JOHN CAGE

"Cage, John (b. Los Angeles, 5 Sept. 1912; d. New York, 12 Aug. 1992). Composer and writer on music. Cage was one of the most important of contemporary American composers: his explorations of new sounds (e.g., the prepared piano), indeterminacy in composition and in performance, graphic notations, and live electronics and his innovative mixed-media events of the 1960s served as stimuli for like-minded composers. More traditional musicians and audiences, however, often reacted with indifference or hostility. He held few academic positions (Wesleyan Univ., 1960-61; Univ. of Cincinnati, 1967; Univ. of Illinois, 1967-69; Univ. of California at Davis, 1969; gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, 1988-89), but his influence on contemporary composers (such as Feldman, Young, Cardew, Ichiyanagi, and Wolff) and more generally on musicians and audiences was a significant one, achieved both through his very numerous compositions and through his writings about music.

"After graduating from high school, Cage attended Pomona College for two years, then visited Paris, Berlin, and Madrid for his own study of music, art, and architecture; in 1933 he was in New York, studying theory and attending Cowell's classes in non-Western, folk, and contemporary music; in California he studied counterpoint with Schoenberg (1934-35) and theory at UCLA; by 1938 he was in Seattle accompanying a dance group at the Cornish School, where he first met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with whom he was often to collaborate. In Seattle he formed a percussion group and continued to compose in a chromatic style, making some use of serial procedures. Imaginary Landscapes no. 1 (1939) illustrates his concern with time as a structural unit (it consists of four sections of 3x5 measures separated by interludes) and with timbre (it is scored for two variable-speed turntables, frequency recordings, cymbal, and piano). By 1940 he was in San Francisco, where his first piece for prepared piano (Bacchanale, 1940) was occasioned by his need for percussive sounds from one instrument and to accompany a dance; most of the dance music from this period employs the prepared piano and is cast in irregular structure appropriate to the choreography; other concert music of the 1940s employs strict rhythmic layouts to produce `nearly stationary' music (Music for Marcel Duchamp, prepared piano; The Seasons, ballet, both 1947) for which he saw Webern and Satie as models.

"National recognition dated from a percussion concert at the Library of Congress in 1943; his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949; Guggenheim and National Institute of Arts and Letters Awards followed. Indeterminacy became important in the compositions of the 1950s, which include the well-known 4' 33" (tacet for any instrument or instruments, 1952) as well as Imaginary Landscape no. 5 (1952), the score for which is a set of instructions for producing a tape from fragments of recordings from any 42 records; in Music for Piano (1952-56) the I Ching determined the number of sounds per page, while imperfections in the paper dictated the particular placement of the notes on the staff. The Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), intended for David Tudor, is a compendium of the techniques of composition and graphic notations (including tracings of astronomical charts) that Cage had developed, but in addition implicates performer(s) in the compositional process (e.g., they choose the actual material to be played, draw lines, and define terms in their parts).

"In the Water Music (1952) Tudor had been required to perform many actions away from the piano (e.g., pouring water from pots, using a radio); in the late 1950s and 1960s such theatrical and multimedia events became more frequent and were combined with indeterminacy. Thus the performance instruction in 4' 33" no. 2 (solo for any player, 1962) is `In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.' In the 1970s Cage became interested in Thoreau (Renga, 1976, in which the notation consists of drawings by Thoreau) and in the transformation of literature into music (Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, 1979; the score provides the means for translating any book into music; Cage's realization is an electronic piece built from sounds mentioned in the book). Renga may be performed together with Apartment House 1776, in which the I Ching dictates extracts from music of the American Revolution, with vocal interventions reflecting native and immigrant cultures.

"Cage's works do not fit easily into traditional genres or categories. When he came closest to achieving his aim of creating a `musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and tradition of the art,' the response was not always positive: Atlas eclipticalis (for any ensemble from 86 instruments, 1961) was not well received by most of the audience nor by the musicians when performed by the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein (1964). Nevertheless, Cage increasingly received honors and commissions from major organizations: in 1968 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1978 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in the 1970s he received prestigious commissions from the Boston Symphony (Renga, 1976), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Lecture on the Weather, 12 instruments or voices, tapes, and films, 1975), and IRCAM (Roaratorio, 1979)."

List of writings
Bibliography