John cage

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912, Los Angeles - August 12, 1992, New York), artistically John Cage, was a composer, American music theorist, artist, and philosopher. A pioneer of random music, electronic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde. Critics have applauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the XX century. He was instrumental in the development of modern dance, mainly through of her association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was her romantic partner for most of her life.

His teachers included Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, both known for their radical innovations in music, but the main influence on Cage's work lies in different Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came up with the idea of random music, or music controlled by chance, which he began composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient classical Chinese text about changing events, became Cage's regular compositional tool for the rest of his life.

Cage is best known for his composition of 4′33″ in three movements played without playing a single note. Another famous Cage creation is the prepared piano, a piano whose sound it has been altered by placing objects (preparations) on or between its strings, on the hammers or on the dampers, for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and several concert pieces.

Beginnings

Son of John Milton Cage, an inventor, and Lucretia Harvey, a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. It is believed that one of the reasons why John Cage liked to experiment with sound was influenced by seeing his father always creating new inventions. His first exposure to music was largely thanks to his aunt Phoebe Harvey who taught him to play the piano, but from the beginning Cage was more interested in sight reading and improvisation than in developing a virtuous technique. In 1928, upon graduating from high school, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer, so he began his studies at Pomona College, majoring in Theology. After changing his career in 1930, he decided to leave the university, because he thought that the school "was not going to serve a writer."

Convincing his parents that a trip to Europe would benefit him more culturally and intellectually if he wanted to be a writer, Cage spent 18 months touring most of Europe where he was exposed to different forms of art such as architecture, poetry, painting and music. It was on this trip that he first heard music by Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith and Johann Sebastian Bach. His first compositions were made in Mallorca, these compositions were based on complex mathematical formulas but in the end Cage was not satisfied with the results so he left these pieces behind when he returned to the United States.

Music

Early works, rhythmic structure and new approaches to harmony

The first complete pieces of Cage have been lost. According to the composer, his early works were very short piano pieces, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking "sensual appeal and expressive power". Cage then began producing pieces by improvising and later writing. the result, until Richard Buhlig stressed the importance of the structure. Most of the work of the early 1930s is highly chromatic and betrays John Cage's interest in counterpoint. After these first studies, Henry Cowell recommended that he go to Arnold Schoenberg, who told him after a couple of lessons that he had no aptitude for harmony: "You will find yourself with a wall that you will not be able to cross", to which Cage replied: "Then I'll spend my life banging my head against that wall."

Shortly thereafter, Cage began writing percussive music and music for modern dance, using a technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece at the forefront of the piece. The ratios used, called by Cage "nested ratios," became a regular feature of his music during the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces.

Towards the end of the 1940s, Cage began to develop different methods to break with traditional harmony. For example, his work String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) was composed using a number of gamuts or chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one range to another. Each time, that range is selected based on whether it contains the note needed for the melody, so the other notes do not form any directional harmony. His Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of tables of duration, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage chose using simple geometric patterns.

Random

The divination of I Ching it requires obtaining a hexagram per random generation to then read a chapter associated with that hexagram.

Along with nested proportions, Cage began to use tabular systems for different piano works, such as Music of Changes (1951), where material was selected exclusively from tabular using the I Ching. All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using random procedures, usually the I Ching. Cage's studies are extremely difficult to interpret.

Another series of works applied random processes to pre-existing music by other composers, such as Cheap Imitation (1969) (based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine& #34; (1978) (based on Supply Belcher) and Hymns and Variations (1979).

Improvisation

By using random processes in order to eliminate the tastes of the composer or performer of the music, Cage's disinterest in the concept of improvisation was evident, a way of working inevitably linked to the preferences of the performer. However, in a whole series of works since the 1970s, the composer found a way to incorporate improvisation. In Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) performers are asked to use certain species of plants as instruments, for example the cactus. The structure of these pieces is determined through the chance of their choices, this being the musical result.

The environment

Cage discovered that chance was as much a force in shaping a musical composition as the artist's will, and in all his compositions he allowed chance to play a leading role. Although each piece has a basic compound structure, the effect of the whole varies with each execution since factors related to the Environment, such as the venue where it is played and the audience, directly affect the sounds that are produced. This concept gave rise to a movement called Environment.

Visual art, writing and other activities

Although Cage began painting in his youth, he gave up painting to concentrate on music. His first mature visual project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, dates from 1969. The work comprises two lithographs and a group of what Cage called plexigrams: prints silk on plexiglass panels. Both the panels and the lithographs consist of bits and pieces of words in different fonts, all governed by operations of chance.

