As a child, he was introduced to music by some of his relatives and various private piano teachers in his home county. John’s aunt Phoebe Harvey familiarized him to piano music of the 19 th century and when he was in his fourth grade he received his first piano teachings.
Full Answer
Did John Cage use the prepared piano?
But this was an important point in John Cage’s work with the prepared piano as well. Just as with Cunningham, prior to 1944 the prepared piano had appeared here and there on dance programs. But this concert featured Cage’s music for the prepared piano almost exclusively.
What was cage's first experience with music?
Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century.
What instruments did cage use in his works?
Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier.
Where did John Cage teach modern dance?
John Cage In the late ‘thirties I was employed as accompanist for the classes in modern dance at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington. These classes were taught by Bonnie Bird, who had been a member of Martha Graham’s company.
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How did John Cage play his instrument?
Cage wanted to use percussive sounds to accompany the group in the dance studio, but the room was so small that only one instrument (a piano) could be used. He turned the piano into a percussion instrument by opening the piano and inserting objects between the strings.
What techniques did John Cage use?
After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano (c.
How did John Cage get into music?
Mature Period. In 1946, Cage began studying Indian music and philosophy from Gita Sarabhai - an Indian musician whom he was tutoring in Western music. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cage attended several lectures given by the famous Zen Buddhist, D.T. Suzuki, who would also have a large influence on his work.
What did John Cage do to the piano?
He wedged bolts and pieces of weather stripping between the strings of the piano, muting the tone and creating more complex, inharmonic timbres. After this discovery, “I wrote theBacchanale quickly,” Cage recalled, “and with the excitement continual discovery provided.”
Who taught John Cage?
His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933—35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures.
Who invented prepared piano?
composer John CageWhile composers such as Henry Cowell experimented with manipulating the strings of the piano during the early 1900s, the history of prepared piano as it is understood today begins with the American composer John Cage.
How many sound did John Cage hear in the anechoic chamber?
two soundsHe was also influenced by an encounter with an anechoic chamber, a room scientifically designed to maintain absolute silence for various types of acoustic testing. In his famous collection of essays titled Silence, Cage wrote about entering such a chamber at Harvard and hearing two sounds, one high and one low.
What is the purpose of 4 33?
Conceived around 1947–48, while the composer was working on Sonatas and Interludes, 4′33″ became for Cage the epitome of his idea that any auditory experience may constitute music. It was also a reflection of the influence of Zen Buddhism, which Cage had studied since the late 1940s.
What was unique about John Cage?
John Cage was one of the first musicians who created electronic music. He used tape and combined several different sounds that made musical collages as he kept experimenting.
What did John Cage study?
Returning to the United States in 1931, he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Arnold Schoenberg, Adolph Weiss, and Henry Cowell. While teaching in Seattle (1938–40), Cage organized percussion ensembles to perform his compositions.
What is it to prepare a piano?
A prepared piano in the simplest sense is a piano that has been altered to sound differently. In order to do this, composers place objects between or on the strings to produce an unusual tonal effect.
What is John Cage musical style?
John Cage was an incredibly impactful and controversial American composer of the 20th century. He was the forerunner for the avant-garde, significantly developing nonstandard styles of music such as electroacoustic music and aleatoric music (chance-controlled).
How did John Cage change music?
One of the most influential 20th century composers, John Cage pioneered a body of music that he described as "the contemporary transition from keyboard-influenced music to the all-sound music of the future." From 1930 to 1950 Cage composed over 16 percussion scores and invented compositional procedures and theories ...
How many sound did John Cage hear in the anechoic chamber?
two soundsHe was also influenced by an encounter with an anechoic chamber, a room scientifically designed to maintain absolute silence for various types of acoustic testing. In his famous collection of essays titled Silence, Cage wrote about entering such a chamber at Harvard and hearing two sounds, one high and one low.
What is a fun fact about John Cage?
John Milton Cage was one of the most influential music composers of the 20th century. He was an artist, composer, philosopher, and music theorist. He was the inventor of prepared piano and a pioneer in electroacoustic music and indeterminacy in music.
