Cage, John Milton, Jr.

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Cage, John Milton, Jr.

(b.. 5 September 1912 in Los Angeles, California; d. 12 August 1992 in New York City), prolific avant-garde composer, teacher, visual artist, and writer of critical pieces and poetry, diaries, and fiction.

Cage was the son of John Milton Cage, Sr., an amateur scientist and inventor, and Lucretia Harvey, a homemaker and occasional newspaper columnist. He first studied piano as a child, taking lessons initially with his aunt. Following two years at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. Cage went to Europe, traveling between 1930 and 1931, studying piano, architecture, and painting with various people. On his return home, he gave occasional lectures on the modern arts to local women’s groups. In 1932 he studied briefly with the pianist Richard Buhlig, who recommended that he send some of his compositions to the composer Henry Cowell. In 1934 Cage traveled to New York City to work as Cowell’s assistant at the New School and also took lessons from the composer Adolph Weiss (a student of the composer Arnold Schoenberg). A year later, Cage returned to California to study with Schoenberg, who was dismissive of Cage’s music. This opposition only made Cage more determined to compose. On 7 June 1934, he married Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, who became a partner in his artistic endeavors.

During the mid-1930s Cage worked as a dance accompanist, first in Los Angeles, then at Mills College in Oakland, California (summer 1937), and finally at the Cornish School in Seattle (1938), where he met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. The two would become lifelong collaborators and partners. That same year, Cage “invented” the prepared piano by placing small screws, nuts, pieces of rubber, and other items into the piano’s mechanism in order to change it from primarily a melodic to a percussive instrument; the side benefit of this invention was that the player could never be sure what sound would occur when he hit each key. Cage composed almost exclusively for the instrument over the next few years, including his celebrated Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-1948), which led to both a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters after it was premiered in New York City in 1949.

From 1941 to 1942, Cage was in Chicago, where he taught at Laszló Moholy-Nagy’s short-lived experimental art school. In 1942 he moved to New York City, where he was reunited with Cunningham; Cage composed music for many of Cunningham’s first solo recitals and, in 1953 when Cunningham officially formed a dance company, Cage became its music director, a position he held almost until his death. When he first came to New York City, Cage also met the artist Marcel Duchamp, a founder of the Dada movement, whose theories of art, and sense of humor, had an enormous impact on the composer. In 1945 Cage divorced his wife; that same year, he became interested in Eastern philosophy, attending classes by D. T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism. In summer 1948 he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina—a center for avant-garde artists—along with Cunningham; they returned for another summer four years later. During 1949 Cage toured Europe for three months with Cunningham. There, he befriended the avant-garde composer and conductor Pierre Boulez and heard early examples of musique concrète (compositions made directly on audiotape, usually by creating audio collages through cutting and pasting short, unrelated recordings together).

The year 1952 was a banner one for Cage for performances and compositions. His Music of Changes was premiered on 1 January by the pianist David Tudor in New York City. It was one of his first pieces composed using, in Cage’s words, “chance operations.” By tossing dice or drawing cards, Cage would randomly select certain elements of a composition, such as pitch, tempo, duration, or loudness. He soon turned to using the Chinese work of divination, the I Ching, as an aid in this work, and eventually developed the IC computer program, with Andrew Culver, as a means of speeding the process. Also in 1952 Cage created his first work for audiotape, Imaginary Land-scape, No. 5. Most famous of all, 4’33”, the notorious “silent” piano piece (which Cage felt highlighted the music that is occurring around us at all times), premiered in Woodstock, New York, on 29 August of that year, also by Tudor. Cage’s point—that there is music occurring all around us, at all times—reverberated through all of his later works. The piece is considered an early example of conceptual art.

In 1953 Cage created his most ambitious work for tape, Williams Mix, a tape collage composed of thousands of bits of tape, intricately fused onto six audiotapes meant to be played simultaneously, so that the result is an abundance of sounds within only several minutes. A year later, Cage left New York City to settle in an artists’ community in Stony Point, New York. During this period, he befriended two New York painters, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; both would participate in early “Happenings” (unscripted events featuring contributions by musicians, artists, actors, and others, designed to encourage audience participation) staged by Cage, and each later served as artistic director for Cunningham’s dance company. In the second half of the 1950s, Cage taught on occasion at New York City’s New School, where his students included many people who later became active in the 1960s Fluxus and Happening movements. (The Fluxus movement was an early 1960s art movement in New York that worked in a variety of media and also encouraged audience participation.) In 1957 he recorded Indeterminacy, a two-record set that features Cage reading minute-long stories while Tudor played randomly selected, and unrelated, piano pieces. A year later, Cage was celebrated with a “25th anniversary concert” of his works at New York City’s Town Hall, which was released on record. This helped introduce Cage’s art to a larger audience.

