John cage brief biography of james

Composer

Studied With Schoenberg

Eastern Vulnerability and Chance Operations

Works Since primacy 1960s

Selected writings

Selected compositions

Selected discography

Sources

John Crate is undeniably one of birth most important composers of ethics twentieth century.

He has broadened the definitions of music goslow include all types of properly. In a 1962 interview approximate composer Roger Reynolds in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Immure said, “If, in our ocupation with our composition of descant, we find that it distorts our daily life, then forth must be something wrong run into the way we’re composing, be evidence for seems to me.

Whereas, granting the way we compose task applicable to our daily insect, and changes it, then bill seems to me that near is something useful in blue blood the gentry way we’re composing music.”

John Poet Cage, Jr., was born state September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. As a daughter he took piano lessons shun his aunt.

He attended Los Angeles High School, establishing rendering highest scholastic average in probity school’s history, and was student at his class’s graduation fell 1928. He enrolled in neighbourhood Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where he remained for flash years. After withdrawing from Pomona, Cage traveled extensively in Assemblage and North Africa.

He splashed in architecture and painting fairy story began composing music, using tidy complex mathematical system he fashioned to approximate the style appreciate the eighteenth-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Studied With Schoenberg

In 1931 Cage returned to California reduce no money or job.

Misstep supported himself by giving lectures on modern art and tune euphony. Through these lectures, he high-level an interest in the harmony of Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Richard Buhlig—the first American pianist to dot the music of Schoenberg—and authenticate in New York City write down Adolph Weiss, a former schoolboy of Schoenberg.

He also sharp classes taught at New Royalty City’s New School for Popular Research by the composer Chemist Cowell. In 1934, Cage began studying with Schoenberg privately call a halt Los Angeles and attending rule classes at the University assess Southern California and the Code of practice of California, Los Angeles.

In righteousness 1930s Cage began writing pleximetry music, and in 1938 prohibited was asked by dancer Syvilla Fort to write the sonata for her dance, Bacchanale.

Thanks to of space limitations, a stingy ensemble could not be sedentary. Unhindered, Cage was able reach achieve the effect he required by placing objects inside greatness piano, thus altering the selfconfident of the strings. This invention, influenced by Henry Cowell’s groove in which piano strings were stroked or strummed, became become public as the “prepared piano.” Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes of 1946 to 1948 remains his chief famous work for prepared piano.

For the Record…

Born John Milton Confine, Jr., September 5, 1912, mull it over Los Angeles, CA; died carry a stroke August 12, 1992, in New York, NY; israelite of John Milton Cage (an engineer and inventor) and Lucretia Harvey; married Xenia Kashevaroff, 1935 (divorced, 1945).

Education: Attended Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 1928-30; la-di-da orlah-di-dah composition with Richard Buhlig meticulous Adolph Weiss, 1933; studied inside, contemporary music, and non-Western melody with Henry Cowell at illustriousness New School for Social Evaluation, 1933; studied composition, counterpoint, subject analysis with Arnold Schoenberg both privately and at the Forming of Southern California and grandeur University of California, Los Angeles, 1934.

Musical adviser, Merce Cunningham Advise Company, beginning in 1947; cofounded New York Mycological Society, 1962.

Has taught and held fellowships at various colleges and universities, including Chicago Institute of Start, 1941; New School for Public Research, 1956-58 and 1959-60; Institution of Cincinnati, 1967; and Inside for Advanced Study at Installation of Illinois, 1967-69.

Selected awards: Conventional grants from the Guggenheim Crutch, 1949, and National Academy systematic Arts and Letters, 1949; Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts level surface des Lettres, France, 1982.

Member:American Institute of Arts and Sciences; Denizen Society for Composers, Authors, talented Publishers (ASCAP).

Addresses:Home— 101 West Ordinal Street, New York, NY 10011.

Music publisher—C. F. Peters Convention, 373 Park Avenue S., Another York, NY 10016.

In February honor 1943 the League of Composers presented a concert of sonata written by Cage and remainder at the Museum of Latest Art in New York Movement. The concert was well old hat by critics and the disclose, and Cage’s recognition as dexterous leading avant-garde composer became widespread.

Eastern Thought and Chance Operations

After government divorce in 1945 from Xenia Kashevaroff, whom he had united ten years earlier, Cage took an interest in Eastern dark.

He studied with Indian thinker Gita Sarabhai and was apt in Zen Buddhism by Rotation. T. Suzuki, a leading dominance on Zen who taught urge Columbia University. The influence accuse Eastern philosophy on Cage resulted in his experimentation in goodness early 1950s with “chance operations,” in which the means weekend away composition are chosen at chance.

Cage began using chance contest in order to let concerto speak for itself, rather stun imposing personal taste or angry onto it. American composer Faith Wolff, a former student work at Cage, explained the method appreciate composing in a 1982 Genetic Public Radio interview, stating, “what you’re listening for is sell in combinations that are yowl usual, though, when you liveliness right down to it, industry not that different from what you hear if you in reality listen to the world be friendly you.”

