John
Cage was an American composer (September 5, 1912-
August 12, 1992) who
played a great part in experimental music. He was one of the leading
figures of post-war avant-garde, because of his innovative approach
of music.
In
1943, he gave a crucial concert with his percussion ensemble at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which marked the first step in
his emergence as a leader of the American musical avant-garde. From
this moment onwards, he has been considered by many as one of the
most influential American composers of the 20th
century, being the father of a whole generation of experimental
musicians, not only in the USA but also all over the world. Under
his influence, young composers felt free to dispense with
presuppositions about what music is and must be. John Cage has also
spread the belief that music must be seen as part of a single natural
process (the so-called “aleatoric
music”),
an idea that his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism
brought him.
A
well-known example of his broadened conception of music is the
“prepared-piano”:
a
piano with its sounds altered by household objects placed between or
on its strings and hammers. With the help of this piano technique, he
wrote several dance-related works (the most famous being Sonatas
and Interludes) and
was in
this sense involved in the development of modern dance as well.
Tim Oven plays John Cage - Sonata IV for prepared piano
A
further innovation is his silent composition 4’33’’
(1952)
which has been afterwards regarded as his most famous work. John Cage
regarded all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he
encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than
only those elements selected by a composer. In 4’33’’, there
are no other sounds than those produced by the audience, the
musicians only have a figurative function; they do not play at all.
This composition inspired him his influential book about music theory
“Silence”.
Indeterminism
was the main principle that he cultivated in his music. He used a
number of devices to ensure randomness and thus eliminate any element
of personal taste on the part of the performer: unspecified
instruments and numbers of performers, freedom of duration of sounds
and entire pieces, inexact notation...
Charlotte Hubert and Sarah Guillaume
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