From: asbed@sol.usc.edu (Asbed Bedrossian)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: John Cage Obituary
Date: 31 Aug 1992 15:55:06 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol.usc.edu
Keywords: john cage obituary

Hi, I wanted to add my share into the John Cage megabytage here. This is the
obituary article from the LA Times the day after Cage died. I thought it had
some interesting details. Hopefully posting this (specially this late) is
not horribly illegal. I am not well versed in laws.

:ll
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LA Times, 13-Aug-1992, p: A24

		Obituary

John Cage, 79; Avant-Guarde Composer Created Music With Sound and Silence

By BURT A. FOLKART
TIMES STAFF WRITER

John Cage, the highly inventive, often perplexing avant-guarde composer, who
theorized that music does not have to have sound but can be anything that
fills a space in time, died Wednesday of a stroke.  Valerie Gundersen, a
woman for St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, said he died there after
suffering a stroke at his home in New York City.

Called by the Encyclopaedia Britannica "a composer whose work and
revolutionary ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music," the
79-year-old guru of modern sound made numerous and complicated tracks across
the world of music as he defined and then redefined his challenges to
conventional musical wisdom.

He wrote 12-tone music in 1934, organized a percussion orchestra in 1938,
composed for prepared piano (in which objects are inserted between some of
the instrument's strings) in 1940 and used elecronically produced sounds in
1942.  "I like ambient sound," he told The Times last year when he was the
recipient of the first Frederick R. Weisman Art Award.  "I don't object to
burglar alarms or hums from refrigerators."

In 1951, he scored a piece that included the noise from 12 radios.  His
first piece on magnetic tape came in 1952. At the end of that decade he
began writing scores that left choices of sounds to the performers.

[Picture: John Cage in l987]

In 1962, Cage performed "O'O" in which he sliced vegetables, put them in a
blender and drank the juice.

In the 1970s he was turning astronomical charts into orchestral scores and
computerized the "I Ching" into his first opera," in the 1980s.

The Los Angeles-born musician liked to make each composition different.

"My father was an inventor [his mother a reporter for the Los Angeles
Times]. If I can, with each piece I make something like a discovery," he
said.

He also wrote poetry, essays and lectures, painted and etched, played chess
with masters and was considered an exert on mushrooms.

Cage's most popular work probably is "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared
Piano," which he wrote in the mid-1940s. It was in this composition that he
had metallic objects placed among many of the instrument's strings to make
it, in his words, "a percussion composition under the control of a single
player."

"First Construction (in Metal)," a percussion composition, featured an
assortment of Western and non-Western items and found objects.  Like the
later works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, it was composed, according to
Cage's notes, "with the single objective of making the rhythmic structure
clear."

His 1939 "The Imaginary landscape No. 13 is considered by some to be the
first electronic composition.  The sounds were provided by test recordings
of constant frequencies, the kind used by radio stations and in acoustical
research. Two performers varied the frequencies by manipulating variable -
speed turntables, switching stations and fluctuating the volume.

"Concert for Piano and Orchestra" (1957-1958) employed as many unusual
sounds and sound effects as he could draw from the instruments of a
conventional orchestra.

He became as well or better
known for his persona than for his
music.

His signature opus, "4'33," is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in
which a pianist simply steps onstage, sits at the piano in silence then
walks off.

John Milton Cage Jr. studied piano and composition in Los Angeles and then
Paris, returning to the United States in the late 1930s, when he worked as a
dance accommpanist.

About that time he developed a piano technique using tone clusters and
playing directly on the strings.  He also wrote poetry and painted when he
returned to California, where he had been a student at Pomona College. He
studied counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, and Schoenberg told him
he had no feeling for harmony.

His compositions from that period were based on a schematic organization of
the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale.

1939 he wrote "First Construction (in Metal)" using bells, brake drums,
temple gongs, anvils and other metallic Objects coupled with electrically
produced noises he had explored at a radio station.

In 1940 he settled in San Fransisco, where he gave concerts of percussion
music. From there he went on to teach contemporary composition at the
Chicago Institute of Design, and he eventually settled in New York, which
was his base for the remainder of his life.

In 1949 gave a concert in Carnegie Hall of his works for prepared piano.

He also was moving from structures based on pitch to those built on rhythmic
patterns ing both intense scorn and high acclaim from critics and fellow
composers.

As he studied Eastern phylosophy and Zen Buddhism he began introducing
elements of random chance into his works so the compositions could vary from
performance to performance. One 16-page work, for example, could be performed
continuously or broken into pieces.

"In my works that employ chance I have an awareness of the whole piece, the
various things that might happen," Cage said last year. "But I am not aware
of any of the details.  Those things happen in a way that makes me a tourist
- someone who sees everything for the first time - in my own composition."
Next year, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art will stage
"Rolywholyover, A Circus," a massive, dynamic exhibition of Cageian
materials already three years in preparation by the composer and MOCA
curator Julie Lazar.

When Cage was given the Weizman award for lifetime achievement last year,
singer Joan La Barbara, who sang "Eight Whiskus," a work he composed for her
in 1985, said:

"He asked us to consider all things as music and caused us to listen to the
world in a different way."

There was no immediate information on survivors.