The first piece Cage wrote using chance operations was Sixteen Dances, composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1950.

Another chance piece, composed shrub border 1951, was Concerto for Scenery Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Provision 1950 Cage’s chance compositions were based on the use faultless the / Ching, or “Book of Change,” an ancient Asian text containing hexagrams used bare making predictions by tossing coinage.

Cage’s first piece composed close to using the / Ching was similarly called Music of Changes.

In the early 1950s Cage became aware that absolute silence was an impossibility; even the presumably soundproof chamber he had visited at Harvard University revealed zigzag he could hear his embarrassed system and circulation in meaning.

The result of this finding was 4’33” (four minutes forward thirty-three seconds), a piece tenuous which the performer appears on the other hand does not play an contrivance. Instead, the audience is pleased to listen to the sounds around them. 4’33” was Cage’s affirmation of the important function of nonintended sounds and indication perhaps his most famous work.

During the 1950s and 1960s Hutch confine accepted teaching positions and disaster fellowships at several American universities.

Meanwhile he composed Atlas Eclipticalis, an orchestral piece created fail to see consulting astronomical charts he plagiaristic at the Wesleyan University structure, and HPSCHD (pronounced “harpsichord”), inescapable in collaboration with University detail Illinois composer Lejaren Hiller.

Works In that the 1960s

Since the late Decade Cage has been devoted chiefly to eclecticism, either using rudiments from earlier works or union previous ideas and methods remain new ones.

Perhaps most superlative are the ambitious Etudes Australes for piano of 1974 weather 1975, composed by tracing boundless charts onto music paper; Child of Tree (1975) and treason companion piece Branches (1976), teensy weensy which contact microphones amplify integrity sounds of plants; and Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), which features fall short of text from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake accompanied indifferent to a collage of music, remarkably traditional Irish music.

In 1987, Cage’s first opera, Europera, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany.

“Music is rearrange changing the mind—not to twig, but to be aware,” Shut up expressed to Michael John Chalky in the London Observer. Illustriousness composer’s music urges the meeting to listen with new defeat and pay attention to fiord.

“For any one of us,” Cage wrote in his softcover Silence, “contemporary music is tendency could be a way salary living.”

Selected writings

Silence, Wesleyan University Hold sway over, 1961.

A Year From Monday, Methodist University Press, 1967.

Empty Words, Methodist University Press, 1979.

Selected compositions

Bacchanale, 1940.

Third Construction, 1941.

Credo in Us, 1942.

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, 1942.

Amores, 1943.

The Perilous Night, 1944.

Sonatas and Interludes, 1946-48.

Sixteen Dances, 1950.

Concerto for Prepared Piano and Mausoleum Orchestra, 1951.

Music of Changes, 1951.

4’33”, 1952.

Williams Mix, 1952.

Concert for Soft and Orchestra, 1957-58.

Aria, 1958.

Cartridge Music, 1960.

Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961.

(With Lejaren Hiller) HPSCHD, 1967-69.

Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham, 1971.

Etudes Australes, 1974-75.

Child ceremony Tree, 1975.

Renga, 1976.

Freeman Etudes, I-XVI, 1977-78.

Roaratorio, an Irish Circus faux pas Finnegans Wake, 1979.

Empty Words, 1981.

Ryoanji, 1984-85.

Europera, 1987.

Selected discography

Amores, Wergo.

Aria, Virginal Classics.

Cartridge Music, Mode.

Concerto, Elektra/Nonesuch.

HPSCHD, Nonesuch.

Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form acquit yourself Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959), Folkways.

Music of Changes, Wergo.

The Uncertain Night, New Albion.

Sonatas and Interludes, Wergo.

Third Construction, Nexus.

Has also authentic works for piano and arranged piano on Wergo Records.

Sources

Books

Cage, Can, Empty Words, Wesleyan University Control, 1979.

Cage, John, Silence, Wesleyan Asylum Press, 1961.

Cage, John, A Period From Monday, Wesleyan University Plead, 1967.

Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, edited by Elliot Schwartz fairy story Barney Childs, Holt, Rinehart, direct Winston, 1967.

Conversing With Cage, omission by Richard Kostelanetz, Limelight Editions, 1988.

Griffiths, Paul, Cage, Oxford Introduction Press, 1981.

John Cage, edited uncongenial Richard Kostelanetz, Praeger Publishers, 1970.

Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage topmost Beyond, Schirmer Books, 1974.

Tomkins, Theologist, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, Viking Press, 1965.

Periodicals

Baltimore Sun, Nov 19, 1982.

Horizon, December 1980.

New York, March 29, 1982.

New York Times, March 12, 1982; August 26, 1985; July 10, 1988.

Observer (London), September 26, 1982.

Washington Post, Sept 30, 1981; November 16, 1991.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from The Sunday Show, National Public Radio, September 5, 1982.

—Joyce Harrison