John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 –
August 12, 1992) was an American composer. He was a pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and
electronic music. He is perhaps best known for his 1952
composition 4'33", whose three movements are
performed without a single note being played. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the
most important composers of his era. [1]
Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce
Cunningham. In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher,
writer, printmaker[2], and avid amateur mycologist and
mushroom collector.
Early life and work
Cage was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Los Angeles High School. He was of English and
Scottish descent[3]. His inventor father said to him, “if someone says ‘can't,’ that shows you what to do.”[4] Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society"
who was "never happy."
Cage's family was Episcopalian. Cage himself planned
to become a minister or writer. He said that even before he chose a musical
path, he had an unfocused desire to create. He took piano lessons as a child, but did not devote himself fully to music until
much later. There are some hints of his subsequent anti-establishment stance in his early life; for example, while attending
Pomona College, he was shocked to find a large number of students in the library reading
the same set text. He rebelled and "went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I
received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly."
Cage dropped out in his second year of college and sailed to Europe, where he stayed for 18 months, working for some of this
time as an architect's apprentice. It was there that he wrote his first pieces of music, but upon hearing them he found he didn't
like them and left them behind on his return to America.
Apprenticeship
John Cage returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America being revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There he took lessons in
composition from Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell at the New
School for Social Research, Adolph Weiss and, famously, Arnold Schoenberg whom
he "literally worshipped". Schoenberg told Cage he would tutor him for free on the condition he "devoted his life to music". Cage
readily agreed, but stopped lessons after two years. Cage later wrote in his lecture Indeterminacy: "After I had been
studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to
him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came
to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall'."
Schoenberg later described Cage as being 'not a composer, but an inventor — of genius".
Cage soon began to experiment with percussion instruments, as well as
non-traditional instruments and sound-producing devices, and gradually came to use rhythm as the
basis for his music instead of harmony. More generally, he structured pieces according
to the duration of sections. These approaches owed something to the music of Anton Webern
and especially Erik Satie, one of his favourite composers.
In 1935, Cage married artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff.
The Cornish School years
In the late 1930s, Cage went to the Cornish School of the Arts in
Seattle, Washington. There he found work as an accompanist for dancers. He was asked
to write some music to accompany a dance by Syvilla Fort called Bacchanale. He
wanted to write a percussion piece, but there was no pit at the performance venue for a percussion ensemble and he had to write
for a piano. While working on the piece, Cage experimented by placing a metal plate on top of the strings of the instrument. He
liked the resulting sound, and this eventually led to his conceiving the prepared piano,
in which screws, bolts, strips of rubber, and other objects are placed between the strings of the piano to change the character
of the instrument. This creation was influenced by his old teacher Henry Cowell, who wrote
pieces requiring performers to pluck the piano strings with their fingers and use metal slides.
The Sonatas and Interludes of 1946–48 are usually considered Cage's greatest work for prepared piano. Pierre Boulez was one of the work's admirers, and he organized its European premiere. The two composers
struck up a correspondence which ended when they disagreed over Cage's use of chance in composing. For Boulez, this was an
unacceptable abdication of the composer’s control over his art. However for Cage this was to be a wholly necessary step in his
subsequent aesthetic evolution.
Another significant prepared piano work is The Perilous Night (1943). "Cage always referred to it as his
"autobiographical" piece, and his biographer, David Revill has convincingly associated it with the traumas associated with Cage's
sexual reorientation, culminating in divorce from his wife (1945) and the beginning of a monogamous homosexual parternership with
Merce Cunningham, that lasted to the end of his life. [This piece was] Cage's attempt
to express, and thereby relieve, the anxieties he was experiencing in his private life"³.
It was also at Cornish that Cage founded a percussion orchestra for which he wrote his First
Construction (In Metal) in 1939, a piece that uses metal percussion instruments to make a loud and rhythmic music. He
also wrote Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in that year, possibly the first composition to employ record players as instruments.
It consisted of a quartet using "a muted piano, a suspended cymbal, and two variable-speed turntables on which single-frequency
radio test records were played at various steady speeds and also sliding between speeds in siren-like glissandos"³. Around this
time, he met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became a major creative
collaborator and his lifelong partner following Cage's split from his then-wife Xenia. (The couple divorced in 1945 or 1946.)
In late 1942 and early 1943 Cage composed his "'Ten-Piece Percussion Ensemble' whose members included his [then] wife Xenia
and Merce Cunningham"³. This piece was performed at the New York Museum of Modern Art, February 7, 1943. "It was widely written
up in the press, including a picture spread in Life magazine, and won him his first fame"³.
