John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 to August 12, 1992)

On August 12, 1992 – 27 years ago today – the American composer, inventor, philosopher, facilitator, agent provocateur, shaman, clown, and guru, John Cage died in New York City at the age of 79.

Background. My May 14, 2019 Dr. Bob Prescribes post (which can be found on Patreon; if you’ve not yet subscribed, please do so!) featured the American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965). Cowell, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, was a musical polymath, a Universalist, a walking encyclopedia: someone who was as deeply knowledgeable of so-called “world music” (particularly central and east Asian music) as he was of Western art music and folk music.

Henry Cowell (1897-1965)

Cowell was a charismatic human dynamo, and a composer and teacher of genius, someone whose pioneering impact on the American musical community in the 1920s and 1930s was singular. Among the many young American musicians on whom Cowell had a decisive impact was a native Los Angelino and graduate of Los Angeles High School named John Milton Cage, Jr. According to Cage, Cowell was nothing less than “the open sesame for new music in America.”

Cage took Cowell’s teachings and beliefs about the universal, pan-cultural nature of music and sound to an entirely new level, and in doing so changed forever the way twentieth-century composers thought about music. 

(Pardon me a brief personal comment. To my adored East Coast academic colleagues who, upon reading the paragraph above, will only roll their eyes and shake their heads: I would remind you that Ivy League music departments and their offshoots across the U.S. constitute but a tiny part of the international musical and artistic community, which was in fact deeply – even profoundly – influenced by Cage during the mid and late-twentieth century. To my beloved readers who only know Cage from such works as 4’33” and assume that he was a charlatan, well, he was most certainly not, as even a cursory examination of his music for prepared piano will bear out. He was in fact a brilliant, personable, extremely funny man, someone who refused to live by any rules other than his own. Knowing Cage as I do, I’ve no doubt that if someone called him a “charlatan”, he’d put an index finger in the air, smile his big toothy grin, and say something on the lines of “Yes, but a charlatan of genius!”)

Cage as a young man

Despite some early piano lessons, Cage came to music relatively late in life, after having worked for a time as an architectural apprentice. Along with Henry Cowell, Cage’s most important composition teacher was – of all people – Arnold Schoenberg, who was teaching at U.C.L.A. when Cage studied with him and who Cage worshipped. In a lecture entitled “Indeterminacy”, Cage told this story:

“When Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, ‘Of course.’ After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle; that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’”

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)