John Cage (b. 1912 d.1992)

## Introduction

**John Cage** was born in **Los Angeles California** to an inventor father and a journalist mother. From boyhood piano lessons he continued through into **Pomona College,** (encountering the work of **Marcel Duchamp),** and onto cultural excursions throughout Europe as well as lessons with American Composer **Adolph Weiss**. He dropped out of college in 1930 as came to believe that "college was of no use to a writer". Going on to say,

*"I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left."*

**Schoenberg and Cowell** are his primary influences, especially of his early work with percussion and prepared piano as well as pitch and rhythmic organization. **Cage** was perhaps the Godfather of what we would now term ***"Performance Art"***, as his theories surrounding randomization and indeterminacy became his primary source of creating his work and his life. Though he eschewed the term "Experimental music, "***Experimental Music, a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".*** An interesting note is that when he graduated in 1928 from **Los Angeles High School** as a valedictorian, he gave a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans.

"One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created. . . . We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think." This speech anticipated ***4'33"*** by more than thirty years. The insight here is that his compositional theories were already in his head from quite an early age. He is also famous in **Mycology** circles, (the study of mushrooms), as he held a fascination with and an appetite for mushrooms first cultivated out of necessity during the great depression. With money and food a scarce commodity in those years, he found that scavenged mushrooms were edible, (mostly). He likened searching for mushrooms under forest growth to the experience of hearing quiet sounds that are typically eclipsed by the noise of crying babies or fire engines.

*“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,”*

## Work Analysis

Perhaps the most notoriously vexing piece of music ever composed is **"4'33""**. Essentially is a three movement composition for any instrument or combination of instruments and specifically instructs the performers NOT to play their instruments during the piece. Though sometimes called **"Silence"**, the idea of the piece is to challenge what constitutes music. Within the space of 4 minutes and 33 seconds the audience and performer are hearing the sounds of the concert hall, traffic outside, birds, people shifting, coughing, laughing, talking, etc. **Cages** point and the inherent theory of his life is that all sound is music, perhaps even going so far as to say all existence is music. In music circles of 1952, when it had it's premiere in **Woodstock New York with David Tudor**. The audience saw him sit at the piano and mark the beginning of the piece by closing the keyboard lid. He opened it again to mark the end of the first movement and the process was repeated for the second and third movements. The instruction and form of the piece is in essence a framework with which the natural sounds of the world around us populate the silence which in turn, is the music that the piece generates. many though this was a joke and took it seriously enough as to want to run **Cage** out on a rail for being not serious within the institutionalized bias that is going to a concert hall with the expectation of hearing a piece of music delivered in a very serious way to an audience who have more than likely heard the piece before. there could be no bias on any level with such a piece. Needless to say, things did not go well for **Cage** in the aftermath of the premiere as any cache that his recently composed **"Sonatas and Preludes for prepared Piano"** might have given him was dashed to pieces as not only did the audience balk at the seemingly useless exercise, but many of **Cages** contemporaries, (**Boulez, Stockhausen** and **Xenakis** among them), abandoned him both as a a friend and colleague as a result.

Along with the anti bias point to the piece, it also dealt with the concerns of duration. Duration is the only element that is shared by both silence and sound. The underlying structures of any music is formed and framed by a specific duration where sounds or silence fill the space but neither are needed in this framework.

The third point to the piece is regarding the audience behavior and how they react to the piece. Initially, of course, there was indignation as there were no composed sounds for them to hear, thus making them the composer of their own silence.

The question as to whether this piece constitutes music or is just a witty performance piece still rages on. As the piece can seemingly encompass most every level of how to understand music or non music for that matter, I would say that it is indeed both music and "not" music. In using the institutionalized compositional forms of staff paper, rests, clefs etc., as well as instruction as to how to play the music, (or not), it takes the form of music in general. In the original printed program of the premiere there are 3 durational movements at 30″, 2′23″ and 1′40″. (Though apparently as the original manuscript is lost of this piece, over the years these durations have been altered somewhat.)

"They missed the point. There's no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out."— John Cage speaking about the premiere of *4′33*

There were precedents to Cages piece, some of which were only theoretical in nature and not acted upon as an actual performance piece.

