John Cage

Known for his silent "hit" 4'33'', John Cage, born in Los Angeles on September 5, 1912, revolutionized the music of his time by introducing chance into composition, introducing the prepared piano, and employing electronic systems and multiple devices. The son of an engineer and inventor, his high school music teacher was composer Fannie Dillon, and he went on to study at Pomona College in Claremont, before traveling to Paris in 1930 to study with Lazare Lévy at the Conservatoire. Back in California, he took piano lessons with Richard Buhling and studied composition with Henry Cowell, who introduced him to the use of clusters and prepared piano, and with Adolph Weiss, and harmony, counterpoint and analysis with Arnold Schönberg, from whom he unlearned the limited structure of the tonal system. On June 7, 1935, he married sculptor Xenia Kashervaroff, from whom he divorced ten years later. Author of a manifesto on the omnipresence of noise and its musical application, The Future of Music (1937), he worked as piano accompanist for a dance class at Seattle's Cornish School, and experimented with a multidisciplinary fusion of music, dance, architecture and painting in his first piece of electroacoustic music for two variable-speed record players, muffled piano and cymbal, Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939). He also led a percussion group and taught for a season at the School of Design in Chicago (1941-1942), before moving to New York, where the couple stayed with Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, who introduced him to Marcel Duchamp. On February 7, 1943, Cage gave a concert with prepared piano at New York's Museum of Modern Art, preceding the publication of A Valentine Out of Season, his first piece of this kind. The exercise involved placing various objects such as erasers, pieces of rubber and plastic, screws, bolts and nuts between or on the strings. His meeting with dancer Merce Cunningham put an end to his marriage and led to the composition of numerous works for Cunningham's company until 1987, starting with Four Walls (1944). At the same time, his interest in Eastern music and philosophy began, in a mutual exchange with the Indian musician and singer Gita Sarabhai. This led to the composition of Sonatas and Interludes (1948) and his initiation into Buddhism. Returning to Paris in 1949, he saw Erik Satie as a precursor and met Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Boulez, while in New York he met Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, forming a circle of advanced composers. His reflections led him to question the place of the artist, and to favor the erasure of the artist in favor of chance. Similarly, he replaced notation with graphics and did away with the notion of execution, preferring indeterminacy. Thus, the Yi Jing, the Chinese book of mutations, enters into the creation of several works starting with Music of Changes (1951), each element of which comes from a drawing of lots. Also created by his accomplice David Tudor, his most famous piece 4'33'' (Woodstock, August 29, 1952) has no notes at all. Left to the sounds of the environment, it represents the culmination of the theory of the void as artistic will, but its silence remains unattainable in practice, subject to the vagaries of performance. Cage took the concept to its climax with 0'00'' in 1962. Imaginary Landscape No. 2 for twelve radio devices and twenty-four performers, the following No. 5 and Williams Mix for magnetic tape, and Water Music, for piano and objects (whistles, water containers, deck of cards) were other significant pieces to emerge during this period. Between 1948 and 1952, Cage taught at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where he organized his first "happening", Theatre Piece No. 1, combining music, dance, poetry and visual arts. He gave lectures at the Darmstadt Summer Academy (1954, 1957, 1958), where he unveiled Variations I (1958), "for any number of performers, sounds, combinations and means" ( Variations II to VIII followed between 1961 and 1967). In 1960, he presented Etude for Piano in Cologne with the visual artist Nam June Paik. Close to the Fluxus movement, Cage taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and collaborated on academic works collected in Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Recognized for his contribution to contemporary music, he received commissions and invitations from all over the world. In 1964, Leonard Bernstein premiered Atlas Eclipticalis, a score whose notes are modelled on the stars of a cartography. While his passion for mycology is not correlated with his work, his other favorite activity, chess, which he plays with Duchamp, is the subject of musical constructions such as Reunion (1968). In 1969, HPSCHD, with Lejaren Hiller, is a five-hour composition for more than seven harpsichords and an extensive array of magnetic tapes and projectors, whose sounds are computer-generated on NASA slides. In the same year, Cheap Imitations marks Cage's return to notated composition to the music of Satie's Socrate, and his last public appearance as a pianist, after suffering from arthritis. Number Pieces (1987-1992), one of Cage's last works, consists of some forty pieces of various kinds performed by different collaborators. At the same time, he composed five operas under the name Europera, using varying degrees of resources, but the works commissioned by the Frankfurt Opera were shelved following a fire. Suffering from sciatica and atherosclerosis, John Cage died on August 12, 1992 at the age of 79.

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