John Cage

• 1. Introduction

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  John Milton Cage Jr. spent his entire life asking a single question: what is music? He was born on the 5th of September, 1912, in Los Angeles, and for nearly eight decades he pursued an answer so radical it would alienate friends, baffle critics, and quietly reshape the way artists in almost every medium understood their work. In 1952, he presented a pianist with a score that instructed him to sit at the keyboard for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and play nothing at all. The composition 4'33" made the sounds the audience itself created, the rustling and coughing and traffic outside, the music. It was either the most important piece of the 20th century or an elaborate provocation, and the argument has never fully been settled. How does a man who studied with Arnold Schoenberg, the master of strict twelve-tone technique, end up throwing coins at an ancient Chinese oracle to decide which notes to write? And what does it mean when even the composers who publicly dismissed him, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, went on to borrow his methods?

• 2. A Peculiar Education

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  Cage's father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an inventor who held that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." That disposition shaped his son directly. At 18 months old, the younger Cage swallowed two or three strychnine tablets; the family feared the worst, but a stomach pump saved him. The incident reads, in retrospect, like an omen of a life built around surviving the impossible. His earliest musical instruction came through private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and from his aunt Phoebe Harvey James, who introduced him to the piano repertoire of the 19th century. He enrolled at Pomona College in 1928 as a theology major, but what he found there was not faith so much as curiosity: a professor named José Pijoan introduced him to Marcel Duchamp, and Cage walked away certain that college "was not being run correctly." His reasoning was characteristically blunt. He had gone into the library stacks, read the first book by an author whose name began with Z rather than the assigned text, and received the highest grade in the class. He left Pomona and sailed to Europe, visiting France, Germany, Spain, and Mallorca, where he made his first compositions using dense mathematical formulas he later abandoned. It was in Seville that he experienced something he never forgot: "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment," a description that could serve as an early blueprint for almost everything he would later create.

• 3. The Schoenberg Encounter

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  In 1933, Henry Cowell received some of Cage's compositions and replied with a vague letter suggesting that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg. To afford the preliminary lessons Cowell recommended, Cage traveled to New York and took a job washing walls at a YWCA in Brooklyn, sleeping four hours a night and composing for four hours starting at 4 am. When he finally approached Schoenberg, he admitted he could not pay the fee. Schoenberg asked whether Cage would devote his entire life to music. He said yes, and Schoenberg agreed to teach him for free. The two years that followed were intense and ultimately decisive. Schoenberg told Cage he would always hit "a wall through which I could not pass" because he lacked a feeling for harmony. Cage replied: "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall." Schoenberg later described Cage as "not a composer" but "an inventor of genius," an assessment Cage came to embrace. When Schoenberg told his assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music, Cage revolted, not against the man, but against the idea, and resolved more firmly than ever to compose. He would keep the vow he had given Schoenberg for the rest of his life, continuing to write music even in later decades when, as he acknowledged, he had "no need for it."

• 4. The Prepared Piano and Modern Dance

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  At the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Cage took a position as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird in the late 1930s. He organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought him his first real public recognition. Then, in 1940, he invented the prepared piano, altering the sound of a piano by placing objects on, beneath, or between its strings. The instrument was born out of practical necessity: a room too small for a full percussion ensemble. What began as a workaround became a signature. The stimulus for experimenting with non-musical objects came from filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, who told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Cage did not share the belief in spirits, but the idea that any object could be a sound source stayed with him permanently. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met Merce Cunningham, the dancer who would become his romantic partner for the rest of his life and the primary choreographic collaborator through decades of shared work. Cage's friendship with the painter Lou Harrison, whom Cowell had recommended he seek out in San Francisco, further reinforced his interest in percussion and dance. Together their works shaped a performance community on the West Coast that had few precedents. Cage eventually left Seattle in the summer of 1941 after László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design, where he hoped to establish a center for experimental music that, ultimately, did not materialize.

• 5. Chance as a System

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  Early in 1951, Christian Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I Ching, the first complete English translation, published by Wolff's father Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. For Cage, this ancient Chinese text, ordinarily used for divination, became something else entirely: a tool for making compositional decisions without personal preference. He described the goal as "imitating nature in its manner of operation." His first major results using the I Ching were Imaginary Landscape No. 4, scored for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano, the latter written for pianist David Tudor. The I Ching became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life; he eventually replaced coin tosses with a computer algorithm that replicated the same process. His procedures were far from simple randomization. For Cheap Imitation (1969), a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, the specific questions he posed to the I Ching covered which of seven modes to use, which of twelve possible chromatic transpositions to apply, and which note among seven to select for each phrase. For Etudes Australes (1974-75), the procedure involved placing a transparent strip on a star chart, identifying pitches, transferring them to paper, and then consulting the I Ching to determine which pitches should remain single and which should become parts of chords, chosen from a pre-compiled table of some 550 possible aggregates. The extreme difficulty of the etudes was deliberate: Cage believed that a performance of the impossible would demonstrate that "the impossible is not impossible," which was his answer, grounded in his self-described anarchism, to the idea that the world's political problems cannot be solved.

• 6. Happenings, Fluxus, and the Classroom

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  From 1956 to 1961, Cage taught experimental composition at The New School in New York, and the classes became a generative force in American art history. Most of his students had little or no background in music. They were mostly visual artists, and they included Allan Kaprow, Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins. Cage met Kaprow during a mushroom hunt with sculptor George Segal and invited him to join the class. Kaprow later coined the term "happenings" to describe theatrical events without fixed duration, without a conventional stage-audience separation, and without a plot, occurring in the present tense and shaped by chance. Works that came directly from the class included George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds. Cage's thinking on theater was shaped by his reading of Antonin Artaud's treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings these classes produced are now recognized as a forerunner to the Fluxus movement. The most dramatic moment associated with Cage in this period came in October 1960 at Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio, where video artist Nam June Paik, performing Etude for Piano, cut off Cage's tie and then poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of both Cage and Tudor. As early as 1952, at Black Mountain College outside Asheville, North Carolina, Cage had already staged what has been called the first happening in the United States, a multi-media performance event later titled Theatre Piece No. 1, organized and performed on the same day it was conceived.

• 7. The Long Finale

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  Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by the early 1970s his hands were too swollen to perform. Cheap Imitation (1969), a piece he himself described as "disturbing" in the context of his broader work, became the last composition he performed publicly. He continued writing even after manuscripts had to be completed by assistants, and even after David Tudor stopped performing on piano in the early 1970s to concentrate on his own compositions. In 1978, Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press invited Cage to make prints, and he produced a new series every year until his death, working with unconventional materials, stones, and fire, arriving eventually at a series of watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop in southwestern Virginia. In 1987, he began his five Europera works, all commissioned by the Oper Frankfurt to mark his 75th birthday. The operas combined standard pieces of operatic repertoire selected by chance, meaning no two performances were identical. Days before the premiere of Europeras I and II, Frankfurt's opera house was damaged by fire; the eventual performances drew mixed reactions, and Cage wrote a letter to his musicians criticizing their interpretation. That same year he began a series of Number Pieces, short notated fragments playable at any tempo within indicated time brackets. He wrote approximately forty of these in his final years, including Eighty (1992), premiered in Munich on the 28th of October, 2011. On the 11th of August, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage suffered a stroke. He died the following morning at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan. He was 79. His ashes were scattered in the Ramapo Mountains near Stony Point, New York, at the same site where he had years earlier scattered the ashes of his parents. In September 1992, just weeks after his death, his only film, One11, a 90-minute monochrome work consisting entirely of chance-determined images of electric light, premiered in Cologne.