On September 5, 1912, John Cage was born. Cage was an avant-garde composer whose work often seemed to be equal parts music and philosophical exploration.
Cage was born and raised in Los Angeles. He began taking piano lessons in 4th grade; he enjoyed them but didn’t seem to have any interest in music as a career. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as valedictorian at 16 and enrolled at Pomona College as a religion major. Frustrated by the regimentation of formal education, he dropped out two years later. With the encouragement of his parents, he spent the next eighteen months traveling through Europe, where he began composing.
When he returned to the United States in 1931, Cage supported himself giving lectures on modern art, and thought of being a painter but soon decided to focus on music. “The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings,” he later said.
In the 1930s, Cage supported himself with a variety of jobs, including some time spent as a dance accompanist at UCLA, where he began writing music for choreographers. In 1938, he was asked to write music for a new dance. The room where the piece was to be performed had no room for an instrumental ensemble; only a piano was available. That led to Cage’s creation of the “prepared piano.” By inserting objects—screws, pencils, erasers, small dowels—into the strings of selected notes on the piano, the sound of those notes would be changed; usually, the pitch would disappear entirely, and playing one of these notes would create a thump or a twang. It was a way of turning the piano into a sort of percussion ensemble.
It wasn’t an entirely new idea—composers had been experimenting with similar effects for at least twenty years—but Cage made broader use of it than anyone had to that point, and he is generally credited with the invention of the prepared piano. He wrote several pieces for the instrument, of which the most frequently performed is the Sonatas and Interludes, written between 1946 and 1948.
The next breakthrough in Cage’s compositional style came in the early 1950s when a student gave him a copy of the I Ching, a work of classical Chinese writing often used as a method of divination. Cage began to use it as a tool to make choices in his composition, letting elements of the piece be determined by chance. His goal was to remove himself as much as possible as an active element in his compositions. He described the sound of traditional music as “someone talking,” and wanted his music to create the feeling that “sound is acting.” “I don’t need sound to talk to me,” he said. Cage talks about his first encounter with the I Ching in the documentary John Cage Talks About Cows and One/Seven.
His first major works to be principally based on chance were written in 1951. Imaginary Landscape #4 was to be performed on 12 radios, and what the audience heard would depend on what was being broadcast by local radio stations during the performance. Music of Changes, a large work for piano, took its name from the I Ching, a phrase often translated as Book of Changes.
And in 1952, he premiered what is perhaps his best-known piece, 4’33”. That is the duration of the piece, and it consists of the performer sitting in front of their instrument and playing nothing. It’s often described as four-and-a-half minutes of silence, but the point Cage wanted to make was that the audience wasn’t in silence and that whatever sounds they were hearing—the rustling of coats and programs, the clearing of throats, the hum of the air conditioner—were music, too. Kyle Gann’s No Such Thing as Silence looks at the history of 4’33”, and the musical and philosophical debates it provokes.
Many critics and composers who had admired Cage’s earlier work reacted sharply to chance music. The composer Iannis Xenakis called chance “an abrogation of a composer’s function;” conductor/composer Pierre Boulez suggested that it was a convenient way to hide “a basic weakness in technique.”
Cage continued to develop his new ideas, though and stretched further and further from traditional music. Much of the score to his 1957 Concerto for Piano and Orchestra didn’t even look like music, as Cage began experimenting with unusual forms of graphical notation.
By the early 1960s, some pieces didn’t have any musical notation; they were simply instructions to the performer, and not always musical instructions. The score to the 1962 piece 0’00” was a single sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action.” The first performance of the piece consisted of Cage writing that sentence. Cage continued in this vein throughout the 1960s, creating pieces of performance art that came to be known as “happenings.” He returned to notated music in 1969, with a piano piece called Cheap Imitation. A later version of the piece, for violin, can be heard here.
In the 1970s, Cage’s output was dominated by three sets of extraordinarily (and deliberately) difficult etudes—Etudes Australis for piano; Freeman Etudes, for violin; and Etudes Boreales for cello. These pieces were a reflection of his philosophy about social change. “A performance would show that the impossible is not impossible,” he said of these works and hoped that they would inspire audiences to make seemingly impossible changes in the world around them.
Cage’s 1980s music was principally a series of “number pieces,” named for the number of performers required. Two⁴, for instance, was the fourth piece written for two performers. Cage also made his first venture into opera, writing five pieces all called Europera; some of them are made up of fragments of other operas, with costumes and sets chosen by chance.
Cage died on August 11, 1992, after suffering a stroke. A few years later, a performance of his music began that he would surely appreciate. On September 5, 2001, at a church in Halberstadt, Germany, the organ began playing Cage’s Organ/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible). Sandbags are placed on the organ’s pedals so that each chord will play continuously; every few years, someone comes out to move the sandbags. The next such chord change is scheduled for Cage’s birthday this year, and the performance will be finished in 2640, and it’s hard to imagine the piece being played any more slowly than that.
Kay Larson’s biography Where the Heart Beats focuses on the importance of Zen Buddhism in Cage’s life. A selection of Cage’s lectures and essays is gathered in Silence. And the documentary John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It is described as a “performance biography.”