor. As a child he took piano lessons and then studied composition with American composer Adolph Weiss. Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg. He began writing in his own musical system, often using techniques similar to those of Schoenberg. In 1937 he moved to Seattle and took a job accompanying a dance company. During the late '30s, Cage also began experimenting with musique concrète, composing the landmark Imaginary Landscape No. 1, which employed variable-speed phonographs and frequency tone recordings alongside muted piano and a large Chinese cymbal (Steinem 1964). He also invented the "prepared piano," in which he placed a variety of household objects between the strings of a grand piano to create sounds suggesting a one-man percussion orchestra. It was at this time that Cage fell under the sway of Eastern philosophies, the influence of Zen Buddhism informing the random compositional techniques of his later work; obsessed with removing forethought and choice from the creative model, he set out to make music in line with the principles of the I Ching, predictable only by its very unpredictability.

TYPE OF MUSIC COMPOSED

Cage organized an orchestra in Seattle in 1938. In 1940 he moved to San Francisco, where he and Lou Harrison gave concerts of performance based music, and in 1941 he went to Chicago to give a course on music at the Chicago Institute of Design. He accompanied this with dance classes of Katherine Manning and organized several expression concerts. In the spring of 1943, he went to New York, and this remained as his home base. A program of percussion music under his direction was presented by the League of Composers at the Modern Art concert on 7 February 1943 (Hacks 1954). At this concert, he included three of his own works that brought him major public attention for the first time. Most all of Cage’s music during this period was written for the prepared piano. Among his compositions for prepared piano was Bacchanale, written in 1940. By the late 1940s Cage had established himself as a talented and innovative composer (Johnson 1972). A performance at Carnegie Hall of his major work for prepared piano, sonatas and interludes by Maro Ajemian in January 1949 was an important event of the New York music season, and Cage received awards that year from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which cited him for “having thus extended the boundaries of musical art.” (Johnson 1972) The prepared piano gave a wide range of percussive sounds; each note could have a distinctive timbre, determined by what objects were inserted into the strings and at what point. Also in his music for percussion ensembles, Cage used a large variety of usual and unusual instruments. His First Construction of 1939 has the six percussionists play orchestral bells, thundersheets, piano, sleigh bells, oxen bells, brake drums, cowbells, Japanese temple gongs, Turkish cymbals, anvils, water gongs, and tam-tams. While in Chicago, Cage had access to the sound-effects collection of a local radio station, and afterwards he began to use electrically produced sounds. Many of the sounds produced by the prepared piano and some percussion instruments are of indeterminate or extremely complex pitch, and Cage quite logically turned from structures based on the pitch to ones built on rhythmic patterns. Patterns built on additive groups provide the basis for rhythmic structures in some Eastern music. They give his music a static quality quite different from the linear, goal-oriented thrust of most western European and American art music. He has explained that the expressive talent of certain of these pieces reflects Eastern attitudes. The ballet The Seasons attempts to express the traditional Indian view of the seasons as quiescence, creation, preservation, and destruction. The external events of Cage’s career in the late 1940s and early 1950s resembled those of the previous years. He spent several summers teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The important events of these years were internal to his music. It was at this time that the most dramatic changes in his thinking occurred. In the late 1940s Cage had begun a study of Eastern philosophies with Gita Sarabhai and of Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki of Columbia University. By 1950 he was studying the I Ching, the Chinese book of changes and in 1951 he began a series of pieces using various methods of composition in which elements of chance were introduced into the process of creation or performance. In Music of Changes, pitches, durations, and timbres were determined not by a conscious decision on the part of the composer but by the use of charts derived from the I Ching and the tossing of three coins (Charles 1982). Music for the Piano I is noted completely in whole notes, with the performer determining durations; pitches were chosen by ruling staves on pages of paper and then making notes where imperfections were observed on the page. Imaginary Landscape no. 4 is performed with 12 radios with two performers at each, one manipulating the knob that changes stations and the other the volume control; the notation is precise but of course the sounds for any given performance vary according to what is on the air (Charles 1982). Cage’s aim in these works was to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory and also of the literature and traditions of the art of music. Later he explained his philosophical basis for creating chances or random music. He came to believe that it should not be man’s role to shape the world around him to his own desires and habits but rather to adapt himself to the objects and people surrounding him. “In music, as in life, one should make the best of the world oneself, should find for oneself that is beautiful and meaningful” (Bell 1994). His 4’33” which may be performed by any instrument or combination of instruments, epitomizes this attitude (Bell 1994). The performer sits silently on stage for the duration of the piece, the music consists of whatever noises are made by the audience and whatever sounds come from outside the auditorium during this time. Until he moved into chance operations, Cage had been slowly building a reputation as a talented and serious composer. But performances of such pieces as Music of Changes, consisting of a string of unrelated notes often separated by long silences and timed by a stopwatch, or of the piece for 12 radios, were met with amusement, amazement, or hostility. Few musicians or critics understood what he was trying to do. Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown worked with him and exchanged ideas during the duration of these years. Together, they founded the Project Music for Magnetic Tape.