Asian influences
While at the Cornish School, Cage encountered ideas that influenced his later work. From the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai he
heard Thomas Mace's saying "The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine
influences." Cage developed an interest in Hindu aesthetics through the writings of the nineteenth
century mystic Sri Ramakrishna, the twentieth century Indian art historian Anada K.
Coomaraswamy and, through Coomaraswamy, the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart.
These influences are detectable in such pieces such as The Seasons and the String Quartet in Four Parts, whose
anti-directional and harmonically static forms suggest the cycles of nature.
Most infuential, though, was Cage’s discovery in the late forties of Taoism and then Zen
Buddhism, through Japanese scholar Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. In 1950, Cage received
a copy of the I Ching from composer Christian
Wolff. Rather than fortune-telling, Cage used it to make compositional decisions. The first work Cage composed by tossing
coins was titled, appropriately enough, Music of Changes"³. The reduced, static expression of the Indian inspired works
faded as Cage aimed to dissolve personality, intention and expression altogether via the use of chance. Another important work
from this era is the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra of 1951.
John Cage put the influence of Zen Buddhism into practice through music. He described his music
as "purposeless play", but "this play is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest
improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind
and desires out the way and lets it act of its own accord." Hence comes his favorite saying nichi nichi kore kōnichi or, every day is a good day.
Chance
After leaving the Cornish School, Cage joined the faculty of the Chicago School of Design for a time, then moved to
New York City. He continued to write music and establish new musical contacts. He toured
America with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company several times, and also toured Europe with the experimental pianist David Tudor, his other closest collaborator during this period.
After it was introduced to him by Christian Wolff, Cage began to use the
mechanism of the I Ching (Chinese “Book of Changes”) in the composition of his music in order to
provide a framework for his uses of chance. He used it, for example, in the Music of Changes for solo piano in 1951, to
determine which notes should be used and when they should sound. Another piece Cage wrote consisted of lines, running
horizontally and some vertically across the page of all different length. The performer must determine the speed, pitch, clef,
and length of each note based on what he perceived the line to instruct. He used chance in other ways as well; Imaginary
Landscape No. 4 (1951) is written for twelve radio receivers. Each radio has two players; one
to control the frequency the radio is tuned to, the other to control the volume level. Cage wrote very precise instructions in the score about how the performers should set their
radios and change them over time, but he could not control the actual sound coming out of them, which was dependent on whatever
radio shows were playing at that particular place and time of performance. This piece marked a move away from scores which had
been merely composed with indeterminate methods, to those which were also performatively indeterminate. Such pieces as the
Variations series paradoxically placed great responsibility in the hands of the performer in the demands the music made in
terms of realising indeterminate (chance) procedures. When applied to the often-conservative infrastructure of the symphony
orchestra, in pieces such as the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958) and Atlas
Eclipticalis (1961), Cage’s radical demands resulted in markedly hostile performer reactions.
The detailed nature of Cage's compositional use of chance remains poorly understood. Generally, Cage proceeded from the
broadest aspects of a new composition to extremely specific ones. For all these decisions, he determined the number of
possibilities for each aspect and then used chance to select a particular possibility: the number of possibilities would be
related to one or a series of numbers corresponding to the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. For instance, Cage might
choose a musical pitch from three possibilities. Possibility A could be related to I Ching numbers 1–24, possibility B to
25–48, and possibility C to 49–64. The actual choice of an I Ching number, as described in the book itself when it is used
as an oracle, was accomplished by tossing coins or (later) by running a computer program, initially the print-out of one designed
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the
supervision of Lejaren Hiller and later one designed by Cage's assistant, the composer
Andrew Culver. There, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Cage wrote a "mixed-media
performance called HPSCHD (computerese for "harpsichord"). Programming the computer to make the I Ching coin tosses for
him enabling Cage to make enough random decisions—more than a million—to keep seven keyboard players, fifty-two tape recorders
playing random computer-generated 'tunes' in fifty-two different tunning systems, fifty-two film projectors and sixty-four slide
projectors (showing scenes of space travel, some from old science-fiction movies) constantly busy for four-and-a-half hours, May
16, 1969"³. Cage called the generation of an I Ching number a chance operation.... A finished composition generally
entailed numerous chance operations. Before "HPSCHD", He composed Atlas eclipticalis (1961). This piece was written for
"eighty-six instrumental parts that could be played in whole or in part, for any duration and in any combination from soloist to
full orchestra. The I Ching decided which staves carried which clefs, and how they were to be assigned to the various
instruments. The performance was a fiasco. The orchestra rebelled along with the audience...some so enraged that they threw their
microphones on the floor and stamped on them"³. These are just a few examples of 'Chance Music' that Cage comprised and the
reactions he received. Most performers often felt that Cage's 'chance' music was so detailed that there was nothing left to
chance (or improvise). The performers felt more like slaves of the music rather than interpreters. Cage later went on to say "In
my opinion it is the composer's privilege to determine his works, down to the minutest detail"³.
