John Cage

Life

Born September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles. His full name was John Milton Cage Jr. He studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell. In 1944 he gave his first joint recital with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would later become his lifelong partner, and the two made work together for a long time afterwards. He died in New York on August 12, 1992.

The prepared piano and chance

He devised the prepared piano in 1940 and first used it in Bacchanale. The method inserts rubber, pieces of wood, bolts, and other objects between the strings of a grand piano to change its timbre into something percussive, and Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) became its representative work.

From around 1951 he made the Chinese I Ching his main compositional tool, and from Music of Changes (1951) onward he used chance procedures in almost all his works. He was also strongly drawn to Zen and was greatly influenced by the lectures of D. T. Suzuki.

4′33″

Composed in 1952 and premiered on August 29 of that year in Woodstock, New York, by the pianist David Tudor. The performer does not play the instrument at any point, and the surrounding sounds heard in the meantime become the content of the work. It is said to have its background in an experience in 1951, when he entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, heard the sounds of his own body in a room that should have had no sound, and realized that complete silence cannot be made.

Influence on those around him

In 1952, at Black Mountain College, he staged a composite performance later regarded as a forerunner of the "happening." The class in experimental composition he taught at the New School from 1956 to 1961 drew artists such as Allan Kaprow and George Brecht, and led to the formation of Fluxus. His book Silence (1961) is regarded as his most influential writing. He was also deeply knowledgeable about mushrooms, and was involved in founding the New York Mycological Society in 1962.