Some composers have discussed the significance of silent composition though never actually writing anything to support the theory. In his 1907 manifesto, ***Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music*, Ferruccio Busoni** described its significance:

*"That which, within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential of the art, is the Rest and the Hold (Pause). Consummate players, improvisers, know how to employ these instruments of expression in loftier and ampler measure. The tense silence between two movements—in itself music, in this environment—leaves wider scope for divination than the more determinate, but therefore less elastic, sound."*

When **Hindemith** read the above statement, and he proposed a work consisting of nothing but pauses and fermatas.

***Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man* (1897) by Alphonse Allais**, a French humorist **(1854–1905)**; published in his *Album primo-avrilesque*

*"Twenty-four blank measures. Earlier title: "Great sorrows are mute: incoherent funeral march". The composer instructed: "Great sorrows being mute, the performers should occupy themselves with the sole task of counting the bars, instead of indulging in the kind of indecent row that*
 destroys the august character of the best obsequies."

***In futurum*** **(1919) by Erwin Schulhoff** **(1894–1942)**

silent; notated in great rhythmic detail, employing bizarre time signatures and intricate rhythmic patterns.

***Silent music* (1941), by Raymond Scott** **(1909-1994)**

The band was going through all the motions: the swart, longish-haired
leader led away; the brasses, the saxophones, the clarinets made a great
 show of fingering and blowing, but the only sound from the stage was a
rhythmic swish-swish from the trap-drummer, a froggy slap-slap from the
bull-fiddler, a soft plunk-plunk from the pianist.

***Monotone-Silence Symphony* (1949), by Yves Klein**

in two movements, a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence

***4'33" No. 2* (1962) by John Cage**

Also known as *0'00"*; the performer determines the extent to which the piece is silent, mostly silent, noisy, or raucous.

The composer instructed: *"In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action. The performer should allow any interruptions of the action, the action should fulfill an obligation to others, the same action should not be used in more than one performance, and should not be the performance of a musical composition."*

## Comparisons

Though his teachers were **Henry Cowell** and **Arnold Schoenberg**, much of his inspiration and influence came from his immersion into **Zen Buddhism and Indian Philosophies**. Having started the study of east and south Asian Cultures in the late 40's, he adopted the **I Ching** as his primary tool for creating chance controlled music and performance instructions for the remainder of his life. He also worked at length with **Merce Cunnigham** in the development of Modern Dance.

## Observations

For me , **Cage** is the ultimate iconoclast and perhaps even the ultimate musician. The use of randomness to create and perform his theoretical music and performance pieces was without peer in his early years as his ideas were bold and even scary to musicians and composers alike, (see 4' 33"). In challenging the sensibilities of what music even is, and what constitutes music as not just a series of pitches and rhythms organized into pleasing, (or non pleasing) formulations and constructions, but that music is everything that we hear and experience which in itself is a random function of time and consequence. That the composition of **4' 33"**, to this day causes people to perhaps laugh at the humor in it, (and there is humor in it), as well as to be deadly serious as regards the entire point of its composition, (and it is also deadly serious), makes for an astounding piece of music that can be played by anyone while you sleep and eat, drive a car, go to work, brush your teeth, etc. The music that is made is a highly personal music that is entirely unbiased and self contextualized and personalized. The piece is utterly John Cage, as well that it utterly isn't. The perfect genius of the piece is also that it has been expanded upon, (to 4 hours and 33 minutes by **Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening band),** it has also been "covered" by countless assortments of soloists and full orchestras as well as just about every genre on the planet judging by the sheer number of You Tube Videos! The homage is real. The subject is alternately serious and humorous.

   **Morton Feldman**, another avant-garde composer/ musician, once said, *“John Cage was the first composer in the history of music who raised the question by implication that maybe music could be an art form rather than a music form.”*

## Works Cited

http://johncage.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_Cage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Cage

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/john-cage-mn0000183867/biography

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/searching-for-silence

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160327305/33-musicians-on-what-john-cage-communicates

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0905.html

https://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-why-experimental-artist-john-cage-was-obsessed-mushrooms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_silent\_musical\_compositions