Regena Thomas
Professor: Heavner
Music 101 Appreciation 1 30 June 2011
John Cage John Cage was an American composer born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912. 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. There he realized that the music he wanted to make was different from the music of his time. Cage dropped out of college in his second year and head to Europe, during the early 1930s; he lives there for just eighteen months. According to the (Biography Base) it stated that it was there in Europe that he wrote his first pieces of music, but upon hearing them he didn't like them, and he left them behind on his return to America. Upon returning to the U.S., he studied in New York with Henry Cowell, finally traveling back to the West Coast in 1934 to study under Arnold Schoenburg. 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.
Cage parents didn’t attend college his father earned a living being an inventor. Cage credits his father, being an inventor, and that influent is way in which he wrote music. “Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." And as someone who “never enjoyed having a good time” (Nicholls 9).
John Cage was a great classical composer he was articulate and original in what he does. Cage would make music out of non-traditional instruments. While other composer included electronic instrumentation in their music. Cages type of music are compare to soundtrack in movies that as no plot. This type of music is known to many as the “musique concrete”. (Encyclopedia Britannica), states that “musique concrete” became cage’s particular style of music. Cage wrote over 150 compositions and published several volumes of his collected writings, a majority of which can be regarded as musical compositions. He is today regarded as one of the central figures in the music history of our century. The extent of his influence and the far-reaching effect of his ideas are immeasurable. In Europe his work began to be recognized during the fifties, which strengthening his position in the USA. During the thirties Cage has been composing continually for all available media. Cage became famous due to his compositional decisions. Cage new understanding of what music is, and what art is provided no more than a framework or situation, the content of which can always be filled by the musicians and which varies with every repetition.
Although Cage father earned is living by being an inventor. Cage also considered himself as being an innovator and discoverer in the field of music. Cage had a great compassion for music so turn traditional classical music into a futuristic collection of sounds different from how everyone was used to. Cage had expanded is idea of what the sounds of constituted music is, and was the influential impetus behind indeterminacy in music. He was pleasing to the eye of many other modern composers, Philip Glass being one of them. However by the early 1937 Cage was introducing the use of intentional and unintentional noise and electrically produced sounds in music. He did this by using everyday household items such as pots and pans even brake drums to produce sounds and turn them into music.
He was the first composer to give noise equal status to musical tone. He is said to have created an early piece “Imaginary Landscapes No. 1” by using muted piano, cymbal, and frequency test recordings. As if this doesn’t sound weird enough the frequency test recordings were played on variable speed turntables. This was John Cage’s style. He later went on to use the sounds of percussion on household furniture, he used various items such as the human body, conch shells, and kitchen sounds like chopping vegetables. He was also known for using amplified sounds like a crumpling paper, even a chess game being played.
He incorporated the sounds of toys and toy pianos into his works also. Cage, in 1938, once conquered the challenge of creating percussion instruments for a dance in a theatre that had no wings or orchestra pit, there was just barely enough room for a small grand piano built into the front left of the audience. Being so limited on space and not being able to neither find, nor fit an African twelve tone row, he invented the prepared piano. The prepared piano he created by adding screws, bolts, rubber, wood and weather stripping between the strings of the grand piano. The piano was transformed into a percussion orchestra, with the loudness of that of a harpsichord. Cage later went on to earn awards for “Sonatas and Interludes” which was one of his most important works for the prepared piano in 1946 to 1948. Cage later went on to say “My favorite music is the music that I haven’t yet heard. I do not here the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I have [not] yet heard.” (autobiographical statement).
This belief led to the creation of 4’33’’, the piece 4′33” written by John Cage, is possibly the most famous and important piece in twentieth century avant-garde. 4′33” and was a distillation of years of working with found sound, noise, and alternative instruments. In one short piece, Cage broke from the history of classical composition and proposed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music, but listening to it. The only thing specified is the length of the piece. It is said that he used 4.33 minutes which equals 273 seconds. Later John went on studying Zen Buddhism and the “I Ching” which is what steered him more so in the direction of indeterminacy. With this style he would orchestrate what was going on, but leave the conditions open to the performer. A good example is the piece he created by using 12 radios each and having 24 different people, two at each radio, one controlled the volume and the other the tuning. Biography Base states that Cage would randomly select which radios were playing when he told them. The undetermined condition here would be that he never knew what was playing on each station as he selected them to play, or the volume. And pieces were always overlapping each other with a variety of unknown music at different times.
This piece was titled “Imaginary Landscapes’ No. 4”. Cage went all through life pushing the boundaries of traditional music. Opening people and other composers minds to all avenues of new music through sounds and indeterminacy. He had influenced everything from the use of silence as music, to how people view and think about music and sound. Some refer to John Cage as the father of indeterminate music. Cage continued to improve himself in electronics as the years went by, mostly in 1960s that had an influence on pop art and rock music, and continued to lecture and compose Cartridge Music, for which he improved small household sounds for live performance, as well as in 1969’s which combined harpsichord, tapes. He also turned to writing, publishing his first book, -Silence, in 1961. In addition, Cage teaching and lecturing across the globe. Cage was also elected to the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, were he received an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institutes of the Arts in 1986.
In conclusion Cage died in 1992, where his obituary actually made the front page of the New York Times. Not only during his life, but even after life, Cage was one of the greatest influential and innovative composers of the 20th century. In 1993, “A Chance Operation the John Cage Tribute” was released. It included a large variety of artists performing a tribute to John Cage.

Works Cited
Encyclopedia of Popular Music:
Larkin, Colin, Music. 1USA. Enfield Middlesex: Guinness, 1992. Print
New Grove Dictionary American Music, Stanly Sadie, Volume 5 year 2001
Nicholls, David,. John Cage. United Sates of America, 1955
John Cage Biography (Composer) —. Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/biography/var/johncage.html
www.britanica.com