Arguably the most innovative composer of this century, John Cage sought to broaden the definition of “music” to embrace whatever a composer’s vision identifies—from the roar of road traffic to complete silence, from string quartets to an ensemble of automobile parts. His bequest to music is the license to question, to dare, and to expand toward infinity the boundaries of the artistic experience.
Born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, Cage relished the fact that he was the son of an inventor and strove—with considerable success—to become regarded as one himself. Arnold SCHOENBERG, with whom Cage attempted to study for a time, dismissed the unteachable pupil as “an inventor, perhaps, but never a composer.” Cage wore the epithet with lifelong pride.
The senior John Cage was, indeed, a successful inventor: his improvements in submarine detection devices were adopted by the U.S. Navy during World War I. He and his wife had moved from Colorado to California, largely to escape the restrictive attitudes of their small town. Their only surviving child showed an interest in music at an early age. He studied piano with an aunt and expressed admiration for the music of Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). More important, he displayed early signs of the healthy disregard for convention that would colour his whole life. At the age of 15, he won an oratorical competition in Los Angeles and delivered a speech on Americans’ need for tolerance toward the cultures and lifestyles of other peoples. Sixty years later, at a 75th-birthday celebration, Cage delivered that speech once again, and found that its relevance had survived.
The young Cage entered Pomona College, near Los Angeles, with initial thoughts of a career in the ministry, followed by a time of European wandering. It was under the spell of Spanish skies, as he revealed in a 1989 autobiographical note, that he first attempted to compose music “in some mathematical way, I no longer recall .…” By age 19, he was back in California, supporting himself by gardening, but also moving steadily toward a musical career. He studied for a time with Richard Buhlig, a Chicago-born pianist and self-styled mystic who encouraged rule-breaking among his students. One of Buhlig’s associates was the ardent iconoclast, composer, and pianist Henry COWELL, who was 15 years older than Cage but of like mind when it came to exploring new artistic horizons. In 1933, Cage moved to New York to study in Cowell’s classes at the avant-garde New School for Social Research.
A year later, however, he was back in Los Angeles for the famous encounters with the newly arrived émigré Arnold Schoenberg. “It was clear to both of us,” Cage later recalled, “that I had no feeling for harmony… [and that] I’d never be able to write music. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘You’ll come to a wall’ Schoenberg replied, ‘and you won’t be able to get through.’ ‘Then I’ll spend my life knocking my head against that wall!’ I replied.” In 1939, Cage moved to San Francisco, where he and another innovative American composer, Lou Harrison, gave a number of live performances in which they explored the music-making potential of discarded metal trash, using such objects as thin sheets for producing thunder, or brake-drums and huge springs that gave off highly distinctive sounds.
It was while working with a dance group in Seattle in 1938 that Cage first came up with the idea of the “prepared piano.” He found that by wedging various objects at certain points between a grand piano’s strings, an exotic blend of tonal effects and percussive timbres could be obtained, which was not unlike the sound of African or Indonesian drums. Following on from his first piece for prepared piano, Bacchanale (1938), Cage went on to create a large repertory of works for prepared piano, both as a solo instrument and combined with an orchestra. By the late 1940s, Cage’s reputation as a leading innovative composer was secured, with a 1949 Carnegie Hall performance of his latest work for prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes, becoming a focus of attention in the New York music season.
More important, the success of the “prepared piano” in suggesting the presence of unexplored musical horizons led Cage throughout his life to challenge accepted musical forms and propose new ones of his own invention. In the 1950s, as charter member of the “New York School,” which also included American composers Morton Feldman (1926–87) and Earle Brown (b. 1926), as well as the innovative American painter Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925), Cage experimented with the newly revealed panorama of sounds created by electronic devices and tape. Influenced by Rauschenberg’s “all-white” paintings, he created what remains his most famous piece, 4’33” (1952)—a “silent” work for piano, carefully notated, lasting 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and consisting entirely of the ambient sounds in the room at the time. Another famous work, Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), was arrived at by imposing a particular day’s star chart over manuscript paper, and then interpreting the clusters of dots as notes.
Although Cage claimed little influence from the mainstream of composers, either present or past, his musical outlook embraced a wealth of other influences. In New York, he championed the French composer Erik SATIE, producing a concert in which Satie’s Vexations—a work lasting 24 hours or more and consisting of endless repetitions of a single page of music—was received kindly by a baffled audience. Another significant influence was Cage’s lifetime companion, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, for whom he created a repertory of dance pieces, each one a unique statement on the nature of motion.
The 1960s found Cage teaching on one of his favourite subjects, mushrooms, at New York’s New School for Social Research, while completing Silence, the first of several essay collections exploring the nature of the arts. In the early 1970s, he discovered the writings of the great 19th-century American writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau. The result was Lecture on the Weather (1975), a work of pandemonium using readings from Thoreau’s Journals, taped sound-effects, a chamber ensemble, and film.
Cage’s attention was seized, no less, by the Irish writer James Joyce’s highly experimental novel Finnegans Wake (1938), which inspired the composition of Roaratorio in 1979. Subtitled “An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake,” the work consists of tape recordings of thousands of sounds derived from Joyce’s novel, many of them taped in the locations where Joyce himself would have heard them.
A close study of Eastern philosophies in the late 1940s and an increasing interest in the use of chance (aleatory) elements in music, drew Cage to the Chinese oracular writings of the / Ching (Book of Changes). In 1951, he composed a four-volume piano work entitled Music of Changes, in which the tone and length of the notes were determined by the toss of three coins and the relevant text from the / Ching. Cage’s fascination with the / Ching continued up to the age of 75, in 1987, when he used it to select famous passages from the entire repertory of grand opera. Then he juggled the contents so that a tenor, for example, might be assigned an aria for coloratura soprano. He finally pasted the pieces together to form an entirely new dramatic, evening-length work.
Dismissed in some circles as a madman or buffoon, Cage lived to reap appropriate honours for his extraordinary and revolutionary contributions to music. Whether or not his large scores will survive in performance, they benefited immensely during Cage’s lifetime from his smiling presence, his delighted delivery of the discursive texts, and the notion that someone in this world found music in the act of feeding raw carrots into an electric blender (as in his 1973 work called, appropriately, Etcetera). On August 12, 1992, as the world prepared to honour Cage’s 80th birthday, he died suddenly of a stroke in the apartment he shared with Merce Cunningham in Manhattan, New York. His best-known single statement, “everything we do is music,” is a fitting testament to the creative genius that accepted no restrictions to musical inventiveness.
Alan Rich
SEE ALSO:
ALEATORY MUSIC; BOULEZ, PIERRE; ELECTRONIC MUSIC; STOCKHAUSEN, KARLHEINZ; VARÈSE, EDGARD.
FURTHER READING
Kostelanetz, Richard. John Cage (ex)plain(ed) (London: Prentice-Hall, 1996);
Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Bacchanale; Four Walls;
Music of Changes-, Roaratorio;
Sixteen Dances-, Sonatas and Interludes.