303
See also: Pierrot lunaire 240–245 ■ Parade 256–257 ■ Gruppen 306–307 ■
In C 312–313 ■ Six Pianos 320 ■ Einstein on the Beach 321John Cage
Born in Los Angeles in 1912,
John Cage studied music
under Arnold Schoenberg and
Henry Cowell and used serial
techniques in his early works.
By 1939, he had started to
experiment with the prepared
piano, tape recorders, and
other technology. His concert
at the New York Museum of
Modern Art in 1943 brought
him to the attention of a wider
musical community.
In the years that followed,
Cage explored Buddhism and
other eastern philosophies and
became fixated on the nature
of music and its absence. His
compositions brought fame
and infamy. Although he never
fully abandoned notated
scores, his experimentalism
led to him becoming an icon
of the Fluxus movement,
espousing “found” sound and
materials. Plagued by poor
health, Cage suffered a fatal
stroke in 1992 at the age of 80.music” was coined to describe
compositions in which chance
plays a significant role. Early on,
Dadaists—an avant-garde art
movement—saw that chance could
form a part of a new aesthetic.
French-American artist Marcel
Duchamp composed two aleatory
works between 1913 and 1915,
while Frenchmen Francis Picabia
and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes
wrote works for performance at the
Festival Dada in Paris, in 1920.The composer’s role
Although aleatory music originated
in pure experimentalism, it was
considered a serious concept by
the mid-20th century, a reaction to
what had gone before. Ever since
composers had moved from figured
bass to full notation, performers
had gradually lost a sense of being
actively creative musicians, and as
improvised ornamentation fell by
the wayside, and scores became
more detailed, there had been aview, espoused by Stravinsky,
that even interpretation was
unnecessary. The performer’s
only concern, it claimed, was
to reproduce the score without
interference. This attitude reached
its apogee with the advent of
integral, or total, serialism, in
which virtually all the musical
parameters were controlled by
the compositional system.Cage the anarchist
For the American composer John
Cage, this imbalance of power
toward the composer created
a musical hierarchy in opposition
to his socialist and anarchist
beliefs. The only way this hierarchy
could be undermined, he thought,
was if either the composer were
less or the performer more a part
of the compositional process. ❯❯CONTEMPORARY
Other key works1946–1948 Sonatas and
Interludes
1958 Concert for Piano and
Orchestra
1974–1975 Études Australes
1987 Europeras I and IICage’s experiments in sound led to
his invention of the “prepared piano,”
in which the piano has its sound
altered by the placement of objects
on or between the strings.If you develop an ear for
sounds that are musical, it is
like developing an ego. You
begin to refuse sounds that
are not musical and that way
cut yourself off from a good
deal of experience.
John CageUS_302-305_Cage.indd 303 26/03/18 1:01 PM