![]() ![]() ![]() Much of Cage’s writing was composed within a prose poem form he called “mesostic” (similar to acrostic, but led by middle rather than initial letters). PBS, in a feature on Cage for their American Masters series, described the ambition of Cage’s 4'33", in which the performer sits before a piano for four and a half minutes without playing a note: “Cage broke from the history of classical composition and proposed that the primary act of musical performance was not making music, but listening.”īeginning with Silence (1961) and A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967), Cage used writing to pursue his investigations into the structure of syntax and chance. Influenced by the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, the design of Buckminster Fuller, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cage created inventive, nonintentional musical compositions with unorthodox musical sources, which often utilized elements of chance involving computer programs or the I Ching. Beginning in 1942, Cage lived primarily in New York. Though Cage invented the “prepared piano,” a piano with carefully altered strings, at Cornish, it was at Black Mountain College that he staged the first of his infamous “happenings” with Cunningham, painter Robert Rauschenberg, and poet Charles Olson. Cage met his lifelong partner and collaborator, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, while teaching at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. He grew up in Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Los Angeles and was educated at Pomona College and the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied with classical composer Arnold Schoenberg. Born in Los Angeles, prolific avant-garde composer, writer, and artist John Cage was the son of an inventor and a Los Angeles Times society writer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |