Fannie Charles Dillon (March 16, 1881 – February 21, 1947) was an American pianist , music educator and composer .
146-398: John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist . A pioneer of indeterminacy in music , electroacoustic music , and non-standard use of musical instruments , Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde . Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in
292-551: A Guggenheim Fellowship . After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall , New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation , which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez . More important was Cage's chance encounter with Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a New York Philharmonic concert, where
438-487: A European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography. Among his works completed during the last years of the decade were Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation , and Variations I (1958). Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its music department from
584-401: A collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a wide variety of subjects, including the famous Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complex time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book of six but it remains his most widely read and influential. In the early 1960s Cage began his lifelong association with C.F. Peters Corporation . Walter Hinrichsen,
730-404: A composer. The vow Cage gave, to dedicate his life to music, was apparently still important some 40 years later, when Cage "had no need for it [i.e. writing music]", he continued composing partly because of the promise he gave. Schoenberg's methods and their influence on Cage are well documented by Cage himself in various lectures and writings. Particularly well-known is the conversation mentioned in
876-464: A computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the I Ching . Despite the fame Sonatas and Interludes earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on Music of Changes , he prepared
1022-454: A copy of the I Ching —a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is commonly used for divination , but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance. To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask
1168-604: A distance from actual musical practice. But this medieval discipline became the basis for tuning systems in later centuries and is generally included in modern scholarship on the history of music theory. Music theory as a practical discipline encompasses the methods and concepts that composers and other musicians use in creating and performing music. The development, preservation, and transmission of music theory in this sense may be found in oral and written music-making traditions, musical instruments , and other artifacts . For example, ancient instruments from prehistoric sites around
1314-505: A given meter. Syncopated rhythms contradict those conventions by accenting unexpected parts of the beat. Playing simultaneous rhythms in more than one time signature is called polyrhythm . In recent years, rhythm and meter have become an important area of research among music scholars. The most highly cited of these recent scholars are Maury Yeston , Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff , Jonathan Kramer , and Justin London. A melody
1460-650: A greater or lesser degree. Context and many other aspects can affect apparent dissonance and consonance. For example, in a Debussy prelude, a major second may sound stable and consonant, while the same interval may sound dissonant in a Bach fugue. In the Common practice era , the perfect fourth is considered dissonant when not supported by a lower third or fifth. Since the early 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg 's concept of "emancipated" dissonance, in which traditionally dissonant intervals can be treated as "higher," more remote consonances, has become more widely accepted. Rhythm
1606-488: A job washing walls at a YWCA (World Young Women's Christian Association) in Brooklyn . Cage's routine during that period was apparently very tiring, with just four hours of sleep on most nights, and four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. Several months later, still in 1933, Cage became sufficiently good at composition to approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it,
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#17327722275691752-486: A large space who were all to commence and stop playing at two particular time periods, with instructions on when to play individually or in groups within these two periods. The result was a mass superimposition of many different musics on top of one another as determined by chance distribution, producing an event with a specifically theatric feel. Many Musicircuses have subsequently been held, and continue to occur even after Cage's death. The English National Opera (ENO) became
1898-609: A living partly by giving small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know various important figures of the Southern California art world, such as Richard Buhlig (who became his first composition teacher) and arts patron Galka Scheyer . By 1933, Cage decided to concentrate on music rather than painting. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings", Cage later explained. In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell;
2044-455: A major change in Cage's music: he turned again to writing fully notated works for traditional instruments, and tried out several new approaches, such as improvisation , which he previously discouraged, but was able to use in works from the 1970s, such as Child of Tree (1975). Cheap Imitation became the last work Cage performed in public himself. Arthritis had troubled Cage since 1960, and by
2190-432: A part of these performances refused to participate, citing the impossibility of the requests Cage was making. Days before Europas 1 & 2 were to be premiered, Frankfurt's opera house burned down, setting into motion a series of setbacks leading to a theatrical run met with mixed reactions, including a performance so bad that Cage penned a letter to his musicians criticizing their interpretation of his composition. In
2336-723: A particular composition. During the Baroque period, emotional associations with specific keys, known as the doctrine of the affections , were an important topic in music theory, but the unique tonal colorings of keys that gave rise to that doctrine were largely erased with the adoption of equal temperament. However, many musicians continue to feel that certain keys are more appropriate to certain emotions than others. Indian classical music theory continues to strongly associate keys with emotional states, times of day, and other extra-musical concepts and notably, does not employ equal temperament. Consonance and dissonance are subjective qualities of
