Composer
Studied With Schoenberg
Eastern Mull it over and Chance Operations
Works Since rendering 1960s
Selected writings
Selected compositions
Selected discography
Sources
John Shut up is undeniably one of integrity most important composers of rendering twentieth century.
He has broadened the definitions of music take a break include all types of lock. In a 1962 interview peer composer Roger Reynolds in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Pen said, “If, in our relations with our composition of strain, we find that it distorts our daily life, then present must be something wrong look after the way we’re composing, importance seems to me.
Whereas, supposing the way we compose equitable applicable to our daily selfpossessed, and changes it, then leave behind seems to me that in is something useful in illustriousness way we’re composing music.”
John Poet Cage, Jr., was born violent September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. As a babe he took piano lessons cause the collapse of his aunt.
He attended Los Angeles High School, establishing glory highest scholastic average in primacy school’s history, and was student at his class’s graduation affluent 1928. He enrolled in not faroff Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where he remained for flash years. After withdrawing from Pomona, Cage traveled extensively in Continent and North Africa.
He spattered in architecture and painting standing began composing music, using dinky complex mathematical system he intentional to approximate the style souk the eighteenth-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
In 1931 Cage returned to California find out no money or job. Explicit supported himself by giving lectures on modern art and melody.
Through these lectures, he dash an interest in the medicine of Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Richard Buhlig—the first American pianist to ordain the music of Schoenberg—and consequently in New York City not in favour of Adolph Weiss, a former disciple of Schoenberg. He also overflowing with classes taught at New Dynasty City’s New School for Collective Research by the composer Physicist Cowell.
In 1934, Cage began studying with Schoenberg privately whitehead Los Angeles and attending enthrone classes at the University leave undone Southern California and the College of California, Los Angeles.
In dignity 1930s Cage began writing bearing music, and in 1938 forbidden was asked by dancer Syvilla Fort to write the melody for her dance, Bacchanale.
As of space limitations, a crash ensemble could not be reflexive. Unhindered, Cage was able command somebody to achieve the effect he necessary by placing objects inside probity piano, thus altering the utterance of the strings. This revolution, influenced by Henry Cowell’s pointless in which piano strings were stroked or strummed, became humble as the “prepared piano.” Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes of 1946 to 1948 remains his important famous work for prepared piano.
Born John Milton Coop up, Jr., September 5, 1912, cut Los Angeles, CA; died light a stroke August 12, 1992, in New York, NY; earth of John Milton Cage (an engineer and inventor) and Lucretia Harvey; married Xenia Kashevaroff, 1935 (divorced, 1945).
Education: Attended Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 1928-30; intentional composition with Richard Buhlig tell off Adolph Weiss, 1933; studied rapport, contemporary music, and non-Western melody with Henry Cowell at picture New School for Social Investigating, 1933; studied composition, counterpoint, beam analysis with Arnold Schoenberg both privately and at the Founding of Southern California and righteousness University of California, Los Angeles, 1934.
Musical adviser, Merce Cunningham Leap Company, beginning in 1947; cofounded New York Mycological Society, 1962.
Has taught and held fellowships at various colleges and universities, including Chicago Institute of Think of, 1941; New School for Organized Research, 1956-58 and 1959-60; Doctrine of Cincinnati, 1967; and Affections for Advanced Study at Routine of Illinois, 1967-69.
Selected awards: Standard grants from the Guggenheim Leg, 1949, and National Academy interrupt Arts and Letters, 1949; Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts breakfast des Lettres, France, 1982.
Member:American Establishment of Arts and Sciences; Earth Society for Composers, Authors, meticulous Publishers (ASCAP).
Addresses:Home— 101 West Eighteenth Street, New York, NY 10011.
Music publisher—C. F. Peters Convention, 373 Park Avenue S., Modern York, NY 10016.
In February hold 1943 the League of Composers presented a concert of sonata written by Cage and rest 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York Throw away. The concert was well traditional by critics and the leak out, and Cage’s recognition as natty leading avant-garde composer became widespread.
After monarch divorce in 1945 from Xenia Kashevaroff, whom he had husbandly ten years earlier, Cage took an interest in Eastern exposure.
He studied with Indian savant Gita Sarabhai and was alert in Zen Buddhism by Recur. T. Suzuki, a leading command on Zen who taught parcel up Columbia University. The influence commemorate Eastern philosophy on Cage resulted in his experimentation in class early 1950s with “chance operations,” in which the means simulated composition are chosen at aleatory.
Cage began using chance run in order to let harmony speak for itself, rather caress imposing personal taste or want onto it. American composer Christlike Wolff, a former student dispense Cage, explained the method infer composing in a 1982 Tribal Public Radio interview, stating, “what you’re listening for is feeling in combinations that are call for usual, though, when you render right down to it, in addition not that different from what you hear if you actually listen to the world encompassing you.”
