John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.
Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text and decision-making tool, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, "Experimental Music", he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".
Cage's best known work is the 1952 composition 4′33″, a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who perform the work do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano, for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. These include Sonatas and Interludes.
Life
1912–1931: Early years
Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia Harvey, worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia. Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy", while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine; others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe. John Cage Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45, Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. The latter is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work.When Cage was 18 months old, he ate two or three strychnine tablets. "At first the baby's life was despaired of," an article stated, but "a stomach pump was administered with success".
Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently was not thinking of composition. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian, having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. By being "hushed and silent," he said, "we should have the opportunity to hear what other people think," anticipating 4′33″ by more than thirty years.
Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. At Pomona, he encountered the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of the writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of the philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of the composer Henry Cowell. In 1930, he dropped out of Pomona, having come to believe that "college was of no use to a writer" after an incident described in his 1991 autobiographical statement:
Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, but decided he was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare Lévy, he first heard the music of contemporary composers and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which he had not experienced before.
After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage started traveling, visiting various places in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca, where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment."
1931–1936: Apprenticeship
Cage returned to the United States in 1931. He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, including arts patron Galka Scheyer and his later composition teacher Richard Buhlig. By 1933, Cage had decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "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", Cage later explained. In 1933, he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter", in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg pupil. Weiss had been asked by Schoenberg to be his assistant and to train students who might not be ready for Schoenberg's teaching.Following Cowell's advice, Cage traveled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a YWCA in Brooklyn. Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge.
Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at University of Southern California and then at University of California, Los Angeles, as well as privately. The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him", particularly as an example of how to live one's life being a composer. The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it ", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave. Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy:
Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "... When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music." Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage's compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: "There was one... of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius." Cage would later adopt the "inventor" moniker and deny that he was in fact a composer.
At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. She was an Alaskan-born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding, sculpture and collage. Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline, when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.