Composer, pianist, and avant-garde musician, John Cage was a member of that rare breed of artists who invent their own artistic tradition. Philosophically linked to Dadaism, Futurism, and Zen Buddhism, his music amplified the unpredictable and accidental possibilities of sound, always...
[more]Composer, pianist, and avant-garde musician, John Cage was a member of that rare breed of artists who invent their own artistic tradition. Philosophically linked to Dadaism, Futurism, and Zen Buddhism, his music amplified the unpredictable and accidental
possibilities of sound, always provoking controversy along the way.
Cage once claimed that his major contribution to music was the elimination of harmony. In his quest for nonharmonic instruments, he focused on percussion, establishing an orchestra of drums and other traditional noise-makers from China and India. These experiments finally led to the development of his signature instrument, the "prepared piano," which featured screws, bolts, spoons, clothespins, aspirin boxes, a doll's arm, strips of felt, rubber, plastic, and leather. By eliminating all sounds of precise pitch, Cage produced atonal music that replaced the chromatic scale with a range of pings, plucks, and thuds. On albums like "Music for Amplified Toy Pianos" and "Water Music," Cage composed according to chance principles which he called "indeterminacy" or "unpredictability" (terms borrowed from quantum physics and statistical theory).
His novel compositions featured protracted silences, vocal repetitions, electronic distortions, haphazard tuning of radios, and the stuffing of pianos with impedimenta for varied percussive effects.
Eventually, these experiments led to multimedia collaborations with such artistic luminaries as the painter Jasper Johns and the musician Lejaren Hiller. With the latter, he created "HPSCHD," a utilization of numerous harpsichords, tapes, films, slides, and colored lights. Cage's most esoteric works include "Roaratorio," an electronic piece consisting of the thousands of sounds described in "Finnegans Wake," and "4'33," a performance in which the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a note.
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