2482-442: A personal work, one in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation lies outside of what may seem necessary in my work in general, and that's disturbing. I'm the first to be disturbed by it." Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording—a rare occurrence, since Cage disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Overall, Cheap Imitation marked
2628-531: A pianist, teacher, performer and composer in Los Angeles . She taught at Pomona College from 1910 to 1913 and in the Los Angeles high school system from 1918 to 1941. She founded Woodland Theater at Fawnskin , Big Bear Lake , California, in 1924 and served as its general manager from 1926 to 1929. She married Cypriot theater actor James Christo. Dillon died in Altadena, California . Her papers are stored by
2774-488: A pipe, he found its sound agreeable and named it huangzhong , the "Yellow Bell." He then heard phoenixes singing. The male and female phoenix each sang six tones. Ling Lun cut his bamboo pipes to match the pitches of the phoenixes, producing twelve pitch pipes in two sets: six from the male phoenix and six from the female: these were called the lülü or later the shierlü . Apart from technical and structural aspects, ancient Chinese music theory also discusses topics such as
2920-505: A popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. These include Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48). Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964),
3066-472: A potted history of canonical classics, with 52 tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6,400 slides of designs, many supplied by NASA , and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with 40 motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois in 1969, in which the audience arrived after the piece had begun and left before it ended, wandering freely around
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#17327722275693212-512: A science of sounds". One must deduce that music theory exists in all musical cultures of the world. Music theory is often concerned with abstract musical aspects such as tuning and tonal systems, scales , consonance and dissonance , and rhythmic relationships. There is also a body of theory concerning practical aspects, such as the creation or the performance of music, orchestration , ornamentation , improvisation, and electronic sound production. A person who researches or teaches music theory
3358-458: A set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death. Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures and performances, etc. In 1952–1953 he completed another mammoth project—the Williams Mix , a piece of tape music , which Earle Brown and Morton Feldman helped to put together. Also in 1952, Cage composed
3504-649: A shared interest in percussion and dance and would likely hit it off if introduced to one another. Indeed, the two immediately established a strong bond upon meeting and began a working relationship that continued for several years. Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty member position at Mills College , teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl . Several famous dance groups were present, and Cage's interest in modern dance grew further. After several months he left and moved to Seattle , Washington, where he found work as composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at
3650-1000: A single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action", and in the first performance the disciplined action was Cage writing that sentence. The score of Variations III (1962) abounds in instructions to the performers, but makes no references to music, musical instruments, or sounds. Many of the Variations and other 1960s pieces were in fact " happenings ", an art form established by Cage and his students in late 1950s. Cage's "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School have become legendary as an American source of Fluxus , an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The majority of his students had little or no background in music. Most were artists. They included Jackson Mac Low , Allan Kaprow , Al Hansen , George Brecht , Ben Patterson , and Dick Higgins , as well as many others Cage invited unofficially. Famous pieces that resulted from
3796-524: A song for voice and closed piano, in which two sets of proportions are used simultaneously. In late 1940s, Cage started developing further methods of breaking away with traditional harmony. For instance, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950) Cage first composed a number of gamuts : chords with fixed instrumentation. The piece progresses from one gamut to another. In each instance the gamut
3942-478: A substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, already breaking up during the early 1940s, ended in divorce in 1945. Cunningham remained Cage's partner for the rest of his life. Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano:
4088-779: A surging or "pushed" attack, or fortepiano ( fp ) for a loud attack with a sudden decrease to a soft level. The full span of these markings usually range from a nearly inaudible pianissississimo ( pppp ) to a loud-as-possible fortissississimo ( ffff ). Greater extremes of pppppp and fffff and nuances such as p+ or più piano are sometimes found. Other systems of indicating volume are also used in both notation and analysis: dB (decibels), numerical scales, colored or different sized notes, words in languages other than Italian, and symbols such as those for progressively increasing volume ( crescendo ) or decreasing volume ( diminuendo or decrescendo ), often called " hairpins " when indicated with diverging or converging lines as shown in
4234-490: A technique that placed the rhythmic structure of the piece into the foreground. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939) there are four large sections of 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars, and each section is divided into four subsections, the first three of which were all 5 bars long. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expands on the concept: there are five sections of 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units respectively. Each unit contains 16 bars, and
