By Nick Shave
On 29 August 1952, David Tudor sat down at the piano at the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York, set a stopwatch running and quietly lifted the lid. He then performed nothing for precisely four minutes and 33 seconds.
Or rather, he made no sound, only lifting and lowering the lid so as to signal the beginning and end of each movement. What the audience heard, then, was not the piano but the ambient sounds in the hall – of people shuffling, breathing, whispering – and the wind and the rain outside. Far from being silent, the premiere of John Cage’s 4’33” was full of noises, to be appreciated by anyone who cared to listen.
The beauty of 4'33" – the work for which Cage is best known and from which he continued to draw inspiration throughout his life – is that it can be interpreted on so many different levels: anarchic, democratic, playful, profound, absurd and, yes, ultimately beautiful, it challenges the very notion of what we perceive as ‘music’.
4'33": one of the purest examples of minimal music
Conceived at a time when, in Europe, influential composers such as Pierre Boulez were composing complex, tightly controlled musical structures, Cage’s silence smacks of a chaotic rebellion: it strips music back to nothingness in a way that opens the door to an appreciation of the infinite variety of sounds around us. As such, it is one of the earliest, and purest, examples of minimal music – by which the smallest means give rise to the maximal effects – that would soon find its various outgrowths in the works of composers such as La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass.
What Cage shared with these great American composers was an appreciation of non-western ways of listening, though his oeuvre is too varied to group him in with the minimalists. Rather, in the history
of music, John Cage follows in the footsteps of pioneers Henry Cowell (with whom Cage and his early collaborator Lou Harrison studied) and Charles Ives.
John Cage and the birth of the '60s-style 'happening'
As one of the great American experimentalists, Cage paved the way for Fluxus – a revolutionary artistic movement that thrived in downtown New York in the 1960s, where artists gathered in galleries for events, or so-called ‘happenings’, that broke down the boundaries between life and art.
Cage’s 1952 Black Mountain piece – an untitled event involving dance, poetry, music and the ‘White Paintings’ of Robert Rauschenberg that took place in the dining hall of Black Mountain College in North Carolina – is often referred to as the first '60s-style 'happening'.
Also a painter and writer, Cage worked across the arts. It was Rauschenberg’s series of modular canvases, painted entirely white to reflect changes in light and shadow in the surrounding space, that gave Cage the idea for 4'33". He was also friends with Jasper Johns and the sculptor Marcel Duchamp: just as Duchamp exhibited everyday ‘found’ objects, most famously showing how a urinal was ‘art’, so Johns exhibited the American flag in a series of iconic paintings. (Duchamp also taught Cage how to play chess – in the late 1960s they played a match in public using a specially constructed chessboard on which each move triggered different electronic compositions.)
John Cage and Merce Cunningham
Meanwhile, in the sphere of dance, it was Cage who inspired Merce Cunningham, one of the great choreographers of the 20th century, to start his own company: Cage toured with the company as composer, accompanist and music director, and from 1945 on the two were partners as much in life and love as in their work.
So how to summarise the musical achievements of a composer who so radically transformed the concept of music? It’s one the many conundrums that Cage’s work throws into the musicological mix. Some have attempted to characterise him as a theorist, as a composer primarily of ideas; but this does little justice to the musical voice that emerged during the first half of the 20th century.
When was John Cage born?
Born in Los Angeles in 1912 to an eccentric and brilliant inventor father and journalist mother, he took piano lessons from an early age. But he had no aspirations to become a composer. Rather, he initially followed his dreams of becoming a writer before travelling to Europe in 1930 to pursue his passion for painting and his interest in architecture and poetry.
After returning to the US the following year, Cage took up lessons first in New York – with Henry Cowell, in contemporary composition and non-western music – and then returned to Los Angeles to learn with
his idol, Arnold Schoenberg.
‘In all of my pieces between 1935 and ’40, I had Schoenberg’s lessons in mind’
With their rigorous focus on counterpoint, grounded in the Austro-German musical tradition, lessons became a source of frustration for Cage. According to Schoenberg, Cage had no feeling for harmony, and it’s true that Cage’s first love in music was percussion, but listen to the exotic- sounding gongs and drums of his 1940 Second Construction in Metal, for example, and you’ll also hear a novel take on the fugue. As Cage himself later said: ‘In all of my pieces between 1935 and ’40, I had Schoenberg’s lessons in mind.’
What interested Cage was the aesthetic qualities of sound itself, the pleasing noises he could produce from the things he found in the kitchen or picked out of a scrapyard. In the ’40s, and inspired by the extended techniques of Cowell, who would reach inside the piano to pluck and thrumb the strings themselves, Cage began to explore the musical possibilities of the prepared piano, attaching everyday household items – nails, screws, bits of rubber and plastic – to the strings. The result was a kind of one- man percussion section.