What composition made John Cage famous?
Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title.
When did John Cage change the tuning of his piano?
Experimental composer John Cage changes the tuning of his piano by placing coins and screws between the strings in Gaveau Auditorium in Paris, France, on June 25, 1949. (New York Times Co./Getty Images)
What was Cage's first piano composition?
His most famous prepared piano work, " Sonatas and Interludes ," is a collection of 20 shorter works with objects including screws, bolts, nuts, rubber and plastic.
What is the technique used by Moran?
Moran composes for a technique known as the prepared piano, in which everyday household items are used to alter the sound of any given note on the instrument. While screws and bolts are Moran’s objects of choice, other potential preparations include paper clips, straws and pencil erasers. Placed on the 230 strings inside the piano, ...
What is John Cage's background?
His background in the music scene of the West coast led him towards an interest in tonalities outside of what the traditional piano had to offer. “California, unlike the East coast, was very much connected to the Orient,” says Laura Kuhn, the director of The John Cage Trust.
What is the role of piano in music?
In an age in which music is increasingly produced exclusively using electronic sounds, and live instruments, when they do appear, are so often electronically manipulated, the prepared piano plays the unique role of an instrument that creates sounds that feel electronically altered using an acoustic manipulation.
What is the difference between Hauschka's and Moran's preparations?
The sonic qualities imbued by preparation vary from composer to composer—Hauschka’s menagerie of objects create a soundscape that feels as if he is conducting a large and unusual ensemble, rather than sitting at the piano bench, while Moran’s preparations have a trance-like, bell-ringing quality.
When did Hauschka perform?
Hauschka performed at the 35th Munich Filmfest on June 27, 2017, in Munich, Germany. (Kurt Krieger/Corbis via Getty Images) Every musician has a particular set of tasks and warm-ups before a performance or practice session—oiling the valves, rosining the bow, tuning, long tones, scales, stretches. For Kelly Moran, a composer ...
Where did John Cage learn piano?
Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century.
What college did Cage go to?
Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via professor José Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Henry Cowell.
What was the name of the music that Cage composed for modern dance?
From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things.
Why did Cage dislike improvisation?
Since chance procedures were used by Cage to eliminate the composer's and the performer's likes and dislikes from music, Cage disliked the concept of improvisation, which is inevitably linked to the performer's preferences. In a number of works beginning in the 1970s, he found ways to incorporate improvisation.
How many hours of sleep did Cage have?
Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg.
How long did John Cage stay in Europe?
He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art.
What was the role of Cage in the post-war avant-garde?
A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.
What is John Cage best known for?
Neither a painter or a sculptor, Cage is best known for revolutionizing modern music through his incorporation of unconventional instrumentation and the idea of environmental music dictated by chance.
Who is John Cage?
John Cage was born in Los Angeles to John Milton Cage, Sr., an inventor, and Lucretia ('Crete') Harvey , an amateur artist and occasional journalist for The Los Angeles Times. The range of his father's inventions (including a diesel-fueled submarine and electrostatic field theory), could be characterized as both revolutionary and eccentric, and certainly left an impression on the young Cage.
What was the first large scale performance by Cage?
Theater Piece No. 1 was one of Cage's first large scale collaborative, multimedia performances, created and performed while Cage was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Referred to by many as simply "The Event," the piece involved several simultaneous performance components - all orchestrated by Cage, where chance played a determining role in the course of the performance. Some of the components included in "The Event" were: poetry readings, music, dance, photographic slide projections, film, and the four panels of Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951) suspended from the ceiling in the shape of a cross. Cage sat on a step ladder and lectured about Buddhism, or said nothing, and M.C. Richards and Charles Olson read different poems from ladders, while Rauschenberg played Edith Piaf records, Merce Cunningham danced amidst the audience (chased by a barking dog), coffee was served by four boys dressed in white, and David Tudor played improvised notes on a prepared piano, fitted with pieces of felt and wood between the strings. Cage composed the piece such that each participant did whatever they chose during assigned intervals of time and within certain parameters, but the overarching principle of chance guided the course of events. The highly involved multimedia characteristics of No. 1 are a wonderful example of the Neo-Dada movement and its incorporation of the everyday into modern art. This early proto-happening prefigured later developments in modern art, particularly the increasing focus on the outside world, as evidenced in later movements like Fluxus, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, as well as performance art in general.
