33 John Cage Facts: Contributions, Career, Instruments And More

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.

In his early life, he learned from pupils of Arnold Schoenberg in New York and later from Schoenberg himself in Los Angeles. However, his art became influenced by non-standard methods of using instruments, sounds, and even silence. The performance of his most controversial and legendary work, '4'33", is still one of the most talked-about pieces of the man.

Read on to know more facts about John Cage and if you like this article, then also check out Jimmy Page facts and facts about Beethoven.

John Cage: Facts

John Cage is famous for composing revolutionary music. He has achieved many things in his life, from using silence in his music to being one of the many men to create electronic music and more.

John Cage was born in Los Angeles, California, on September 12, 1912. He started taking piano lessons around the age of ten.

Even though Cage was quite good at it, he still dreamed of becoming a writer. In search of fulfilling his dream, he traveled around Europe. Still, as Cage returned after traveling, he decided to compose music and thus started his journey with the great composer Arnold Schoenberg.

John Cage often recounted a conversation he had with Schoenberg where Schoenberg said he needed to have a feeling of harmony if he wanted to write music.

When Cage said he didn't have that feeling, Schoenberg told him that in that case, he would always encounter an obstacle, like coming to a wall which he would not be able to pass.

In response, Cage told his teacher that he would then devote his life to beating his head against that wall.

John Cage found his reason to make music as he was introduced to traditional Indian music. When he was teaching Western Music to Gita Sarabhai, an Indian heiress, he wanted to know more about traditional Indian music in return.

Sarabhai told him that in Indian tradition, the true purpose of music is to quiet and sober our mind, which makes our mind susceptible to divine influences. He has later recounted that he has always accepted this reason upon hearing it.

Facts About John Cage's Career

John Cage has been one of the most revolutionary figures in composing experimental, electronic music, and more. He started humbly but quickly reached the height of fame, and for good reasons.

John Cage started learning piano from quite a young age, and he was pretty talented at it. However, he never considered experimental composition or music composition as a career; he instead wanted to become a writer.

After Cage graduated from high school, he wanted to be a writer and joined Pomona College. However, he stayed only a couple of years and then dropped out to travel throughout Europe.

Cage traveled to Spain, France, Italy, and Germany during this time, and he tried his hand at architecture, poetry, painting, and music at this time. During the last few months, he listened to contemporary composers like Johan Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky, which inspired him to make his own music.

He came back to the United States after a year and a half of traveling in 1931 and decided to give his all to composing. He started learning composition first from the pianist Richard Bühlig, an interpreter of Arnold Schoenberg, a significant German composer.

He went to New York City in 1933 to learn from a former student of Schoenberg and then started learning from Henry Cowell.

When he came back to Los Angeles in 1934, he was accepted as a student of Arnold Schoenberg himself. He had to start working many jobs during this time to earn money and survive in the city. He had an interest in modern dance as well. Hence, John Cage worked as a dance accompanist, wall washer, and art lecturer.

In 1938, John Cage moved to Seattle, and he started working in the Cornish College of Art, which became a pivotal point in his life. In 1942, he moved back to New York City, and his performance at the Museum of Modern Art the following year made him famous as an avant-garde composer.

Owing to his invention of the prepared piano, he made some significant contributions to music.

In the last years of his life, he started working on watercolors and printmaking, diverse multimedia practice, several musical scores, and several operas. His final few masterpieces, the Number Pieces, came in the last five years of his life when he was suffering from quite a few many diseases.

John Cage's Contribution To Music

John Cage was never bound to traditional kinds of music. All of his works reflect his unorthodox philosophy. These works can only be characterized by the revolutionizing quality of the man. He was way ahead of his time and free from all shackles, and that showed.

In the earlier period of his career, when John Cage was learning from Schoenberg, he started taking an interest in three new things; dance, silence, and percussive music.

His interest in percussion music led him to experiment and try new things with percussion ensembles while adapting and discovering new ways to create music with various instruments as time went by.

He was seeking a workable method for percussion music through his master, Schoenberg's use of tonality as a way of structural principle.

He was experimenting with a silence which he decided was the opposite coexistence of any form of sound.

Cage's fascination with silence led him to explore that among the four characteristics of sound - loudness, pitch, duration, and timbre, the only duration could be found as a characteristic of silence.

That's why to use silence to make revolutionary music; he started using rhythmic structure based on a particular duration of each segment of time instead of traditional harmonic structure.

That's why many of his earlier works, like Construction In Metal and one of his most notable works, '4'33'', were delicate, quiet, and full of silence.

'4'33'' was quite a notorious piece from the man who broke through many music barriers made up of traditional and conventional instruments. In this piece, performers or a performer remains absolutely silent for the specific amount of time said in the title.

However, the amount of time the performer remains silent depends upon their determination.

It's not about being silently present for four minutes and 33 seconds; it's instead about taking in the sounds of the environment around you during that time. The piece is one of the most controversial ones in broader aesthetics of performance and art, along with musicology.

As evident from the piece, '4'33", John Cage was constantly inventing compositions that would not be bound by the traditions and, if necessary, would not require any prior thought. In search of that, he made up purposeless music based on a star chart, throws of some dice, or more such random devices which would not reflect his personal preferences.

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.

Some of John Cage's music compositions allow the musicians to choose how many musicians would play and the order in which the piece's sections are played.

John Cage called this method indeterminacy, and an example of this is Imaginary Landscape No. 4, which has 12 radio sets, and each of these is tuned to different stations, so each of them is unique.

Some of the best works of John Cage in new musical approaches are developed with a kind of tone row technique that has 25-note rows. These are Imaginary Landscape No. 1, Metamorphosis, Composition For three Voices, First Construction (in Metal), Five Songs, Two Pieces for Piano, and Sonata For Clarinet.

Instruments Played By John Cage

John Cage started learning the piano from a very young age. When he began making revolutionary music later in life, he started altering the sounds by placing different objects in his instruments. He also used silence and computers to make his music pieces.

John Cage was never a traditional man. He might have learned the piano when he was very young, but that only gave him an acute understanding of the instrument.

He was always thinking out of the box, and when he invented the prepared piano, it took him to the height of fame. He wrote several concert pieces and dance-related works on the instrument.

His obsession with experimenting with instruments started when he worked multiple jobs during the 1930s. However, he wasn't only searching for music in traditional instruments.

Still, he experimented with many other unusual objects to produce music because he knew that everything has its own unique spirit and sound. While he was experimenting, he came upon the idea of inserting different objects into the strings of a piano to create a different sound.

Before one performance, he asked the pianist to insert various objects, like rubber bands, screws, and nails inside the piano strings.

He found out that when he would strike the keys for those strings, the objects were vibrating, which was changing the sound of those specific keys during the entire time of the performance. It started creating a sort of one-person percussion ensemble.

John Cage was also creating music with the help of computers. Like, HPSCHD, which he created by collaborating with Lejaren Hiller, was made in such a way.

The piece gives the musicians the possibility of playing a maximum of seven harpsichord solos and a maximum of 51 audio tapes simultaneously. The listener gets a computer printout that gives them a program through which they can manipulate the controls of their stereo phonograph.

The brilliance of this is that the piece remains indeterminate in performance this way. Similarly, he replaced the original pitches of a piece originally composed by Erik Satie with randomly selected notes and called it 'Cheap Imitation.'

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