Título: John Cage
Seção: Early works, rhythmic structure, and new approaches to harmony
Background: John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 - August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Conteúdo: Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of the era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan, on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller, on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around the auditorium in the time for which they were there.  Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose a personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obvio

user: was his style of composition different than composers before him?

assistant: Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces,

user: in what way were they ambitious?

assistant: fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films.

user: what was the rhythmic structure of these pieces?

assistant: Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground.

user: was this technique well-received?

assistant: CANNOTANSWER

user: what are some other features of the percussion music he wrote?

assistant: large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars

user: did he have any reasoning behind why he chose this technique?

assistant: he started using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground.

user: what are some of his new approaches to harmony?

assistant: the gamut was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony.

user: what is the gamut?

assistant: Cage first composed a number of gamuts: chords with fixed instrumentation.