SIGNIFICANT OF TODAY
Cage had used electronic sounds in earlier pieces, but Imaginary Landscape no. 5 was his first piece prepared for magnetic tape. It was made as an accompaniment for a dance by Jean Erdman. It was put together by transferring the sounds from 42 phonograph records to tape chopping these into fragments of varying lengths and reassembling them according to chance operations. Williams Mix was a much more complex piece. About 600 tapes of various sounds, musical and non-musical, were assembled, fragmented, and then combined on eight tracks according to precise measurements and combinations arrived at by chance operations from the I Ching. The collecting, measuring and splicing of these occupied Cage for many months. In the summer of 1952, at Black Mountain College, Cage conceived and brought about an event that was an important precursor of the happenings of the following decade. This piece of concerted action involved simultaneous, uncoordinated music for piano and phonograph, poetry reading, dancing, lecturing films, and slides. Other pieces of this time were planned to have visual as well as aural interest. Water Music is written for a pianist who must pour water from pots, blow whistles under water, use a radio and a pack of cards, and perform other actions to engage the eye (Bell 1994). Cage’s chance music of the early 1950s had been constructed by one of several methods that ensured a random collection of notes, but once such a process had taken place the piece was fixed, was notated precisely, and would be just the same in each performance. A next step was to make pieces that would not be fixed, that would change from performance to performance. Music for Piano 4-19 consists of 16 pages; the notes derived by chance operations. The most ambitious piece of this sort is the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (Bell 1994). There is no master score; parts for each instrument of the orchestra were written using chance methods. The piece may be performed by any number of players as a solo, ensemble piece, symphony, aria, or concert for piano and orchestra. Each player selects from his part of any number of pages to play, in any sequence, and coordination is by elapsed time, with the conductor’s arms functioning as the hands of a clock. Attitudes towards Cage and his work was always strong and became even more intense during this most radical period. Vigorously and violently attacked for what he was saying and doing. He was at the same time increasingly in demand as a lecturer, teacher, and performer. He and Tudor made a concert tour of Europe in 1954. Reaction was largely hostile, but soon afterwards such European composers as Stockhausen began discussing and experimenting with chance music. Back in the USA, Cage spent much of this time touring with the Cunningham Dance Company, which was performing more and more frequently. Cage was in Europe again the summer of 1958, giving concerts and lectures at Darmstadt. Luciano Berio invited him to Milan, where he spent four months working in the tape studio operated by the Milan radio station, making the tape piece Fontana Mix. During this stay, he appeared on the Italian television quiz show “Lascia o raddoppia, “ successfully answering questions on mushrooms over a five-week period, winning a large prize, and creating and performing several compositions as a prelude to the competition sessions (Charles 1982). Back in New York in 1959, he taught courses in experimental music and mushroom identification at the New School, was commissioned to write a large orchestral work by the Montreal Festival Society, was a co-founder of the New York Mycological Society, and accepted his first appointment at a degree granting academic institution. From the late 1960s, Cage has been willing to draw on any ideas and techniques of his earlier periods, or to mix these with new interests and procedures. Scores may be precisely and intricately notated, or they may give only the most general guide to the shape and content of the piece. He writes for conventional instrument, for electronic sound and for amplified and distorted sound materials drawn from the natural world. Pieces may be designed for performance in conventional concert halls, dance theatres, at home, or outdoors. One thing may become another: a chess game played on an amplified board or tiny drawings used to make a score. Typical is Etudes australes, a virtuoso piece for piano that has a precisely notated score derived from tracing astronomical charts onto music staves. Cheap imitation, written for piano in 1969 and orchestrated in 1972, is based on a piece by Satie with the original rhythmic patters are kept but pitches are replaced with notes selected through chance procedures. Child of Tree and Branches make use of amplified plant sounds. Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake is an electronic piece built of thousands of sounds mentioned in Joyce’s novel, with many of them recorded in places mentioned in the book. A Dance in the Lake, written for performance in Chicago and the surrounding area, is scored for two places, three places, and four places (Charles 1982). Participants are instructed to go to the places and either listen to, perform at and/or make a recording of a number of quicksteps, waltzes, and marches. Thoreau and Joyce have joined Satie and Duchamp as persons of interest to Cage. He often uses a computer to perform chance operations more efficiently and dispassionately than any human. His first major graphic work, Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel has been followed by a series of others. And his long-time interest in mycology and games continued. Honors have come his way increasingly. His 60th birthday was marked by a concert at the New School in July 1972. Commissions for major compositions have come from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporations, the Boston SO for the American Bicentennial celebration, and the Cabrillo Music Festival. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978, he was one of eight New Yorkers to be given the Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture in 1981, and in 1982 the French government awarded him its highest honor for distinguished contribution to cultural life, Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts Des Lettre (Charles 1982). His 70th birthday brought a festival in his honor in Chicago and a major exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Since 1958, many of Cage's scores have been exhibited in galleries and museums. A series of fifty-two watercolors, the New River Watercolors, executed by Cage at the Miles C. Horton Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in April-May, 1990. In 1991, the Cunningham Dance Foundation produced Cage/Cunningham, a documentary film on the collaboration of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, partly funded by PBS, under the direction of Elliot Caplan. John Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992 (Bell 1994).

CONCLUSION John Cage was an evolutionary man of his time. He created music and art that was largely accepted and misunderstood by many people. He utilized sounds to include doors slamming, pouring water, and radio static and even invented the prepared piano technique. Cage branded his own style of music that greatly influences what we hear today. There has been no other American composer with a larger impact on the world of music.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
List, K. “Rhythm, Sound and Sane.” New Republic. 1945.

Maren, Hacks. “The Musical Numbers Game.” Reporter, March 1958.

Johnson, John. “There Is No Silence Now.” Village Voice, April 172.

Charles, David. “Gloses sur John Cage.” Paris, February 1982.

Bell, Jack. “John Cage” Art News, December 1994.