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John Cage, 19121992
On August 12, 1992, contemporary music lost one of its greatest
inventors when John Cage died at age 79. Possibly the single most
influential composer of his generation, Cage’s innovations have
profoundly changed the musical landscape of our time–even those
who rejected his ideas have had to reckon with them. He had a
visionary clarity about the future direction of music, and an
inventor’s passion for experimentation that was both rigorous
and playful.
Cage was described as an inventor, a philosopher, or an instigator,
as often as he was described as a composer. His early musical
work, during the 1930s and 1940s, explored rhythmic and melodic
structures determined in part by his frequent writing for percussion
and dance performance. His quest for a cheap way of fitting a
diverse percussion orchestra into small dance theatres led to
the invention of the prepared piano, in which various objects
are placed between the piano’s strings, altering their sounds
in several ways.
In the 1950s, Cage turned to chance methods to make compositions,
in an effort to remove his own ego, taste, and self from the process
and simply let the music happen. He became famous for using the
I Ching to generate compositional decisions, and it is his output
from this period, including the series of Variations, Indeterminacy,
Music of Changes, and the famous “silent” piece, 4’33”, that made
him famous (or infamous). His aesthetic from this period, recorded
in a series of collections of his writings, involves the acceptance
of noise and unintended sounds into the musical performance, and
the abandonment of fixed reproducible musical objects in favor
of organic processes. In 1969, with the composition of Cheap Imitation,
Cage (partially) returned to notated music, though he still employed
chance procedures in structuring his pieces, and left a great
many performance decisions up to the players.
Always searching for new ideas, Cage also made himself a respected
expert in mycology, and in recent years had explored printmaking
and copper and engraving. His work, in whatever medium, was always
poetic–often humorous, usually thought-provoking. John Cage has
left a lasting imprint on the future of music, and his legacy
will live on.
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