Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a composer, writer, philosopher, visual and performance artist, and cofounder of the New York Mycological Society for the study, collection and appreciation of mushrooms and fungi. Today's Out Spotlight is John Cage.

Cage pushed the boundaries of traditional music, experimenting with sound, environment and audience perception. His avant-garde work influenced music, painting, dance, performance art and poetry.

John Cage was born in Los Angeles, September 5, 1912. His father was a somewhat eccentric inventor of largely useless devices who told him "that if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." He 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 a 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. He was playing piano on the radio regularly by the time he was 12. From the influence of his inventor father, he developed a reputation for innovation and originality; qualities that became the hallmarks of his career.

Although music was not clearly to be his chosen path, he did say later that he had 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, to pursue a less traditional education. Settling down in Paris, he spent 18 months painting, writing poetry and composing music, before returning to California to focus on his music.

From 1931 to 1936 he study music. His composition teachers included Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg declared the young man “not a composer, but an inventor of genius.” In 1937, Cage worked as a dance accompanist in Seattle, where he met dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The two became professional and life partners for the next 50 years. In 1938, he began to experiment with his music. He composed pieces for the prepared piano—a piano he created with objects placed on and between the strings to alter sound.

He founded a percussion orchestra for which he wrote his First Construction (In Metal) in 1939, a piece which uses metal percussion instruments to make a loud and rhythmic music. He also wrote the Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in that year, which uses record players as instruments, one of the first, if not the first, examples of this. Cage wrote a number of other Imaginary Landscape pieces in later years.

Cage continued to pursue unorthodox techniques into the 1940's. His fascination with Taoism and Zen Buddhism led him to chance music. Based on the “I Ching”—the Zen book of changes—and the flip of a coin, Cage created compositions solely by chance.

Cage joined the faculty of the Chicago School of Design. While there he was asked to write a sound effects-based musical accompaniment for Kenneth Patchen's radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. He then moved to New York City, but found it very hard to get work there. However, he continued to write music, and establish new musical contacts. He toured America with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company several times, and also toured Europe with the experimental pianist (and later composer) David Tudor, who he worked with closely many other times.

In 1948, he joined the Black Mountain College faculty and began collaborating with David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. He composed his most controversial piece “4’33’,” three scores of silence over 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The intended “music” of the piece is the unintentional sound created by the audience and the environment.

The premiere of 4′ 33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and lift the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he closed the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he lifted the lid. And after a period of time, he closed the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score.

He continued to compose and collaborate with other artists. In his later years, he focused on electronic music, often using radios and “Happenings,” what he called them—pieces that are mostly unwritten, except for timed intervals in which a note, a sound or silence is scheduled.

Cage passed away in New York City on August 12, 1992.

“I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.”

John Cage’s “4’33”” performed by David Tudor


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Mr. Peabunny's Blog


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