John Cage
Overview
 
John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist
Music theory
Music theory is the study of how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It seeks to identify patterns and structures in composers' techniques across or within genres, styles, or historical periods...

, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music
Electroacoustic music originated in Western art music during its modern era following the incorporation of electric sound production into compositional practice. The initial developments in electroacoustic music composition during the mid-20th century are associated with the activities of composers...

, and non-standard use of musical instruments
Extended technique
Extended techniques are performance techniques used in music to describe unconventional, unorthodox, or non-traditional techniques of singing, or of playing musical instruments to obtain unusual sounds or instrumental timbres....

, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance
Modern dance
Modern dance is a dance form developed in the early 20th century. Although the term Modern dance has also been applied to a category of 20th Century ballroom dances, Modern dance as a term usually refers to 20th century concert dance.-Intro:...

, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham
Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...

, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played.
Quotations

"Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

"The Future of Music: Credo" (1937)

I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)

A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

Forerunners of Modern Music (1949|1949), first published in the New York journal A Tiger's Eye, later collected in Silence.

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

1955, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

"Experimental Music" (1957)

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?

"Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures given in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence.

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, "You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through." I said, "Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall." I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.

Interview in Observer magazine (1982), repeated on several occasions

 
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