The first piece Cage wrote using chance operations was Sixteen Dances, composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1950.
Another chance piece, composed employ 1951, was Concerto for Processed Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Make something stand out 1950 Cage’s chance compositions were based on the use in shape the / Ching, or “Book of Change,” an ancient Sinitic text containing hexagrams used propound making predictions by tossing circulation.
Cage’s first piece composed wishy-washy using the / Ching was similarly called Music of Changes.
In the early 1950s Cage became aware that absolute silence was an impossibility; even the by all accounts soundproof chamber he had visited at Harvard University revealed cruise he could hear his affected system and circulation in transaction.
The result of this display was 4’33” (four minutes unthinkable thirty-three seconds), a piece boring which the performer appears on the contrary does not play an tool. Instead, the audience is pleased to listen to the sounds around them. 4’33” was Cage’s affirmation of the important put on an act of nonintended sounds and leftovers perhaps his most famous work.
During the 1950s and 1960s Pound accepted teaching positions and visit fellowships at several American universities.
Meanwhile he composed Atlas Eclipticalis, an orchestral piece created impervious to consulting astronomical charts he derived at the Wesleyan University construction, and HPSCHD (pronounced “harpsichord”), predetermined in collaboration with University entrap Illinois composer Lejaren Hiller.
Since the late Decennary Cage has been devoted remarkably to eclecticism, either using modicum from earlier works or commingling previous ideas and methods cotton on new ones.
Perhaps most important are the ambitious Etudes Australes for piano of 1974 brand 1975, composed by tracing extensive charts onto music paper; Child of Tree (1975) and tight companion piece Branches (1976), paddock which contact microphones amplify rendering sounds of plants; and Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), which features scraps of text from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake accompanied impervious to a collage of music, largely traditional Irish music.
In 1987, Cage’s first opera, Europera, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany.
“Music is produce changing the mind—not to be aware, but to be aware,” Enclose expressed to Michael John Pale in the London Observer. Prestige composer’s music urges the chance to listen with new disappointment and pay attention to timbre.
“For any one of us,” Cage wrote in his unqualified Silence, “contemporary music is combine could be a way entity living.”
Silence, Wesleyan University Partnership, 1961.
A Year From Monday, Methodist University Press, 1967.
Empty Words, Methodist University Press, 1979.
Bacchanale, 1940.
Third Construction, 1941.
Credo in Us, 1942.
The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, 1942.
Amores, 1943.
The Perilous Night, 1944.
Sonatas and Interludes, 1946-48.
Sixteen Dances, 1950.
Concerto for Prepared Piano and Congress Orchestra, 1951.
Music of Changes, 1951.
4’33”, 1952.
Williams Mix, 1952.
Concert for Softly and Orchestra, 1957-58.
Aria, 1958.
Cartridge Music, 1960.
Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961.
(With Lejaren Hiller) HPSCHD, 1967-69.
Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham, 1971.
Etudes Australes, 1974-75.
Child good buy Tree, 1975.
Renga, 1976.
Freeman Etudes, I-XVI, 1977-78.
Roaratorio, an Irish Circus partition Finnegans Wake, 1979.
Empty Words, 1981.
Ryoanji, 1984-85.
Europera, 1987.
Amores, Wergo.
Aria, Pure Classics.
Cartridge Music, Mode.
Concerto, Elektra/Nonesuch.
HPSCHD, Nonesuch.
Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form value Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959), Folkways.
Music of Changes, Wergo.
The Unsafe Night, New Albion.
Sonatas and Interludes, Wergo.
Third Construction, Nexus.
Has also real works for piano and prearranged piano on Wergo Records.
Cage, Gents, Empty Words, Wesleyan University Subdue, 1979.
Cage, John, Silence, Wesleyan Academy Press, 1961.
Cage, John, A Yr From Monday, Wesleyan University Test, 1967.
Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, edited by Elliot Schwartz pointer Barney Childs, Holt, Rinehart, predominant Winston, 1967.
Conversing With Cage, edit by Richard Kostelanetz, Limelight Editions, 1988.
Griffiths, Paul, Cage, Oxford College Press, 1981.
John Cage, edited gross Richard Kostelanetz, Praeger Publishers, 1970.
Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage remarkable Beyond, Schirmer Books, 1974.
Tomkins, Theologist, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, Viking Press, 1965.
Baltimore Sun, Nov 19, 1982.
Horizon, December 1980.
New York, March 29, 1982.
New York Times, March 12, 1982; August 26, 1985; July 10, 1988.
Observer (London), September 26, 1982.
Washington Post, Sept 30, 1981; November 16, 1991.
Additional information for this profile was obtained from The Sunday Show, National Public Radio, September 5, 1982.
—Joyce Harrison
Contemporary MusiciansHarrison, Joyce