American avant-garde composer (1912-1992)
People connected to John Cage
He wrote a four-and-a-half-minute piece where the performers play nothing — and it became one of the most argued-over works in music history. Cage dismantled the idea that composition meant filling silence, using coin tosses and ancient Chinese texts to let chance build the score.
John Milton Cage Jr. studied under Arnold Schoenberg in the mid-1930s, but his real turn came through Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, which led him to aleatoric music — composition by chance. Starting in 1951, he used the I Ching as his standard tool, calling music "a purposeless play" and "an affirmation of life." In 1952 he premiered 4′33″, a piece in which musicians stay silent and the audience hears only ambient sound; it remains a flashpoint in arguments about what music is. He also pioneered the prepared piano, placing objects on the strings to warp the instrument's…
Sourced, dated quotes from John Cage
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
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