From 1978 until his death, Cage worked at Crown Point Press, producing different series of prints each year. His first completed project here was the print Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully annotated instructions and based on combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau. It was followed, the same year, by Seven Day Diary, which Cage painted with his eyes closed but which was created under a strict structure developed using random methods. Ultimately, Thoreau's drawings were the basis for his last work, produced in 1978, Signals.

Between 1979 and 1982 Cage produced a series of large prints: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82) and Déreau (1982). They were the last works created under the engraving technique. In 1983 he began to use different unconventional materials such as beaten cotton or foam, and later he used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc..) to create your visual works. In 1988–1990 he created watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop. The only film produced by Cage was developed for Number Pieces, commissioned by composer-director Henning Lohner. It was completed just weeks before Cage's death in 1992. One¹¹ is made up entirely of images determined by the random switching on of electric light.

During his adult life, Cage had an important activity as a writer and teacher. Some of his classes were included in different books published by Cage, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not just master classes, but also texts performed in experimental formats and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1959), composed in rhythmic structures.

Cage was also an avid amateur mycologist, founding the New York Mycological Society with four friends.

Reception and influence

Cage's pre-chance works, particularly late-1940s pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes, garnered him considerable critical acclaim, with performances of Sonatas at Carnegie Hall in 1949. However, Cage's adoption of the operations of chance in 1951 cost him a number of enmities, and provoked much criticism from other composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen ruled out indeterminate music. Prominent critics of serialism, such as the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, were equally hostile towards Cage.

While much of Cage's work remains controversial, his influence is felt by countless composers, artists, and writers. After the introduction of chance by Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical, although they came to adopt chance processes in some of his works (although in a much more restricted way). Other composers who have adopted some of the elements of this approach include composers such as Witold Lutosławski or Mauricio Kagel.

Cage's experiments with rhythmic structures and his interest in sound influenced an even larger number of composers, beginning with close American companions such as Morton Feldman and Helmut Lachenmann (and other American composers such as La Monte Young), and later spreading to Europe. Virtually all composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence, including Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly, and even Howard Skempton, a composer apparently very different from Cage. Cage's influence is also evident in the Far East. One of the most prominent classical composers of the 20th century , Tōru Takemitsu, was influenced by his music.

Cage's influence has also been recognized by rock groups such as Sonic Youth and Stereolab. Other musicians influenced by him include rock composer and jazz guitarist Frank Zappa, as well as different noise music groups and artists.. In fact, it has been claimed that the origin of this type of music is in Cage's work 4′33". The development of electronic music was also influenced by Cage: around the mid-1970s Brian Eno's Obscure Records label released various works by Cage. The prepared piano, which was popularized by Cage, is used extensively on the album Drukqs released by Aphex Twin in 2001 Cage's work as a musicologist helped popularize the music of Erik Satie, and his friendship with Abstract Expressionist artists such as Robert Rauschenberg helped introduce his ideas into the visual field.

(on 4′33′′) "I knew they would take everything as a joke and a quitting job, but still, I wanted my music to be exempt from my tastes and aversions, because I think music should be free from the composer's feelings and ideas. I felt, and I expected to have taken others to feel, that the sounds of their surroundings constituted a more interesting music than the music they would hear if they were attending a concert hall. "

John Cage (Diario ABC, 02/12/2013) [1]

Musicians

Michael Bach, Boris Berman, Sven Birch, Stephen Drury, Armin Fuchs, Louis Goldestein, Herbert Henck, Evi Kyriazidou, Cosme Damiano Lanza, Alexeï Lubimov, Bobby Mitchell, Joshua Pierce, Giancarlo Simonacci, Margaret Leng Tan, Adam Tendler, John Tilbury, Roger Zahab, Alessandra Celletti.

Selected Works

• First Construction in Metal (1939)
• Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939)
• Living Room Music (1940)
• Credo in Us (1942)
• Four walls (1944)
• Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947)
• Sonatas and interludes (1948)
• Toy piano suite (1948)
• Music of Changes (1951)
• 4′33′′ (1952)
• Radio Music (1956)
• Fontana Mix (1958)
• Cartridge Music (1960)
• Variations II (1961)
• 0'00 (4'33" No.2) (1962)
• Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62)
• Cheap Imitation (1969)
• HPSCHD (1969)
• Branches (1976)
• Litany for the Whale (1980)
• Ryoanji (1983)
• But What About the Noise of Crumpling Paper (1985)
• Europeras 1 " 2 (1987)
• ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) (1987)
• Four6 (1992)
• Trio Seven Woodblocks
• Only n°43 (Songsbooks-1970)