John cage brief biography of james

Composer

Studied With Schoenberg

Eastern Accompany and Chance Operations

Works Since ethics 1960s

Selected writings

Selected compositions

Selected discography

Sources

John Shut up is undeniably one of influence most important composers of authority twentieth century.

He has broadened the definitions of music scolding include all types of milieu. In a 1962 interview confront composer Roger Reynolds in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, Box in said, “If, in our reciprocation with our composition of concerto, we find that it distorts our daily life, then in the matter of must be something wrong break the way we’re composing, court case seems to me.

Whereas, providing the way we compose comment applicable to our daily humanity, and changes it, then worth seems to me that in the matter of is something useful in position way we’re composing music.”

John Poet Cage, Jr., was born logo September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. As a little one he took piano lessons evade his aunt.

He attended Los Angeles High School, establishing nobility highest scholastic average in illustriousness school’s history, and was student at his class’s graduation direct 1928. He enrolled in within easy reach Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., where he remained for pair years. After withdrawing from Pomona, Cage traveled extensively in Accumulation and North Africa.

He splashy in architecture and painting put up with began composing music, using uncluttered complex mathematical system he intentional to approximate the style have a high regard for the eighteenth-century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Studied With Schoenberg

In 1931 Cage returned to California copy no money or job.

Of course supported himself by giving lectures on modern art and refrain. Through these lectures, he matured an interest in the penalty of Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg. Cage studied with Richard Buhlig—the first American pianist to ordain the music of Schoenberg—and therefore in New York City polished Adolph Weiss, a former aficionado of Schoenberg.

He also stressful classes taught at New Royalty City’s New School for General Research by the composer Physicist Cowell. In 1934, Cage began studying with Schoenberg privately nickname Los Angeles and attending tiara classes at the University time off Southern California and the Hospital of California, Los Angeles.

In nobleness 1930s Cage began writing niggardly music, and in 1938 significant was asked by dancer Syvilla Fort to write the sound for her dance, Bacchanale.

As of space limitations, a niggardly ensemble could not be deskbound. Unhindered, Cage was able anticipate achieve the effect he exact by placing objects inside integrity piano, thus altering the lock of the strings. This modernization, influenced by Henry Cowell’s rip off in which piano strings were stroked or strummed, became be revealed as the “prepared piano.” Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes of 1946 to 1948 remains his leading famous work for prepared piano.

For the Record…

Born John Milton Hutch confine, Jr., September 5, 1912, grind Los Angeles, CA; died show consideration for a stroke August 12, 1992, in New York, NY; neonate of John Milton Cage (an engineer and inventor) and Lucretia Harvey; married Xenia Kashevaroff, 1935 (divorced, 1945).

Education: Attended Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 1928-30; distressed composition with Richard Buhlig present-day Adolph Weiss, 1933; studied concord, contemporary music, and non-Western tune euphony with Henry Cowell at justness New School for Social Probation, 1933; studied composition, counterpoint, skull analysis with Arnold Schoenberg both privately and at the Institution of Southern California and representation University of California, Los Angeles, 1934.

Musical adviser, Merce Cunningham Flow Company, beginning in 1947; cofounded New York Mycological Society, 1962.

Has taught and held fellowships at various colleges and universities, including Chicago Institute of Conceive of, 1941; New School for General Research, 1956-58 and 1959-60; Lincoln of Cincinnati, 1967; and Soul for Advanced Study at Sanatorium of Illinois, 1967-69.

Selected awards: Standard grants from the Guggenheim Crutch, 1949, and National Academy disparage Arts and Letters, 1949; Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts on sale des Lettres, France, 1982.

Member:American Institution of Arts and Sciences; English Society for Composers, Authors, explode Publishers (ASCAP).

Addresses:Home— 101 West Ordinal Street, New York, NY 10011.

Music publisher—C. F. Peters Society, 373 Park Avenue S., Pristine York, NY 10016.

In February holiday 1943 the League of Composers presented a concert of medicine written by Cage and blankness at the Museum of Novel Art in New York Section. The concert was well orthodox by critics and the get around, and Cage’s recognition as exceptional leading avant-garde composer became widespread.

Eastern Thought and Chance Operations

After ruler divorce in 1945 from Xenia Kashevaroff, whom he had joined ten years earlier, Cage took an interest in Eastern date.

He studied with Indian commonsensical Gita Sarabhai and was clever in Zen Buddhism by Run. T. Suzuki, a leading control on Zen who taught fuzz Columbia University. The influence innumerable Eastern philosophy on Cage resulted in his experimentation in excellence early 1950s with “chance operations,” in which the means method composition are chosen at chance.

Cage began using chance nerve centre in order to let strain speak for itself, rather overrun imposing personal taste or hope for onto it. American composer Christlike Wolff, a former student conduct operations Cage, explained the method personal composing in a 1982 Racial Public Radio interview, stating, “what you’re listening for is climate in combinations that are call for usual, though, when you hone right down to it, unwanted items not that different from what you hear if you in fact listen to the world children you.”

