"I only learn what to do when I have
failures.”
If anyone was
ever born with the wrong name, it was the composer John Cage. His art was
uncaged. No other 20th century composer did as many things in as
many radical ways that overthrew so many ways in which people thought about
music.
His most
famous—or notorious—composition is “4’33.” In it, a “performer” sits at a piano
(or stands by a piano) and does not play for four minutes and 33 seconds (or
for some indeterminate length of time).
The
composition is divided into three movements. Their parts are divided by the
opening and closing of the keyboard lid. The music of the “performance” is the
sounds the audience hears in the absence of “music.”
At its 1952 premiere,
a critic wrote, “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During
the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third people
themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
“Let sounds be just sounds,” Cage believed. He
was student of Zen Buddhism and the I Ching which divines the future through
random interactions. Cage devoted his life to exploring the principle that “the
purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to
divine influences.”
"Noted
for: being radical"
He inherited
his zest for the unconventional from his father, an eccentric inventor who,
among other things, wanted to find a way to “travel in space without the use of
fuel.” His father told him, “If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.”
In grade
school, other children called him a sissy. “People would lie
and wait for me and beat me up,” he said. (After a brief marriage, Cage
acknowledged his true self, and he and choreographer Merce Cunningham, with
whom he collaborated artistically, became life-long partners.)
Cage's high school
yearbook contains the inscription: “Noted for: being radical.”
As one might imagine, he quickly
dropped out of college. “I was
shocked…to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies
of the same book,” Cage wrote. “Instead of doing as they did, I went into the
stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I
received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution
was not being run correctly. I left.”
Instead of sitting in a regimented
classroom, he traveled to Europe. On a street corner in Spain, he noticed “the
multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in
one's experience and producing enjoyment.” Said Cage: “It was the beginning for
me of theater and circus.”
After
returning home, he studied for two years under avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg.
After two years, they both realized Cage had no sense of harmony. Schoenberg
told him he would be a failure as a composer.
"Why not?" Cage asked.
"You'll come to a wall and won't be able
to get through,” Schoenberg replied.
Cage shot
back: "Then I'll spend my life knocking my head against that wall."
True to his
art, he spent many years in near poverty. From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s,
he lived in a two-room cabin in rural New York. He received no income from
“4’33” and earned little or nothing from his music during that period. He
didn’t even have a music publisher. He supplemented what little income he had by
supplying restaurants with mushrooms. (He was an amateur mycologist, co-founded
the New York Mycological Society, and even won $8,000 on a quiz show by
answering incredibly arcane questions about fungus.)
"Music as
weather"
Cage thought
of “music as weather” telling an interviewer near the end of his life that "I
think it is true that sounds are, of their nature, harmonious, and I would
extend that to noise. There is no noise, only sound. I haven't heard any sounds
that I consider something I don't want to hear again, with the exception of
sounds that frighten us or make us aware of pain. I don't like meaningful sound.
If sound is meaningless, I'm all for it."
He
took to heart something he once heard inventor Buckminster Fuller say—“I only
learn what to do when I have failures.”
His
earliest explorations used “prepared” pianos in which objects, such as nails, were
inserted between the strings or attached to their hammers. One of his most Dada
pieces involved slapping the strings of a piano with a fish. (It was dead.)
In 1951, his “Imaginary
Landscape No. 4” involved 12 radios playing simultaneously. Two “performers” operated each device
constantly altering the volume and shifting between stations.
A year later,
Cage’s “Water Music” recreated everyday sounds, and its instruments included
cards being shuffled, water poured from one container to another, a radio being
turned on and off, a whistle blown into a bowl of water, and a piano keyboard
lid being slammed at random moments.
As a guest on
the TV's“I’ve Got a Secret” game show, instruments in his performance included a bathtub,
a rubber duck, and an electric mixer. It also included radios, but not in the
way Cage had intended. Union rules
forbid him from playing them, so he created sounds with them by dropping them
on the floor.
Not
surprisingly, the Soviet Union banned Cage’s music.
“My favorite
music is the music I haven't yet heard,” he one said. “I don't hear the music I
write. I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.”
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