John Cage

John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American experimental music composer and writer. He is well known for his 1952 composition

Method and works

The detailed nature of Cage's compositional use of chance remains poorly understood. Generally, Cage proceeded from the broadest aspects of a new composition to extremely specific ones. For all these decisions, he determined the number of possibilities for each aspect and then used chance to select a particular possibility: the number of possibilities would be related to one or a series of numbers corresponding to the sixty-four hexagrams of the Chinese classic text, I Ching. For instance, Cage might choose a musical pitch from three possibilities. Possibility A could be related to I Ching numbers 1–24, possibility B to 25–48, and possibility C to 49–64. The actual choice of an I Ching number, as described in the book itself when it is used as an oracle, was accomplished by tossing coins or (later) by running a computer program designed by Cage's assistant, the composer Andrew Culver. Cage called the generation of an I Ching number a chance operation. A finished composition generally entailed numerous chance operations.

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Cage used chance to compose a variety of different works, including such pieces as Aria (1958), HPSCHD (1967–69), and Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979). He also wrote several books, including Silence (1961), A Year From Monday (1968), M (1973), Empty Words (1979) and X (1983). Interviews with Cage and the critic Daniel Charles are collected in the book For the Birds (1981), whose title is a reference to one of Cage's favorite sayings, which is typical of his often subtle, self-referential humor: "I am for the birds, not for the cages people put them in." Richard Kostelanetz assembled a collage of various interviews in Conversing with Cage (second ed., 2003), and a volume of conversations with Joan Retallack from the 1990s, Musicage, appeared in 1996.

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During his later years, Cage's work remained experimental, combining many of his musical and free-form concepts in public workshops. Yet other works, such as Cheap Imitation (1969), Hymns and Variations (1979), and Litany for the Whale (1980) resemble the less radical works of his early career. In two groups of compositions from his last years — Music for _____ and the Number Piece series — Cage attempted to reconcile the experimental, process-oriented character of his mature compositions with the idea of a musical work or object. In the Number Piece series in particular, Cage believed that he had finally discovered a way to write music that had harmony, which he now defined as sounds noticed at the same time.

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Another of Cage's works, Organ² / ASLSP, is currently being performed near the German township of Halberstadt; in an imaginative and controversial interpretation of Cage's directions for the piece to be played "As SLow aS Possible", the performance, being done on a specially-constructed autonomous organ built into the old church of St. Burchardi, is scheduled to take a total of 639 years after having been started at midnight on September 5, 2001.

Related Topics:
Organ² / ASLSP - German - Halberstadt - September 5 - 2001

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John Cage died in New York City, only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organised in Berlin by his close friend David Tudor and others was due to take place; however the event went ahead as planned.

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