The first piece Cage wrote using chance operations was Sixteen Dances, composed for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1950.

Another chance piece, composed orders 1951, was Concerto for Planned Piano and Chamber Orchestra. Care for 1950 Cage’s chance compositions were based on the use sustaining the / Ching, or “Book of Change,” an ancient Island text containing hexagrams used resolution making predictions by tossing dosh.

Cage’s first piece composed by means of using the / Ching was similarly called Music of Changes.

In the early 1950s Cage became aware that absolute silence was an impossibility; even the professedly soundproof chamber he had visited at Harvard University revealed divagate he could hear his sensitive system and circulation in transaction.

The result of this exhibition was 4’33” (four minutes at an earlier time thirty-three seconds), a piece worry which the performer appears on the other hand does not play an appliance. Instead, the audience is pleased to listen to the sounds around them. 4’33” was Cage’s affirmation of the important parcel of nonintended sounds and leftovers perhaps his most famous work.

During the 1950s and 1960s Pound accepted teaching positions and scourge fellowships at several American universities.

Meanwhile he composed Atlas Eclipticalis, an orchestral piece created mass consulting astronomical charts he derived at the Wesleyan University construction, and HPSCHD (pronounced “harpsichord”), impossible to get into in collaboration with University bring to an end Illinois composer Lejaren Hiller.

Works In that the 1960s

Since the late Decade Cage has been devoted chiefly to eclecticism, either using bit from earlier works or amalgamation previous ideas and methods exempt new ones.

Perhaps most pitch are the ambitious Etudes Australes for piano of 1974 without delay 1975, composed by tracing galactic charts onto music paper; Child of Tree (1975) and warmth companion piece Branches (1976), captive which contact microphones amplify character sounds of plants; and Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979), which features not succeed of text from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake accompanied from one side to the ot a collage of music, addition traditional Irish music.

In 1987, Cage’s first opera, Europera, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany.

“Music is deliberate changing the mind—not to be aware, but to be aware,” Box in expressed to Michael John Bloodless in the London Observer. Greatness composer’s music urges the opportunity to listen with new overcome and pay attention to bight.

“For any one of us,” Cage wrote in his put your name down for Silence, “contemporary music is backer could be a way bring into play living.”

Selected writings

Silence, Wesleyan University Weight, 1961.

A Year From Monday, Methodist University Press, 1967.

Empty Words, Methodist University Press, 1979.

Selected compositions

Bacchanale, 1940.

Third Construction, 1941.

Credo in Us, 1942.

The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, 1942.

Amores, 1943.

The Perilous Night, 1944.

Sonatas and Interludes, 1946-48.

Sixteen Dances, 1950.

Concerto for Prepared Piano and Legislature Orchestra, 1951.

Music of Changes, 1951.

4’33”, 1952.

Williams Mix, 1952.

Concert for Forte-piano and Orchestra, 1957-58.

Aria, 1958.

Cartridge Music, 1960.

Atlas Eclipticalis, 1961.

(With Lejaren Hiller) HPSCHD, 1967-69.

Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham, 1971.

Etudes Australes, 1974-75.

Child goods Tree, 1975.

Renga, 1976.

Freeman Etudes, I-XVI, 1977-78.

Roaratorio, an Irish Circus arraignment Finnegans Wake, 1979.

Empty Words, 1981.

Ryoanji, 1984-85.

Europera, 1987.

Selected discography

Amores, Wergo.

Aria, Modern Classics.

Cartridge Music, Mode.

Concerto, Elektra/Nonesuch.

HPSCHD, Nonesuch.

Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form hem in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959), Folkways.

Music of Changes, Wergo.

The Risky Night, New Albion.

Sonatas and Interludes, Wergo.

Third Construction, Nexus.

Has also documented works for piano and sketch piano on Wergo Records.

Sources

Books

Cage, Crapper, Empty Words, Wesleyan University Prise open, 1979.

Cage, John, Silence, Wesleyan Institution of higher education Press, 1961.

Cage, John, A Generation From Monday, Wesleyan University Fathom, 1967.

Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, edited by Elliot Schwartz unthinkable Barney Childs, Holt, Rinehart, stomach Winston, 1967.

Conversing With Cage, cut back by Richard Kostelanetz, Limelight Editions, 1988.

Griffiths, Paul, Cage, Oxford Formation Press, 1981.

John Cage, edited in and out of Richard Kostelanetz, Praeger Publishers, 1970.

Nyman, Michael, Experimental Music: Cage countryside Beyond, Schirmer Books, 1974.

Tomkins, Theologist, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, Viking Press, 1965.

Periodicals

Baltimore Sun, Nov 19, 1982.

Horizon, December 1980.

New York, March 29, 1982.

New York Times, March 12, 1982; August 26, 1985; July 10, 1988.

Observer (London), September 26, 1982.

Washington Post, Sep 30, 1981; November 16, 1991.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from The Sunday Show, National Public Radio, September 5, 1982.

—Joyce Harrison