Black Mountain, 4’33’’
In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly
worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, he visited the
anechoic chamber at Harvard University. (An
anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room,
rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear
silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he
informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place
where he expected there to be no sound, yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And
they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realization as he saw it of the
impossibility of silence led to the "composition" of his most notorious piece, 4′33″.
Cage repeatedly claimed that he composed 4′33″ in small units of silent rhythmic
durations which, when summed, equalled the duration of the title. Cage suggested that he might have made a mistake in addition.
Some have speculated that the title of the work refers to absolute zero, as 4’33″expressed
in seconds is 273 seconds, and minus 273 degrees is absolute zero in the Celsius scale; there
is, however, no evidence that this relationship is anything more than a coincidence.
Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and Black Mountain colleague, the
artist Robert Rauschenberg, had, while working at the college, produced a series of
white paintings. These were blank canvases, the idea being that they changed according to varying light conditions of the
rooms in which they were hung, as well as the shadows of people in the room. These paintings inspired Cage to use a similar idea,
using the 'silence' of the piece as an 'aural blank canvas' to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each
performance.
Cage was not the first composer to write a piece consisting solely of silence. One precedent is "In futurum", a movement from
the Fünf Pittoresken for piano by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Written in
1919, Schulhoff's meticulously notated composition is made up entirely of rests.[1] Cage was, however, almost
certainly unaware of Schulhoff's work. Another prior example is Alphonse Allais's
Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man, written in 1897, and consisting of nine blank measures. Allais's
composition is arguably closer in spirit to Cage's work; Allais was an associate of Erik
Satie, and given Cage's profound admiration for Satie, the possibility that Cage was inspired by the Funeral March
is tempting. However, according to Cage himself, he was unaware of Allais's composition at the time (though he had heard of a
19th-century book that was completely blank).[5]
The premiere of the three-movement 4′33″ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952 as part of a
recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the
keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the
second and third movements[6]. The piece had passed without
a note being played—in fact without Tudor (or anyone else) having made any deliberate sound as part of the piece. Only then could
the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon, that “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes
a sound."
Richard Kostelanetz suggests that the very fact that Tudor, a man known for
championing experimental music, was the performer, and that Cage, a man known for introducing unexpected non-musical noise into
his work, was the composer, would have led the audience to expect unexpected sounds. Anybody listening intently would have heard
them: while nobody produces sound deliberately, there will nonetheless be sounds in the concert hall (just as there were sounds
in the anechoic chamber at Harvard). It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting
the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial among those who continue to take it seriously, and is seen as
challenging the very definition of music.
While it may challenge the definition of music, it does not challenge any definition of composition — the earliest score was
written on conventional manuscript paper using graphic notation similar to that used in Music of Changes, with the three
movements precisely scored to reflect their individual lengths. The most famous version of the score is the so-called
Tacet edition, which features three movements all on one page, each labelled tacet — the traditional musical term for when
a musician does not play for a movement. The score provides no time limits for any of the parts. Neither the whole piece nor the
duration of the first performance were decided using chance operations. The piece can have any duration and thus any title, but
is stuck with the famous first performance duration and title (i.e. movement I: 30’’;- movement II: 2’23’’;- movement III:
1’40’’;). Cage himself refers to it as his "silent piece" and writes; "I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting
performances of my silent piece... for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have
published. At one performance... the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe
leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium." (in John Cage: Silence: Lectures and Writings).
It is a potential problem though if one wishes to regard the unpredictable sounds as constituting the music in this piece.
This comes forward clearly in the recording made by the Amadinda Percussion Group, in which the group place themselves in a park.
One hears birdsongs, of course, only interrupted twice due to the pauses following each part. If the sounds during the parts are
the music, then the sounds between the parts are not, and then the Amadinda recording is true to its source. However, in a
performance the listener would not be able to distinguish the parts in sounds, but only in the acts of the performer(s). In this
respect Cage’s silent pieces constitute theater more than sound.
