Recognized as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century and a leading figure in the post-war avant-garde scene, John Cage was an American musician, theorist, writer and artist. Besides being considered to be a pioneer of indeterminacy in music and non-standard use of instruments, Cage is also held in high regard for his visual pieces, namely paintings and prints.
Background
John Cage was born on September 5 in the year of 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father was John Milton Cage Sr., a successful man who was regarded as an inventor by the local populace. Cage’s mother, Lucretia Harvey, worked as a part-time journalist for the Los Angeles Times and was an oftentimes depressed person. Although there is no proving this to be a fact, the Cage bloodline is supposedly trackable to an ancestor named John Cage who was George Washington’s assistant and had a task of surveying the Colony of Virginia.
Cage also had an aunt, Phoebe Harvey James, who was rather talented in the music department. However, Cage was more interested in writing then composing and this is what got him involved with the valedictorian field. Even then, when he was still a rather young man, John Cage already laid his theoretical grounds for the famous 4’33” composition of silence.
Education
Cage’s first experiences with music were received from the private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles. In 1928, the young theorist enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, aiming at the theology major. John Cage yet again started merging disciplines, as he was always prone to doing. He encountered the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via one of his Pomona professors and decided to drop from college in order to pursue a similar line of work.
After much wheedling, Cage managed to persuade his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than any amount of college studies. After that, John hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre. He later made his way to the City of Light. Cage stayed in Europe for about eighteen months and spent most of his time trying his hand at various forms of art. Although he did focus on modern expression the most, John also studied Gothic and Greek architecture. He also took up painting, poetry and music – especially the work of the legendary Johann Sebastian Bach, something Cage never had an opportunity to hear earlier in his life.
After the Euro trip came to an end, young artist took his enthusiasm back home in 1931. He went to live in Santa Monica, California, where he made a living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art based on his direct explorations of the Old Continent. By the year of 1933, Cage decided to concentrate on music composing rather than painting. In order to advance himself in the music department, the artist traveled to the Big Apple. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition and he was offered to become the next student of famous Schoenberg – free of charge.
John and his wife first lived with Cage’s parents in Pacific Palisades for a few months, but then moved to Hollywood. Between the years of 1936 and 1938, Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance – a position of a dance accompanist at UCLA. He was in charge of producing compositions for choreographies and it was here that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets and so on.
In the meantime, the artist’s thirst for visual expression yet again emerged from the depth of his inner self – he frequently traveled to New York City and eventually became a part of the local art scene. Through such travels, John met and became friends with such painters as Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, and many others. This American composer made something like music in New York, presenting a large number of prepared pieces that featured no sound, introducing numerous changes to the medium. He even met and befriended his idol, Marcel Duchamp, as he visited New York and wanted to listen to one of his piano music works. He was interested in visual pieces of his fellow artists whilst they were intrigued by Cage’s avant-garde musical concepts.
However, Cage’s artistic life went through a crisis in the mid-1940s. The public rarely accepted his work and Cage he himself had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues, meaning he was often disregarded by both his fellow musicians and the audience. This, naturally, led to many depressing emotions within Cage’s mind, severely shaking his confidence. This was the time John dedicated much of his time to writing about music and art in general, discussing his philosophical views on both matters. Years of 1948 and 1952 were pivotal for Cage’s music and sounds as it was then that he received classical piano lessons on sonatas from a professional composer.
At one point of the early 1950s, Cage was offered an opportunity to teach at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville. This helped him regain his confidence and set him back on the course of the modern dance. He wrote his widely read and influential book titled "Silence", the first one of what will become a five book series. Cage’s work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious pieces to date, heavily reflecting the mood of the era. It was then that John produced the first fully notated work in years – "Cheap Imitation" for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie’s "Socrate" and it was openly sympathetic to its source. This artwork marked a major change in Cage’s music as he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments and tried out several new approaches along the way, such as improvisation.
However, "Cheap Imitation" ultimately became the last work John ever performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since the year of 1960, and by the early 1970s, his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform in such fashion. Instead, he started to paint in watercolors, in an abstract method which did not require too much precision from Cage’s limbs as music did. His paintings were oftentimes combined with his musical concepts, always leading to interesting results which are unlike anything the scene has seen prior to Cage. John as well started working in another field – the opera. This was the climax of Cage’s artistic career as this was the first time the composer and artist undoubtedly wanted to be involved within a field without compromising it with other mediums.
During the mid and late 1980s, Cage’s health worsened progressively, The problem with arthritis was mixed with sciatica and arteriosclerosis as John suffered a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted. The transitoriness and fragility of his well-being were extremely obvious in his later works as Cage accepted his fate and did not allow fear to find its place between him and his art. On August 11, 1992, while he was preparing evening two cups of tea for himself and his friend Cunningham, Cage suffered another stroke in New York. He died during the morning. Ultimately, what remains behind him is an incredible legacy of impacts on various creative fields, underlined by his unique view on the music, world and art.
Achievements
Cage is best known for revolutionizing modern music through his incorporation of unconventional instrumentation and the idea of environmental music dictated by chance. He is also known as the father of indeterminism who was influenced by Zen-Buddhism and Indian philosophy to use aleatoric (chance-controlled) music in his compositions. John Cage was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 and he also received an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1986, he received an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institutes of the Arts.
Cage turned to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies and concluded that all the activities that make up music must be seen as part of a single natural process. He came to regard all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminism in his music. He used a number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element of personal taste on the part of the performer: unspecified instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds and entire pieces, inexact notation, and sequences of events determined by random means.
Membership
John was the founder of New York Mycological Society.
Interests
Amateur mycology
Artists
Marcel Duchamp
Music & Bands
Johann Sebastian Bach
Connections
At some point in 1934, John met and fell in love with a fellow artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff. The two were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935. The couple first stayed in Pacific Palisades with John’s parents but later shifted to Hollywood. His marriage began to crumble when he joined Cornish College as a composer. There he met many people, some of whom who became his lifelong friends. One of them was the dancer Merce Cunningham with whom he became passionately involved, so, he divorced his wife in 1945. Till the end of John’s life, Cunningham remained his partner.