His music now took on a meditative, static quality
Originally conceived in 1938 as a space-saving exercise for his six-minute dance piece Bacchanale, Cage’s prepared piano opened up new soundworlds and gave his early works a subdued, exotic character, similar to the sound of Indonesian gamelan. Without the goal-orientated structures
of harmony – and the gravitational pull of one key leading to the next – his compositions such as Music for Marcel Duchamp (1947) took on a meditative, static quality, one he would return to in his late
works, the Number Pieces (1987-92).
Cage and a relay team of pianists revisited Satie's Vexations in 1963. It took them nearly 19 hours to perform
Cage was not, of course, the first western composer to take an idiosyncratic approach to musical time, nor to appreciate the quietly subversive nature of ambient music. Long before 4'33", Erik Satie had promoted the idea of ‘furniture’ music – his 1893 Vexations, featuring four phrases to be repeated 840 times, was revived by Cage with a relay team of pianists in Manhattan in 1963. It took them 18 hours and 40 minutes to perform.
- Six of the best: Satie works
- 'His music could have come from another planet': how French composer Erik Satie liberated music
John Cage and electronic music
Meanwhile, that other French maverick Varèse had ushered noise into the concert hall: you’ll hear the sounds of Manhattan – its honking foghorns and wailing sirens – in his 1920s masterpiece Amériques.
And following in the footsteps of Varèse, Cage’s delight in the endless possibilities of ‘organised sound’ would lead him into the world of electronic music.
Cage arrived at a concept of music as ‘a way of waking up to the very life we’re living’
You’ll find him employing 12 radios (24 performers and a conductor) in Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951); 42 phonograph records in Imaginary Landscape No. 5 (1952); and a collage of thousands of pre-recorded tape fragments in Williams Mix (1952).
But Cage arrived at his concept of music as ‘a way of waking up to the very life we’re living’ via his immersion in eastern philosophy. In the late 1940s he embarked on a cultural exchange with
the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai: he gave her lessons in counterpoint and she taught him about Indian music.
For Sarabhai, music offered a way to ‘sober and quiet the mind, making it susceptible to divine influences’. Cage embraced this principle with impressive results in his late-1940s Sonatas and Interludes, a cycle for prepared piano consisting of 16 sonatas and four more freely structured interludes.
John Cage and Buddhism
Another formative influence on Cage was Zen Buddhism. Inspired by the lectures of philosopher Daisetz T Suzuki, he would consult the I Ching to make decisions about what went where in his works – such as in his 1951 Concerto for Prepared Piano, for example, or in the Music of Changes, a 43-minute piece for solo piano.
That Music of Changes took Cage the best part of a year to write highlights another irony that runs through his career: the more he attempts to free himself from the act of composition, the more exacting and rigorous he becomes in his methods. With their detailed instructions, Cage’s scores become works of art in themselves – not only challenging to decipher but fiendishly difficult to play.
This is music that demands extraordinary patience
Look at the 1974-5 Etudes Australes for solo piano, in which the notes have been discovered through consulting star charts and the I Ching: with its duets for independent hands, reaching across the entire keyboard, the performer has to adopt a specific technique and even to sit in a certain way. Far from laissez-faire chaos, then, this is music that demands extraordinary patience on the part of those who attempt to play it, and a sign of just how much Cage wants us to listen.
John Cage: a style guide
Here are five key elements to the John Cage soundworld.
Chance
Using complex methodology, Cage found different ways to generate numbers that could be translated
into his music and art. Whether using the I Ching, tossing coins or using a specially written computer program, his basic aim was always the same: to remove his intention from the work, so as to produce something that more closely resembles an act of nature.
Avant-garde
If ever a composer challenged and critiqued the aesthetic conventions of the time, it was John Cage. Notions of instrumentation, performance, composition, music itself: all were scrutinised and redefined. His influence is far-reaching – felt across movements from Neo-Dada to Fluxus to Conceptual art.
Interdisciplinary
Whether working in dance, music, painting, writing or printmaking, Cage moved across the arts, forming collaborations with artists such Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, so as to interrogate the boundaries between them.
Electroacoustic
In the 1940s, Cage created works out of randomly assembled snippets of audiotape.
In 1951, he organised the Project of Music for Magnetic Tape, working with Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman and David Tudor to explore the possibilities of the new electronic medium. Later, he worked with contact microphones, and electronic circuits among other devices – Brian Eno and
Aphex Twin are among the electronic composers who have paid homage to him in their work.
A John Cage timeline
1912 John Cage is born on 5 September in Los Angeles to John Cage Snr, an inventor, and Lucretia Harvey, a journalist. He is taught the piano from a young age.
1935 He joins a course on music analysis given by Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he goes
on to study for two years and whom he later describes as ‘marvellous, indescribable as a musician’.
1965 With his fame on the rise since the publication of his book Silence, Cage receives a new annual grant for living expenses, set up by philanthropist Betty Freeman.
1992 Following a long period of ill health, he suffers a stroke while making tea for himself and partner Merce Cunningham at home in New York. He dies the next day, aged 79.