It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisitiuon of "culture."
John Cage (1912-92), U.S. composer. "Forerunners of Modern Music; At Random," in Tiger's Eye (New York, March 1949; repr. in Silence, 1961).

"There is no such thing as empty space or empty time.  There is always something to hear or something to see.  In fact, try as we might to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible.  Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its walls made of special materials, a room without echoes.  I entered one at Harvard University... and heard two sounds, one a high and one a low.  When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system and the low one was my blood circulation."

 - John Cage _Silence_

• John Cage was part of the topic of discussion by Brian Eno at Art Center College of Design re: generative music 10/02/97
• appeared in the avant garde short film _At Land_ (vhs/ntsc) by Maya Deren

Waveforms:

• _4:33_ MP3
• A musician sits at a piano. For 4 minutes and 33 seconds he does not play a note. Occasionally he turns the pages, as this song has several "movements." Ambient noise drifts in, as it is want to do. Musician rises and bows at end of song.
• _0'00"_ (1962)
• Performer appears on-stage with a cart of vegetables and an electric blender. Performer proceeds to feed the vegetables into the blender to make juice, the noise of the blender being amplified through loudspeakers. Performer drinks the juice.
• _0'00" No. 2_ (1968) Two performers play a game (chess, for example), with microphones and amplifiers there to capture all the non-verbal sounds. Ambient noise drifts in, because one just can't keep it out. The performers play on: P-QN3, Q-KB6.
• _Sound Anonymously Received_ (1969) - The entire instructions for this performance are for one whistle to be blown one time, and one time only.
• _Music For Marcel Duchamp_ MP3 (1947)
• _Totem Ancestor_ MP3 (192k) (1942)
• _Imaginary Landscapes No. 4_ MP3 (224k) (1951)
• Written for 12 radios and 24 performers. Cage specified exact tunings and volume levels on each radio, even though he had no idea whether a radio station existed at that tuning. Each performer would turn their radio to the assigned settings. There are 12 more performers than radios in this song.
• _Cartridge Music_ MP3 (160k) (1960)
• _First Construction In Metal_ MP3 (160k) (1939)
• _Bacchanale_ MP3 (192k) (1938)
• _Six_ MP3 (192k)
• covered by Sonic Youth
• _Root Of An Unfocus_ MP3
• _Writing For The Second Time Through Finnegans Wake_ MP3 (192k)
• James Joyce
• "the greatest book i have never read..."
• _Reunion_
• This piece was performed in 1968 at Ryerson Polytechnic in Toronto. Lowell Cross constructed a chess board equipped with photoreceptors that served as a gating mechanism to transmit or cut off sound produced by other musicians and to control lights. John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess. Other participants included Teeny Duchamp, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman. The book Marcel Duchamp and John Cage by Shigeko Kubota (1970) contains photographs and a recording of this performance.
• _Mushroom Haiku, Excerpt From Silence_ MP3 (192k) (1972/69)
• _The Unavailable Memory Of_ MP3 (192k)

• release _John Cage Meets Sun Ra_ 12" on Meltdown (1987)
  • recorded June 8, 1986 at "Sideshows by the Seashore, Coney Island, NY"
  • These are unedited segments of the historic concert that was part of the "Sideshows by the Seashore" held on June 8, 1986 in Coney Island, NY. Improvisations and songs by Sun Ra & Cage's indeterminate performance vocals based on strict composition methods are contrasted and find a common meeting ground as, toward the end of the session, they play together.
  • _John Cage Meets Sun Ra_ MP3 (160k)(22:19)(26.2megs)
  • _John Cage Meets Sun Ra_ MP3 (160k)(21:23)(25megs)
• _John Cage Bubblegum_ MP3 (160k) by Stereolab off of _Refried Ectoplasm_
• track _Webwork_ MP3 by John Tudor off of _John Cage: A Chance Operation_ CDx2 (1993)
  • recorded tribute to a cmoposer that didn't like the recorded medium

• "All Futures and Pasts begin here."
• "We don't need government, We need utilities."
• "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
• "Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music." John Cage, _Silence_, p.128
• "The I Ching told me to continue what I was doing, and to spread joy and revolution." - John Cage