How long did Cage sit in silence?
Instead, Cage wrote detailed instructions for a single musician to enter the stage, prepare the instrument - initially a piano, but other instruments have been used - and then sit in absolute silence for the full duration of the piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
What was the influence of Cage on contemporary art?
Cage's influence ushered in groundbreaking stylistic developments key to contemporary art and paved the way for the postmodern artistic inquiries, which began in the late 1960s and further challenged the established definition of fine art.
What are the emotions in the Sonatas and Interludes?
These emotions are divided into two groups: the white (humor, wonder, erotic, and heroic) and the black (anger, fear, disgust and sorrow). Sonatas and Interludes was dedicated to Armenian-American pianist Maro Ajemian, who performed in the recording of the piece and during its debut at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Her performance of the work resulted in Cage's receipt of a generous grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Considered by many to be the composer's first masterpiece and highly characteristic of his oeuvre, the work was crafted to include improvisation while following a highly melodic structure based on a simple mathematical formula.
How long is the piece 4'33"?
However, instead of relying on a number of performers to bring it to fruition, this work depends on the environment in which it is performed and chance. The three-movement composition does not contain a single note of music. Instead, Cage wrote detailed instructions for a single musician to enter the stage, prepare the instrument - initially a piano, but other instruments have been used - and then sit in absolute silence for the full duration of the piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The performer's silence allowed the sounds of the surroundings and audience members to become the music itself. This piece clearly defines Cage's interest in aleatory music, in which chance determines the outcome and any sound can be musical. This shift towards the music of silence was sparked by a 1951 visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard. Cage expected to hear nothing within the sound-proofed room, but instead heard two sounds, one high and one low - his nervous system and his circulatory system respectively. Within that anechoic chamber, he discovered the impossibility of silence. This realization led Cage to compose 4'33" and to focus on the music created by our bodies and environments.#N#This piece was first performed in an outdoor amphitheatre in Woodstock, NY as part of a recital of contemporary piano compositions. Cage's revolutionary re-definition of music was received quite poorly at this first performance, with the sounds of nature overshadowed by the audience's outrage at the performer's silence. Despite the initial negative response, 4'33" was embraced by progressive artists as an important foray into the incorporation of ambient sound and durational elements within musical performance. The sheer spontaneity of 4'33" is an important precursor to Allan Kaprow's happenings, which fully matured in the late 1950s and early 1960s and also relied wholly on audience members to dictate the outcome of the art.
Overview
Life
Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an …
Music
Cage's first completed pieces are currently lost. According to the composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power." Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works fr…
Visual art, writings, and other activities
Although Cage started painting in his youth, he gave it up in order to concentrate on music instead. 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: silk screen printing on plexiglas panels. The panels and the lithographs all consist of bits and pieces of words in different t…
Reception and influence
Cage's pre-chance works, particularly pieces from the late 1940s such as Sonatas and Interludes, earned critical acclaim: the Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. Cage's adoption of chance operations in 1951 cost him a number of friendships and led to numerous criticisms from fellow composers. Adherents of serialism such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen dismissed indeterminate music; Boulez, who was once on friendly terms with Cage, criticized hi…
Archives
• The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.
• The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection held by the Music Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts contains most of the composer's musical manuscripts, including sketches, worksheets, realizations, and unfinished works.
See also
• An Anthology of Chance Operations
• List of compositions by John Cage
• The Organ /ASLSP (a.k.a. As Slow as Possible) project, the longest concert ever created.
• The Revenge of the Dead Indians, a 1993 documentary about Cage by Henning Lohner.
Sources
• Bernstein, David W.; Hatch, Christopher, eds. (2001). Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-04407-1.
• Bredow, Moritz von (2012). Rebellische Pianistin. Das Leben der Grete Sultan zwischen Berlin und New York. Mainz, Germany: Schott Music. ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9.