John Cage

John Cage was born in Los Angeles on 5 September 1912. His father, John Milton Cage, was an eccentric inventor who designed, among other things, a petrol-powered submarine and radio equipment; his mother, Lucretia, worked as a journalist. Young John learned piano as a child and discovered the music of Grieg, which he adored. An excellent student, he graduated from high school at the top of his class and entered Pomona College in California in 1928.

But he was bored at university, which he left in 1930 to travel in Europe. In Paris he discovered Gothic architecture, modern painting and the music of Bach. He tried painting, poetry and architecture before choosing music. Back in California he studied composition with Henry Cowell, a pioneer of experimental music, and from 1935 with Arnold Schoenberg, who told him he had no feeling for harmony. Cage promised to devote his life to music and decided to focus above all on rhythm and sound.

In the 1930s he formed a percussion ensemble that played all kinds of objects: tin cans, car brake drums, gongs lowered into water. He composed Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), one of the first works to use record players and electronic sounds. In 1940, for a dance performance in Seattle, there was no room on stage for a percussion ensemble: so he invented the “prepared piano”, slipping screws, bolts and pieces of rubber and wood between the piano strings. The instrument turned into a small percussion orchestra with strange, delicate sounds.

In 1942 he moved to New York. There began a fifty-year artistic collaboration and life partnership with the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, for whose company he composed and directed the music. Between 1946 and 1948 he composed the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, his masterpiece for the instrument. At this time he became interested in Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism, which transformed his idea of music: he wanted to let sounds “be themselves”, free from the composer’s tastes and intentions.

From 1951 he composed using chance. He consulted the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book of divination, tossing coins to decide pitches, durations and dynamics. Thus was born Music of Changes (1951) for piano. That same year he entered an anechoic chamber, a completely soundproofed room at Harvard University. He expected absolute silence but heard two sounds, one high, one low: those of his nervous system and his blood circulating. He concluded that absolute silence does not exist.

This discovery inspired his most famous piece: 4′33″ (1952). The pianist sits at the piano, opens and closes the lid to mark the three movements, but plays not a single note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The “music” is made of the sounds in the hall: coughs, whispers, the sound of rain or wind. The work caused a huge scandal but raised a question that would change twentieth-century art: what is music? Cage also composed works for radios, magnetic tape and all kinds of objects.

A passionate expert on mushrooms, in 1959 he won an Italian television quiz show, Lascia o raddoppia?, by answering questions on the subject. He was also a poet, writer and painter and taught at many universities. In 1985 he composed ASLSP (“As slow as possible”). He died in New York on 12 August 1992. In 2001 a church in Halberstadt, Germany, began a performance of his organ version of this piece, planned to last 639 years and end in 2640.