Cage was born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, the son of an inventor who posited an explanation of the cosmos called the "Electrostatic Field Theory." Later attending Pomona College, he exited prior to graduation to travel across Europe during the early 1930s; upon returning to the U.S., he studied in New York with Henry Cowell, finally travelling back to the West Coast in 1934 to study under Arnold Schoenberg. Around this time Cage published his earliest compositions, a series of Varese-inspired works written in a rigorous atonal system of his own device. Relocating to Seattle in 1937 to become a dance accompanist, a year later he founded a percussion ensemble, composing the seminal polyrhythms piece _First Construction (In Metal)_ in 1939.

John Cage was the father of indeterminism, a Zen-inspired aesthetic which expelled all notions of choice from the creative process.

During the late 1930s, Cage also began experimenting with musique concrete, composing the landmark _Imaginary Landscape No. 1_ MP3 (224k), which employed variable-speed phonographs and frequency tone recordings alongside muted piano and a large Chinese cymbal. He also invented the "prepared piano," in which he placed a variety of household objects between the strings of a grand piano to create sounds suggesting a one-man percussion orchestra. It was at this time that Cage fell under the sway of Eastern philosophies, the influence of Zen Buddhism informing the random compositional techniques of his later work; obsessed with removing forethought and choice from the creative model, he set out to make music in line with the principles of the I Ching, predictable only by its very unpredictability.

track _Williams Mix_ MP3 (160k) off of _Ohm: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music 1948-1980_

• track is assisted by Louis & Bebe Barron, who did the soundtrack for _Forbidden Planet_ (vhs/ntsc)(1956)
   
    

Notes on _Diary_

John Cage: "I began the Diary optimistically in 1965 to celebrate the work of R. Buckmister Fuller, his concern for human needs and world resources, his comprehensive scientific designs for making life on earth an unequivocal success, his insistence that problem solving be continuously regenerative.

"We are living in the world of James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_: Here comes everyone. And I believe the number of people living in 1949 has doubled and in '49 it was as many people living all at once on the planet as had ever lived in history on it. And it is now in the process of doubling again, so that we are coming toward four times as many people as ever lived on the planet before 1950 and we don't know how to behave. And I think that these texts--not all, but some of them--suggest a way to behave, or a way to think what the values are. In each one of our lives, our attitude--if we are conscientious--change.

I know my attitude toward music has included many changes and I have the feeling that the recent music I am writing, I enjoy listening to it more than I do to my earlier work. So that there has been from my point of view, well I fell that I am closer to music than I ever was.
 

I have many things to work on now. I am fortunate in my life, I think. Not only to have so much music to write that is requested by other people, but now also much graphic work, and I am busy, as you know, finding food to cook macrobiotically. That was one of the things that was going to go into the Diary that didn't get in: That praise of macrobiotics. And acupuncture. And now as far as medicine goes, I am devoted to Chinese herbs. If I did continue the Diary, the next part--the ninth part--would certainly be about acupuncture and Chinese herbs and the laying on of hands.

It is curious that there is no mention of the plague that we now have of AIDS which engrosses so many people's thoughts and feelings, brings about so much death. But death becomes a very large part of one's life as one grows older. Not because of your own death, but because of the death of so many people you have known.

To continue the Diary?

We'll see what happens. I would like to mention nanotechnology, the development of molecular technology, technology without pollution. Very small computerized robots freeing us from our own work, from ourselves. The trouble is my life involves, as it always has, no free time.

I don't have a minute." (Laughter)

The first part of the Diary closes with the words: Long Life.

John Milton Cage (born September 5, 1912, died August 12, 1992) was an experimental music composer and writer, possibly best known (some might say notorious) for his piece 4: 33, often described (somewhat erroneously) as "four and a half minutes of silence." He was an early writer of aleatoric music (music where some elements are left to chance), used instruments in non-standard ways and was an electronic music pioneer.

