John Cage
John Cage
1912 - 1992
American composer, philosopher, writer and printmaker. He was educated in California and then made a study tour of Europe (1930–31), concentrating on art, architecture and music. On his return to the USA he studied music with Richard Buhlig, Adolph Weiss, Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg; in 1934 he abandoned abstract painting for music. An interest in extending the existing range of percussion instruments led him, in 1940, to devise the ‘prepared piano’ (in which the sound is transformed by the insertion of various objects between the strings) and to pioneer electronic sound sources.
Cage’s studies of Zen Buddhism and Indian philosophy during the 1940s resulted in a decision to remove intention, memory and personal taste from music, based on the Oriental concern with process rather than result. According equal status to both structured sound and noise, he treated silence (the absence of intentional sounds) as an element in its own right. In the early 1950s he began his close collaboration with the pianist David Tudor and, with the composers Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, they worked on his Project of Music for Magnetic Tapes (1951–3). In the winter of 1950–51 Wolff gave Cage a copy of his father’s publication of the Yi jing (I Ching), the Chinese Book of Changes, which he used in his work thereafter as a source of ‘chance operations’ to obtain numerical values (for which Cage had earlier devised mathematical charts) that could be applied to any facet of musical or artistic composition. In the following year Cage produced his 4’33” (shortly after Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘white canvases’), in which the performer(s) make no sounds but only delineate the work’s three movements.
Also in 1952 Cage organized an untitled event at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE which foreshadowed the ‘happenings’ of the following decade and initiated an approach to performance in collaboration with the dancer and choreographer MERCE CUNNINGHAM, in which music and movement were conceived separately and performed simultaneously. Many later works make use of concurrent layers of independent musical or non-musical activities. Cage also pioneered aspects of live electronic music and offered the performer greater creative freedom.
Cage was influential not only as a composer but also as a thinker, profoundly influencing artists working in other media. He was a friend of visual artists such as Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Max Ernst, Richard Lippold, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Joan Miró and, in particular, Marcel Duchamp, and wrote about and collaborated with most of them. In his own scores after 1950 Cage frequently incorporated visual elements, such as superimpositions of transparent sheets covered with straight and curved lines, circles and dots; coloured wavy lines to represent melodic outlines; and graphlike notations. In some scores he determined the positioning of pitches on a more or less conventional staff by the superimposition of star charts, or he based it on observations of imperfections in the paper. During the 1950s Cage also worked for a time as art director for a textile company.
From 1949 Cage began to introduce new elements into the presentation of lectures, beginning with Lecture on Nothing, by juxtaposing passages of text and sometimes also of music with silences and physical gestures. This was extended in the mid-1960s by the exploratory use of non-syntactical texts and texts printed in a variety of different typefaces. From 1963 Cage developed a new poetic form that he called the ‘mesostic’, in which new words were formed vertically by highlighting one character within each line of the horizontal text. An example of this is the score of a composition for unaccompanied, amplified voice, 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971), which uses more than 700 different Letraset typefaces and sizes. A new visual element—the fragmentary drawings from nature scattered throughout Thoreau’s Journal—is included in the published text of Cage’s Empty Words and in the compositions Score (40 Drawings by Thoreau) and 23 Parts (1974) and Renga (1976; based on 361 paintings), for any instruments or voices.
Cage’s increasing involvement in the graphic presentation of his work also led him to create purely visual works that have no musical connections. These are largely in the form of limited editions, mostly carried out in the etching studio of Crown Point Press in Oakland, CA, where he created 28 series of prints in the course of fairly regular visits between 1978 and his death in 1992. The earliest such work was Not Wanting to Say Anything about Marcel (1969), produced in collaboration with Calvin Sumsion (b 1942). It consists of eight parts (referred to as plexigrams), each comprising a base in which eight parallel Perspex sheets are fitted; fragments of printed text and images are silkscreened on to the sheets. Cage’s etchings became increasingly complex as he used the Yi jing as a means of making formal decisions and of selecting a variety of printmaking techniques. In Changes and Disappearances (1979–82) up to 45 different, irregularly shaped etching plates were used in each of the 35 etchings, with the final print containing 298 colours. Until 1982 most of his prints included reproductions of drawings by Thoreau in whole or in part; thereafter his images were inspired by the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, as well as the shapes of stones and rocks. In 1982, as part of his 70th birthday celebrations, the exhibition John Cage: Scores and Prints was mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. [Hugh Davies. "Cage, John." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T012988.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
