Home > Baker's Student Encyclopedia of Music > Cage, John

(Milton, Jr.), outstanding American composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist; b. Los Angeles, Sept. 5, 1912; d. N.Y., Aug. 12, 1992. His father, John Milton Cage, Sr., was an inventor, and his mother was active as a club-woman in California. As a young man, Cage studied piano in Los Angeles and in Paris. Returning to the U.S., he studied composition in California with ARNOLD SCHOENBERG and in N.Y. with Henry Cowell.

In 1938-39 Cage was employed as a dance accompanist at the Cornish School in Seattle, where he also organized a percussion group. There he met the dancer MERCE CUNNINGHAM, with whom he would collaborate for most of the rest of his life. Cage developed Cowell's piano idiom, making use of TONE CLUSTERS and playing directly on the strings. He also developed the PREPARED PIANO, for which he composed the magnum opus Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48).

Cage taught for a season at the School of Design in Chicago in 1941-42, then moved to N.Y., where he was reunited with Cunningham. He served as musical advisor to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company until 1987. Another important association was his collaboration with the pianist DAVID TUDOR, who became one of Cage's best interpreters. In 1952, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Cage presented a theatrical event historically marked as the earliest musical HAPPENING.

With the passing years, Cage ceased using precise musical notation and definite ways of performance, electing instead to mark his creative intentions in GRAPHIC NOTATION. He established the principle of INDETERMINACY in musical composition, producing works any two performances of which can never be identical.

In 1952 he produced one of his most famous works, a piece entitled 4′;33″, in three movements, during which no sounds are intentionally produced. It was performed in Woodstock, N.Y., by Tudor, who sat at the piano playing nothing for the length of time stipulated in the title. This was followed by another "silent" piece, 0′00″, which is "to be played in any way by anyone." It was presented for the first time in Tokyo in 1962. Any sounds, noises, coughs, chuckles, groans, or growls produced by the listeners are automatically regarded as integral to the piece itself.

In order to eliminate the subjective element in composition, Cage developed a method of selecting the components of his pieces by dice throwing, suggested by an ancient Chinese classic, the I Ching. The length, pitch, loudness or softness, tempo, and placement of each note could be chosen by a throw of a die or the toss of a coin. Cage used this method first in his Music of Changes for piano (1951) and, later, to compose his stage work EUROPERAS 1 and 2, which he wrote, designed, staged, and directed in 1987. Different excerpts from well-known operas, along with stage sets, costumes, and other elements, are selected at random to be performed. A computer program, named by Cage IC (in homage to the I Ching), was used to make the random choices.

Cage was also a brilliant writer, much influenced by the manner, grammar, and style of Gertrude Stein. Among his works are Silence (1961), A Year from Monday (1967), M (1973), Empty Words (1979), and X (1983). He developed a style of poetry called "mesostic," which uses an anchoring string of letters down the center of the page that spell a name, a word, or a line of text relating (or not) to the subject of the poem. Mesostic poems may be composed by computer, the "source material" pulverized and later enhanced by Cage into a semicoherent, highly evocative poetic text. His most substantial writing in this form was his set of six lectures published as I—VI, delivered by him as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry at Harvard University during the 1988-89 academic year.

His scores have been exhibited in galleries and museums, but Cage was also an accomplished visual artist. Beginning in 1978 he returned annually to Crown Point Press in San Francisco to make etchings. A series of 52 paintings, the New River Watercolors, executed from 1988 to 1990 at the Miles C. Horton Center at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, were shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., in 1990. In 1992, shortly after his death, an exhibition of his works was given at the Venice Biennale.

Cage received numerous awards and honors throughout his life, including the prestigious (and lucrative) Kyoto Prize in 1989. He suffered a massive stoke in his N.Y. apartment in August 1992 dying the next day at St. Luke's Hospital, without regaining consciousness. His cremated remains, along with those of Tudor, were scattered in 1997 within the community in which both once lived, the Gatehill Co-op, in Stony Point, N.Y.