John Cage
From Philosopedia
Cage, John (5 September 1912 - 12 August 1992)
A controversial composer famous for his unorthodox musical theories and experimental compositions, Cage with a “prepared piano” used metal, rubber, wood, and other objects on a piano’s strings, altering its sound. He held that all sound, including that which is nonmusical, is part of the “total soundspace.”
Cage’s “4’ 33” ” (1952) consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence along with random environmental sounds that happen to occur. Upon arriving in New York City, he boarded with Peggy Guggenheim, enticed Virgil Thompson’s coterie by his good looks and talent, divorced, slept with, among others, architect Philip Johnson, and fell in love with Merce Cunningham, with whom he shared the rest of his life.
Books he wrote include Silence (1961) and A Year From Monday (1968).
According to two works reprinted in 1997, his I-VI and, with Joan Retallack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words Art and Music, he became more folksy in the 1960s, now substituting jeans and a denim shirt for his 50s tie and jacket. He was accorded cultural superstardom by the 1980s and was generally regarded as one of the most important arts figures in the second half of the century. Cage’s unorthodox punctuation is illustrated in a lecture on the word imitation:
- the greeks went rIght up to the door of treMble too much for that actually In These nucleAr insighT poInt five times ten hOw much more exterNal
Upon turning eighty, Cage was described by some as a musical anarchist and by others a musical liberator. Traditionalists regard him as the former, for he fails to use musical notation in the way others have used it for centuries. For example, a 1991 work utilizes “time brackets” sections lasting 75 seconds, during which the musicians are directed to play for the first 45 seconds, and they must finish between the 30th and 75th second–the timing is entirely up to the musician, which has led many to say that no two performances of the work can be the same and that this is “liberating.”
Not a Eurocentrist, Cage (along with Allen Ginsberg) was drawn to Asian concepts in philosophy. His politics as he grew older became radically anarchist/leftist and by the 1970s he embraced aspects of Maoism.
When, two months before his death, he was asked by Warren Allen Smith for his views on humanism, the Iowa-educated musician, a practicing Buddhist, wrote,
- If there are only seven humanisms, as your letter indicates, I choose number seven [secular humanism]. But if one were added that connected with zen and Tibetan Buddhism together with technology (Fuller, McLuhan, Nano Technology), I would choose that.
