John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was born on September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an inventor who worked on submarines and other devices, and the son later credited that household atmosphere of tinkering and experiment with shaping his own approach to art ^[1]. His mother, Lucretia Harvey, wrote intermittently for the Los Angeles Times. The family moved frequently around the Los Angeles area during his childhood.

Cage took piano lessons as a boy, drawn more to sight-reading and to the music of Edvard Grieg than to virtuoso display. He excelled academically, graduating as valedictorian of Los Angeles High School in 1928 ^[1]. He then enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, intending at first to become a writer or a Methodist minister, but he left after two years, convinced that college conformity had little to offer him.

In 1930 he sailed for Europe, spending roughly eighteen months in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, and elsewhere. He studied architecture briefly, painted, wrote poetry, and began composing his first short pieces ^[2]. When he returned to California in 1931, he had settled on music, supporting himself by giving lectures on modern art to housewives in Santa Monica while seeking out teachers who could train him properly.

Back in Los Angeles, Cage studied composition with Richard Buhlig and later with Henry Cowell, the Californian experimentalist whose interest in non-Western music and unusual piano techniques left a lasting mark on him ^[2]. On Cowell's advice, Cage sought out Arnold Schoenberg, the Viennese master then living in Los Angeles. Schoenberg accepted him as a pupil around 1935, reportedly without fee, on the condition that Cage devote his life to music. Cage later recalled that Schoenberg told him he had no feeling for harmony and would eventually hit a wall; Cage answered that he would spend his life beating his head against that wall ^[1].

Since conventional harmony was closed to him, Cage turned to rhythm and to percussion. In the late 1930s he worked in Seattle as an accompanist for dance classes at the Cornish School, where he met the dancer Merce Cunningham, who would become his lifelong artistic partner. There, in 1940, faced with a stage too small for a percussion ensemble, he invented the prepared piano: an ordinary piano transformed by bolts, screws, rubber, and other objects inserted between the strings, turning the instrument into a one-player percussion orchestra ^[3].

Cage moved to New York City in 1942 with his wife Xenia Kashevaroff, whom he had married in 1935. Early support came from artists rather than musical institutions; Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim briefly hosted the couple. A 1943 percussion concert at the Museum of Modern Art brought national press attention, and his reputation as the leader of a new experimental school began to grow ^[2].

Any account of John Cage achievements begins with the works of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Sonatas and Interludes (1946 to 1948), a cycle for prepared piano influenced by his reading of Indian aesthetics, won him a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 1949 ^[3]. During the same period he studied Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki at Columbia University, and Eastern thought became central to his artistic philosophy. He concluded that the purpose of music was not self-expression but, in a phrase he borrowed from Indian tradition, sobering and quieting the mind ^[4].

From 1951 he began composing with chance operations, using the ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching to determine notes, durations, and dynamics. Music of Changes (1951), a large piano work written for David Tudor, was among the first fully chance-composed scores ^[4]. The method removed the composer's taste from many decisions, a step that scandalized much of the musical establishment and inspired a generation of younger artists.

On August 29, 1952, Tudor gave the premiere of 4'33" at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds he sat at the piano and played nothing, marking the three movements by closing and opening the keyboard lid. The content of the piece was whatever sounds happened to occur: wind, rain on the roof, restless listeners ^[5]. Cage regarded it as his most important work, an argument that there is no such thing as silence and that all sound can be heard as music. That same year he organized at Black Mountain College an untitled multimedia event often described as the first happening, anticipating performance art by a decade ^[2].

Later decades brought pioneering electronic and multimedia works, including Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radios (1951), the tape collage Williams Mix (1952), and HPSCHD (1969), a vast collaboration with Lejaren Hiller using computers and harpsichords. In his final years he produced the so-called Number Pieces, spacious works named simply for their number of performers, and the series of Europeras that shuffled fragments of the operatic repertory by chance ^[3].

Cage was as influential a writer as he was a composer. His first book, Silence (1961), collected lectures and essays composed with the same experimental rigor as his music, including texts structured by chance and the celebrated Lecture on Nothing. The book has remained continuously in print and carried his ideas to readers far beyond concert halls ^[6]. Later volumes included A Year from Monday (1967) and the mesostic poetry that occupied much of his final two decades.

He taught irregularly but memorably. His composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York in the late 1950s enrolled artists such as Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, and Dick Higgins, and it is often cited as a seedbed of the Fluxus movement and of happenings ^[2]. He also held appointments and residencies at institutions including Wesleyan University and the University of Illinois, and in 1988 and 1989 he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, composing the lectures themselves by chance operations ^[4].

In the 1970s Cage took up visual art seriously, producing etchings at Crown Point Press in California and, later, watercolors. He was also a dedicated amateur mycologist: he helped found the New York Mycological Society in 1962, and in 1959 he won a top prize on an Italian television quiz show by answering questions about mushrooms ^[1].

Cage married Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, an Alaskan-born artist and bookbinder, in 1935. The marriage ended in divorce in 1945, as Cage came to terms with his relationship with Merce Cunningham ^[1]. From the mid 1940s until Cage's death, Cage and Cunningham were partners in both life and work, one of the most productive collaborations in American art. Cage served for decades as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, founded in 1953, where the two developed their radical principle that music and dance should be created independently and share only a common length of time ^[3].

Friends described Cage as unusually cheerful, generous, and disciplined. He embraced the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, adopted a macrobiotic diet in the late 1970s after years of health trouble, and lived simply in a loft on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan filled with plants, stones, and no piano ^[4]. His fascination with mushrooms was practical as well as poetic: foraging paid some bills in lean years, and he supplied wild mushrooms to New York restaurants in the 1960s ^[1].

Recognition arrived steadily in Cage's final decades, even from institutions that had once dismissed him. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1968 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. In 1982 France made him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, and in 1989 he received the Kyoto Prize, one of the most substantial international awards in the arts ^[3].

He remained prolific to the end. The Number Pieces, more than forty works written between 1987 and 1992, use flexible time brackets that give performers freedom within chance-determined limits, and many listeners find them among his most quietly beautiful music ^[4]. He continued to travel, lecture, and oversee installations, including the ongoing organ work Organ2/ASLSP, a version of which is being performed in Halberstadt, Germany, over a planned span of 639 years.

On August 11, 1992, while preparing tea in his Manhattan loft, Cage suffered a stroke. He died the next day, August 12, 1992, at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York City, a few weeks short of his eightieth birthday ^[5]. Celebrations planned worldwide for that birthday became memorials instead.

Few twentieth century musicians changed the definition of their art as thoroughly as Cage did. His insistence that any sound can be music, and that intention can be set aside in favor of attention, influenced composers from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morton Feldman to minimalists such as La Monte Young, as well as rock and electronic musicians including Brian Eno and members of Sonic Youth ^[6]. The basic John Cage facts, the prepared piano, the I Ching, the silent piece, have entered general culture in a way matched by few experimental artists.

His reach beyond music was equally large. Happenings, Fluxus, conceptual art, and much performance art trace lines back to his teaching and example, and his collaboration with Cunningham reshaped modern dance ^[2]. The John Cage Trust, founded in 1993 and now housed at Bard College, preserves his manuscripts and licenses his work, while the centenary of his birth in 2012 brought festivals, exhibitions, and recordings across the world.

Debate has never stopped, which would likely have pleased him. Critics still argue over whether 4'33" is a profound reframing of listening or an elaborate provocation, and any serious John Cage biography must weigh both the devotion and the irritation he inspired ^[5]. What is not in dispute is the scale of the shift he caused: after Cage, composers, and audiences, had to decide for themselves where music ends and the rest of the audible world begins.