John Cage

John Cage wrote a piece in which nobody plays anything and spent forty years being asked whether he was serious. He was born in Los Angeles, studied briefly with Schoenberg - who said he was not a composer but an inventor of genius, and who told him he had no feeling for harmony - and worked first with percussion ensembles and with the prepared piano, an instrument he made by inserting bolts, screws and rubber between the strings so that a keyboard produced a gamelan. From about 1950 he took up chance operations, using the I Ching to determine pitch, duration and silence, on the principle that the composer should get his own taste out of the way and let sounds be themselves. 4'33", first performed in 1952, instructs the player to make no sound for that duration; what the audience hears is the room, which is the point, and it has been argued about ever since. He was also a serious writer, a devoted amateur mycologist who once won an Italian quiz show on mushrooms, and a student of Zen under D. T. Suzuki. His partnership with Merce Cunningham lasted from 1942 until his death and produced dozens of works in which music and dance share only a duration. His book Silence has never gone out of print. Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, written between 1946 and 1948, took two years and is the largest work for the instrument he invented. Organ2/ASLSP is being performed in Halberstadt at a tempo that will take six hundred and thirty-nine years, with chord changes years apart. He taught at the New School, and the composers who passed through that class started Fluxus. His Europeras and the late number pieces occupied his last decade. He collected and identified mushrooms seriously enough to co-found the New York Mycological Society.

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