John Cage's publishers later sued Mike Batt for having created a track on his album,
Classical Graffiti, with one minute of silence. The track was named "A One Minute Silence" and credited to John Cage. An out of
court settlement was reached, with Batt paying a six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust.
The Swedish band Covenant released the album United States of Mind in 2000 containing a track called "You Can Make Your Own Music"
consisting of 4:33 of silence, in reference to 4’33’’ by John Cage.
Happenings & Fluxus
John Cage's 'Experimental Composition' classes from 1957 to 1959 at the New School for Social
Research have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus, the international network
of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music, most of whom were artists. His students included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al
Hansen, George Brecht, Alice Denham and
Dick Higgins, as well as the numerous artists he invited to attend his classes
unofficially. Several famous pieces came from these classes: George Brecht's Time Table
Music, and Alice Denham's 48 Seconds.
Conceived in 1952, Theater Piece No. 1 consisted of Cage collaborating with Merce
Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert
Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black
Mountain College where the performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings",
as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of
definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "Happening" is so-named
because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest
route to integrating art and (real) life. The term "Happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow,
one of his students, who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with
George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was
strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and Its
Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus
movement. In October of 1960, Mary Baumeister's Cologne studio
hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik, who in the course of
his 'Etude for Piano' cut off Cage's tie and then washed his co-performer’s hair with shampoo.
On May 9, 2006 at Christie's in New York City, a work of art by Robert Rauschenberg titled
"Cage," dedicated to John Cage, sold for $1,360,000, a record for a Rauschenberg piece on paper.
Subsequent works
Cage’s work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces,
reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall
McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power
of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration
with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the
works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400
slides of designs many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty
motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece
had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there. As much
synaesthetic spectacle as ‘composition’, in any conventional sense, HPSCHD demonstrated Cage’s concern to enact a visceral
experiential environment in which the myriad complexities of the individual elements combine together to negate the possibility
of a single, dominant, centre of interest.
Two years prior to this piece was the first Musicircus (1967), conceived by Cage and essentially an extension of the
“Happenings” from the fifties. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in a large space who were all
to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within
these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance
distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatrical feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue
to occur even after Cage’s death. This concept of circus was to remain important to Cage throughout his life and featured
strongly in such pieces as Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979)- a many-tiered rendering in sound of both
his text Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake and traditional musical and field recordings made around
Ireland.
During the seventies and eighties, Cage's compositions took on a variety of guises, from the overtly political and polemic
Lecture on the Weather (1975- based on the texts of the naturalist-anarchist author Henry David Thoreau)[7],
through to the hyper-virtuosic- an example being the Freeman Etudes- Books I and II (1980), composed for the violinist
Paul Zukofsky. Cage conceived the latter as a useful social demonstration of the performer
practically surpassing his own abilities. In their hyper-virtuosity such pieces can be considered to be a precursor of the
New Complexity movement.
Between 1987 and 1990 Cage composed a major series of works entitled Europeras, numbered one to five. Cage was invited
to compose the first two works for the Frankfurt Opera. They deconstruct operatic form, yet are not merely parodic. Plots,
librettos, and arias (often sung simultaneously) were assembled via chance methods from a wide range of conventional 18th and
19th century operas whose texts and scores were in the public domain. Chance determined other aspects as well, from stage
lighting, scenery, costumes and props to the actions of the singers. There was no conductor; performers were instead guided by
large projections of a digital clock according to strict time intervals. Cage even went so far as to hand out two separate sets
of librettos to the audience at the premiere, themselves culled from previous operatic works. Being overtly based as they are
upon previous works, the Europeras provide one of the most intriguing examples of Cage defamiliarising the familiar,
rendering a complex new web of symbols and meanings overlapping across conventional aesthetic domains.
Yet other works, such as Cheap Imitation (1972), Hymns and Variations (1979), and Litany for the Whale
(1980) resemble the less radical works of his early career. Cheap Imitation, for example, was based on a re-writing of
Satie’s Socrate, and marked a return to conventional staff notation. In two groups of compositions from his last years —
Music for _____ and the Number Piece series — Cage attempted to reconcile the experimental, process-oriented character of
his mature compositions with the idea of a musical work or object. In the Number Piece series in particular, Cage believed that
he had finally discovered a way to write music that had harmony, which he now defined as sounds noticed at the same time.
Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near
the German township of Halberstadt, in an imaginative
interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece. The performance is being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ
built into the old church of St. Burchardi. It is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on
September 5, 2001. The first year and half of the performance
was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding until February
2, 2003. Then in July 2004, two additional Es, an octave apart, were sounded and are
scheduled to be sounded later this year on May 5. But at 5:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) on Thursday,
5 January, the first chord progressed to a second -- comprising A, C and F-sharp -- and is to
be held down over the next few years by weights on an organ being built especially for the project.
Europeras 3 & 4 were commissioned in the spring of 1989 and were to be premiered at the Almeida Festival in London the
following year and with a subsequent European tour. David Revill, in his biography on John Cage ("The Roaring Silence"), writes,
"Europeras 3 & 4, while clearly related to the first two, and bringing with them features such as the "Truckera", stand in
relation to them as chamber to grand opera." John Cage’s Europera 3 was completed in 1990. The instrumentation is as follows: 6
singers, 2 pianos, 6 victrola players (each operating 2 gramophones with 50 discs), lighting (72-96 light projectors). Europera 4
is written for soprano, mezzo-soprano, solo piano, victrola player (with 6 discs), lighting (72-96 light projectors). Both operas
are to be performed in sequence.
Cage's One11, written only a few months before his death in 1992, is a silent work entirely composed of images of the
chance-determined play of electric light. Cage said of this work, of which a film was directed and produced by Henning Lohner,
"Of course the film will be about the effect of light in an empty space. But no space is actually empty and the light will show
what is in it. And all this space and all this light will be controlled by random operations."
Writings, visual art, and other activities
Cage was also highly prolific as a writer, producing a series of increasingly experimental texts that were largely
incorporated into several books published during his lifetime. These are Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968),
M (1973), Empty Words (1979), X (1983) and Anarchy (1988). In these books, featuring writings ranging
from straightforward essays to diary entries to wholly experimental writing. For example, he invented the mesostic, a type of poem in which Cage ‘wrote through’ texts such as
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Cage employed chance
methodologies to create texts which were often presented spatially on the page in a striking variety of font sizes, typefaces and
layouts- an approach towards creating an increasingly visual dimension to text, perhaps inspired by the experimental poetry of
E. E. Cummings and lettrism.
In addition a series of interviews between Cage and the critic Daniel Charles are collected in the book For the Birds
(1981), whose title is a reference to one of Cage's favorite sayings, which is typical of his often subtle, self-referential
humor: "I am for the birds, not for the cages people put them in." Richard Kostelanetz assembled a collage of various interviews
in Conversing with Cage (second ed., 2003), and a volume of conversations with Joan Retallack from the 1990s,
Musicage, appeared in 1996.
From the late sixties Cage was also active as a visual artist, working on annual projects at Crown Point Press, from which he
produced a series of drawings, prints and watercolours. Some of these were inspired by the drawings made by Thoreau in his Journal, and by the aesthetics of his earlier friend, and chess partner,
artist Marcel Duchamp. One of his most striking visual pieces is the 1969 work Not
Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, which is comprised of a complex array of superimposed type encased within plexiglas
panels. It seems at times as though Cage’s increasing interest in writing and visual art indicated a certain frustration with
musical composition. However, as Cage pointed out, he aimed to remain faithful to his promise to Schoenberg to devote his life to
music.
Cage had a lifelong interest in mushrooms. He co-founded the New York Mycological Society with three friends and his mycology collection is presently
housed by the Special Collections department of the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Death
John Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992, only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in
Frankfurt by the composer Walter Zimmermann and the musicologist Stefan Schaedler was
due to take place; however the event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra
by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern. [1]
Cultural References
- The Tragically Hip recorded a song called "Tiger the Lion" for their
Music @ Work album which refers to John Cage and some of his ideas. (see liner
notes on album)[2]
- The character John Cage in the American television legal dramedy Ally McBeal is named after him.[original research?]
- Sonic Youth on their SYR4
album perform two realizations of Cage's piece Six and one of Four6.
- In chapter 75 of Charles Bukowski's Women the narrator states, "If John Cage
could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon."
- Oscar-winning actor Nicolas Cage (born "Nicholas Coppola" and so-billed in his film
début, Amy Heckerling's Fast Times at Ridgemont High), took the last name "Cage" from his admiring both the Marvel Comics
character Luke Cage and composer John Cage. [citation needed]