Cage was born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912. His father was a somewhat eccentric inventor of largely useless devices who told him "that if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." It was not obvious from his early life that he would become a composer; he was born into a Episcopalian family, and his paternal grandfather regarded the violin as the "instrument of the devil". Cage himself planned to become a minister at an early age and later a writer.

Although music was not clearly to be his chosen path, he did say later that he had unfocused desire to create, and his subsequent anti-establishment stance may be seen to have its roots in an incident while he was attending Pomona College. 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." He dropped out in his second year and sailed to Europe, where he stayed for eighteen months. It was there that he wrote his first pieces of music, but upon hearing them he found he didn't like them, and he left them behind on his return to America.

He returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There he took lessons in composition from Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolf 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 when it became clear to him that he had "no feeling for harmony."

Cage began to experiment with percussion instruments and non-instruments and gradually came to replace harmony as the basis of his music with rhythm. More generally, he structured pieces according to the duration of sections. He saw a precedent in this in the music of Anton Webern to some extent, but especially in the music of Erik Satie, one of his favourite composers.

In the late 1930s, he 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 sound this produced, and this eventually led to his inventing 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. It is likely that he was influenced by his old teacher Henry Cowell who also treated the piano in a non-standard way, asking performers to strum the strings with their fingers, for example. The Sonatas and Interludes of 1946-48 are widely seen as his greatest work for prepared piano. Pierre Boulez was amongst its admirers, and organised the European premiere of the work. The two composers struck up a correspondence, but this stopped when they came to a disagreement over Cage's use of chance in his music.

It was also at Cornish that Cage founded a percussion orchestra for which he wrote his First Construction (In Metal) in 1939, a piece which uses metal percussion instruments to make a loud and rhythmic music. He also wrote the Imaginary Landscape No. 1 in that year, which uses record players as instruments, one of the first, if not the first, examples of this. Cage wrote a number of other Imaginary Landscape pieces in later years.

While at the Cornish School, Cage became interested in many things which informed much of his later work. He learnt from Gira Sarabhai that "The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." This got him writing music again after a period of uncertainty about the value of trying to "express" anything through music. He became interested in Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, and met the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became his life partner and creative collaborator.

After leaving the Cornish School, Cage joined the faculty of the Chicago School of Design. While there he was asked to write a sound effects-based musical accompaniment for Kenneth Patchen's radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. Cage then moved to New York City, but found it very hard to get work there. However, 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 (and later composer) David Tudor, who he worked with closely many other times.

Cage began to use the I Ching in the composition of his music in order to introduce an element of chance over which he would have no control. 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. 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.

In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of the Black Mountain College, whre he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, Cage 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." Whatever the truth of these explanations, Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet there was some. "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realisation as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of his most notorious piece, 4:33.

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and Black Mountain colleague Robert Rauschenberg had, while working at the college, produced a series of 'white' paintings. These were apparently 'blank' canvases that, in fact, changed according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in the room and so on. 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.

The premiere of the three-movement 4:33 was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano, and lift the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he closed the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he lifted the lid. And after a period of time, he closed the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played, in fact without Tudor or anyone else on stage having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. 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 to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

4: 33 has been recorded on several occasions, one version being "performed" by Frank Zappa (part of A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute, on the Koch label, 1993). An 'orchestral' version of 4:33 given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in January 2004.

Cage went on to write such pieces as Aria (1958), HPSCHD (1967-69), Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979) and the various so called "numbers pieces" (from the 1980s). He also wrote several books, including Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979) and X (1983). During his later years, Cage remained experimental, combining many of his musical and free-form concepts in public workshops.

Organ² / ASLSP

Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt; in accordance with Cage's directions for the piece to be played "As SLow aS Possible", the performance, being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi, is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight September 5, 2001.

John Cage died in New York City on August 12, 1992.

first mention of John Cage on Usenet:

From: unc!dopey.bch (unc!dopey.bch)
Subject: Re: Disco neighbors
Newsgroups: net.music
Date: 1982-03-12 18:10:11 PST

Using Stravinsky as a retaliatory device seems somewhat tame. Why not use Varese, John Cage or (heaven help us) Harry Partch?

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