John Cage
John Milton Cage (September 5,
1912 – August 12,
1992) was an American
experimental music composer,
writer and visual artist. He is most widely known for his 1952 composition 4'33",
whose three movements are performed without playing a single note.
Cage was an early composer of what he called
"chance music" (and what others have decided to label aleatoric
music)—music where some elements are left to be decided by chance;
he is also well known for his non-standard use of musical instruments and his
pioneering exploration of electronic
music. His works were sometimes controversial, but he is generally
regarded as one of the most important composers of his era, especially in his
raising questions about the definition of music.
Cage was born in Los Angeles. It was not obvious from his
early life that he would become a composer; he was born into an Episcopalian
family, and his paternal grandfather regarded the violin as the
"instrument of the devil". Cage himself planned to become a minister at an early age and later a
writer.
Cage's earliest works show a preoccupation with
serialism, which is basically music in which no one pitch predominates over
another. He soon began to experiment with percussion instruments, as well as
non-traditional instruments as sound-producing devices, and gradually came to use
rhythm
as the basis for his music instead of harmony.
More generally, he structured pieces according to the duration of sections. In
the late thirties, Cage found work as an accompanist for dancers. He was asked
to write some music to accompany a dance. He wanted to write a percussion
piece, but there was no pit at the performance venue for a percussion ensemble
and he had to write for a piano. While working on the piece, Cage experimented
by placing a metal plate on top of the strings of the instrument. He liked the
resulting sound, and this eventually led to his conceiving the prepared
piano, in which screws, bolts, strips of rubber, and other objects
are placed between the strings of the piano to change the character of the
instrument.
Cage began to use the I Ching
(Chinese “Book of Changes”) in the composition of his music in order to provide
a framework for his uses of chance. One way he used chance is in his piece Imaginary
Landscape No. 4 (1951) which is written for twelve radio receivers. Each
radio has two players; one to control the frequency the radio is tuned to, the
other to control the volume level. Cage wrote very precise instructions in the
score about how the performers should set their radios and change them over
time, but he could not control the actual sound coming out of them, which was
dependent on whatever radio shows were playing at that particular place and
time of performance. When Cage used chance in a symphony orchestra setting, his
radical demands resulted in markedly hostile reactions by the performers.
4’33”
In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College. Around this time,
he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University (an anechoic chamber is a
room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all
sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are
also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear
silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one
low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the
high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in
circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no
sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die
there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not
fear about the future of music." The realisation as he saw it of the
impossibility of silence led to the composition of his most notorious piece, 4′33″.
However, Cage repeatedly claimed that he composed 4′33″
in small units of silent rhythmic durations which, when summed, equalled the
duration of the title--he further claimed that he might have made a mistake in
addition. The theory that the title of the work refers to absolute zero (4’33’’″
expressed in seconds is 273 seconds. Minus 273 degrees Celsius - the lowest
temperature that can be obtained in any macroscopic system- is referred to as Absolute zero),
however, continues as a kind of urban legend that no doubt will always remain
attractive to certain people.
The first performance of John Cage's
4'33" created a scandal. Written in 1952, it is Cage's most notorious
composition, his so-called “silent piece”. The piece consists of four minutes
and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. At the premiere
some listeners were unaware that they had heard anything at all. It was first
performed by the young pianist David Tudor at
Cage said, “People began whispering to one
another, and some people began to walk out. They didn't laugh -- they were just
irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven't
fogotten it 30 years later: they're still angry.”
To Cage, silence had to be redefined if the
concept was to remain viable. He redefined silence as simply the absence of
intended sounds, or the turning off of our awareness.
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