Cage’s reputation was secured in the 1960s. From 1960 to 1961, he was a fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies (he held this position again in 1970), in Middletown, Connecticut. While there, he assembled a collection of his writings, which was published by the university’s press as Silence (1961); it has since become a classic of twentieth-century aesthetic philosophy. A year later, Cage founded the New York Mycological Society, reflecting a lifelong interest in mushrooms. (Cage sometimes augmented his income by supplying wild morels to New York’s finer restaurants.) In 1962 he toured Japan with Tudor, and, a year later, undertook a world tour with Cunningham’s dance company. From 1967 to 1969 he was an associate at the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana; HPSCHD for one to seven amplified harpsichords and one to fifty-one tapes was the outcome of his residency there, which was performed only once, in the university’s gymnasium. Cage created his first visual work in 1969. Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel consists of a sequence of Plexiglas plates that recalled Duchamp’s famous Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, which was executed on a large piece of broken glass.

During the 1970s and 1980s Cage worked as a writer, graphic artist, watercolor painter, and composer. In the early 1970s Cage became interested in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, culminating in the work Lecture on the Weather for 12 Amplified Voices, optionally with instruments, tape, and film (premiered in Toronto, 26 February 1976). During the second half of the 1970s Cage’s long-running fascination with James Joyce began. In 1978 he published Writings Through Finnegans Wake, a collection of mesostics (in a mesostic, a word runs down the center of the page; Cage would then randomly select text from a source work, such as Joyce’s novel, to place on either side of the central letters); follow-up volumes appeared in the early 1980s. In 1979 Cage completed Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, which premiered in Paris.

In 1982 the first exhibit of Cage’s scores and prints was given in a major museum retrospective that appeared at New York City’s Whitney Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cage spent the mid-1980s creating his series of Europeras. Eventually the work was produced in five versions, each featuring randomly selected arias, costumes, set pieces, and even librettos. From 1988 to 1989, Cage held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard University; as part of his responsibilities, he gave six randomly composed lectures that were subsequently published as I-VI (1990). In 1991 he created his last score for Cunningham, Beach Birds.

The year 1992 was a gala year for Cage, with many celebrations scheduled for his eightieth birthday. He composed special works for both large orchestras and smaller ensembles, and created his first film, One¹¹, a ninety-minute film whose only visible content was changing gray shadows against a white background. Cage was about to depart for a birthday celebration for him in Germany when he collapsed from heart failure in his New York City loft on 11 August. He died the following day.

Cage was a tall man with a long, distinctive face; he often wore a grin, in keeping with the Buddhist notion of maintaining a happy countenance. Early in his career, he wore his hair in a high brush cut; in the 1970s, he adopted long hair and a beard in the then-fashionable style; later in life, he returned to a less hirsute look. Cage won numerous awards and honors, particularly in the last decade of his life. Following his death, an ever-changing exhibit of his works in all media, called Rolywholyover, which Cage had been planning since 1990, toured the world.

Although he was commonly regarded as an apostle of “artistic freedom” and “chance,” Cage was an extremely productive inventor who, once he transcended traditional conventions, was able to realize a wealth of indubitably original constraints. The notorious “prepared piano,” which prevented the emergence of familiar pianistic sounds, was merely the beginning of a career that included scrupulously alternative kinds of musical scoring, idiosyn-cratically structured theatrical events, unique literary forms, and much else that was aesthetically new. Cage also revolutionized musical scoring (even collecting an anthology of Notations, 1969, that mostly reflects his influence), introducing graphic notations and even prose instructions. He was also a pithy speaker, who produced instantly quotable and memorable sayings, such as “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it—and that’s poetry.”

Cage’s music manuscripts are at the New York Public Library; a portion of his manuscripts relating to poetry and writing and the humanities in general are at Wesleyan University (the balance is at the John Cage Trust in New York City); all correspondence is at Northwestern University in Chicago; his materials relating to nature, mycology, marine biology, and horticulture are at the University of California, at Santa Cruz; all other holdings are at the John Cage Trust. A famous early biographical/critical sketch of Cage is included in Calvin Tomkin’s The Bride and the Bachelor (1965); another early profile was written by Richard Kostelanetz: “The American Avant-Garde: John Cage,” Stereo Review 22, no. 5 (May 1969); the piece was subsequently included in his book Masterminds (1969). An “authorized” biography written by David Revill, The Roaring Silence, was published in 1992. Richard Kostelanetz assembled a book of interviews to create Conversing with Cage (1988) and edited two collections of articles on Cage, John Cage (1971) and Writings about John Cage (1993). The composer William Duckworth and Richard Flemming coedited John Cage at Seventy-five (1989). Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman edited a collection of articles and interviews from the early 1990s titled John Cage: Composed in America (1994). William Duckworth included a long interview with Cage in his book Talking Music (1995). A complete annotated bibliography on Cage is due to be published in 2001 by Paul van Emmerick.