In 1912, composer John Cage was born in Los Angeles, California. He briefly attended Pomona College before touring Europe and returning to the United States to study music in 1931. Richard Buhlig, Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell, and Arnold Schoenberg were his teachers, and his first compositions were based on Schoenberg’s 12-tone approach. In Seattle, he found work as a teacher, and between 1936 and 1938, he founded percussion ensembles in order to have performers for his works. Simultaneously, he and Merce Cunningham—choreographer, dancer, and Cage’s long-term musical and life partner—experimented with collaborative works.
Cage was experimenting with new compositional approaches by 1939, including one known as “prepared piano,” which entails inserting objects into the piano or otherwise altering it to produce sounds that aren’t typical of the instrument. In addition to traditional acoustic instruments, Cage used tape recorders, radios, and record players in his performances. In 1943, he gave his first notable performance, a percussion ensemble concert at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.
Cage’s interest in Eastern philosophies such as Zen Buddhism, which grew in popularity in the years after, influenced his music. He kept blurring the lines between music and other types of sound, devising schemes to incorporate random and chance elements into musical performance. This had the effect of changing the performer’s role as well as making each performance one-of-a-kind. Some aspects of the performance, such as pitches, techniques, and note duration, were left up to the performers to decide on the spot, while others, such as the I Ching, were determined by an external source. Cage eventually added other media to the musical performance, but these media, like his 1969 work HPSCHD, had random or chance elements as well.
John Cage’s work 4′ 33U+2033>, pronounced “Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds,” is perhaps his most well-known work, in which he has three movements of silence. Cheap Imitation, a 1969 piece that aims to convey an impression of composer Erik Satie’s work, and Roaratorio, the name of an electronic composition that incorporates words from Irish novelist James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegan’s Wake, are examples of works that owed inspiration to other artists. Cage died in New York City in 1992.