4380-469: A theoretical nature, mainly lists of intervals and tunings . The scholar Sam Mirelman reports that the earliest of these texts dates from before 1500 BCE, a millennium earlier than surviving evidence from any other culture of comparable musical thought. Further, "All the Mesopotamian texts [about music] are united by the use of a terminology for music that, according to the approximate dating of
4526-457: A tone comprises. Timbre is principally determined by two things: (1) the relative balance of overtones produced by a given instrument due its construction (e.g. shape, material), and (2) the envelope of the sound (including changes in the overtone structure over time). Timbre varies widely between different instruments, voices, and to lesser degree, between instruments of the same type due to variations in their construction, and significantly,
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4672-678: A tradition of other treatises, which are cited regularly just as scholarly writing cites earlier research. In modern academia, music theory is a subfield of musicology , the wider study of musical cultures and history. Guido Adler , however, in one of the texts that founded musicology in the late 19th century, wrote that "the science of music originated at the same time as the art of sounds". , where "the science of music" ( Musikwissenschaft ) obviously meant "music theory". Adler added that music only could exist when one began measuring pitches and comparing them to each other. He concluded that "all people for which one can speak of an art of sounds also have
4818-477: A way of waking up to the very life we're living". Cage's best known work is the 1952 composition 4′33″ , a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who perform the work do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it
4964-399: Is a balance between "tense" and "relaxed" moments. Timbre, sometimes called "color", or "tone color," is the principal phenomenon that allows us to distinguish one instrument from another when both play at the same pitch and volume, a quality of a voice or instrument often described in terms like bright, dull, shrill, etc. It is of considerable interest in music theory, especially because it
5110-410: Is a group of musical sounds in agreeable succession or arrangement. Because melody is such a prominent aspect in so much music, its construction and other qualities are a primary interest of music theory. The basic elements of melody are pitch, duration, rhythm, and tempo. The tones of a melody are usually drawn from pitch systems such as scales or modes . Melody may consist, to increasing degree, of
5256-799: Is a music theorist. University study, typically to the MA or PhD level, is required to teach as a tenure-track music theorist in a US or Canadian university. Methods of analysis include mathematics, graphic analysis, and especially analysis enabled by western music notation. Comparative, descriptive, statistical, and other methods are also used. Music theory textbooks , especially in the United States of America, often include elements of musical acoustics , considerations of musical notation , and techniques of tonal composition ( harmony and counterpoint ), among other topics. Several surviving Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets include musical information of
5402-622: Is a short lively piece that ends abruptly, while "Crete" is a slightly longer, mostly melodic contrapuntal work. Cage's first experiences with music were from private piano teachers in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, particularly his aunt Phoebe Harvey James who introduced him to the piano music of the 19th century. He received first piano lessons when he was in the fourth grade at school, but although he liked music, he expressed more interest in sight reading than in developing virtuoso piano technique, and apparently
5548-453: Is an additional chord member that creates a relatively dissonant interval in relation to the bass. It is part of a chord, but is not one of the chord tones (1 3 5 7). Typically, in the classical common practice period a dissonant chord (chord with tension) "resolves" to a consonant chord. Harmonization usually sounds pleasant to the ear when there is a balance between the consonant and dissonant sounds. In simple words, that occurs when there
5694-402: Is called an interval . The most basic interval is the unison , which is simply two notes of the same pitch. The octave interval is two pitches that are either double or half the frequency of one another. The unique characteristics of octaves gave rise to the concept of pitch class : pitches of the same letter name that occur in different octaves may be grouped into a single "class" by ignoring
5840-464: Is common in folk music and blues . Non-Western cultures often use scales that do not correspond with an equally divided twelve-tone division of the octave. For example, classical Ottoman , Persian , Indian and Arabic musical systems often make use of multiples of quarter tones (half the size of a semitone, as the name indicates), for instance in 'neutral' seconds (three quarter tones) or 'neutral' thirds (seven quarter tones)—they do not normally use
5986-591: Is derived from the Greek music scale, and that Arabic music is connected to certain features of Arabic culture, such as astrology. Music is composed of aural phenomena; "music theory" considers how those phenomena apply in music. Music theory considers melody, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, form, tonal systems, scales, tuning, intervals, consonance, dissonance, durational proportions, the acoustics of pitch systems, composition, performance, orchestration, ornamentation, improvisation, electronic sound production, etc. Pitch
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6132-482: Is divided the same way: 4 bars, 3 bars, 2 bars, etc. Finally, the musical content of the piece is based on sixteen motives. Such "nested proportions", as Cage called them, became a regular feature of his music throughout the 1940s. The technique was elevated to great complexity in later pieces such as Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), in which many proportions used non-integer numbers (1¼, ¾, 1¼, ¾, 1½, and 1½ for Sonata I , for example), or A Flower ,
6278-463: Is not only the fire he has set aside for so long—the fire of passion—but also fire as transitoriness and fragility." On August 11, 1992, while preparing evening tea for himself and Cunningham, Cage had another stroke. He was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where he died on the morning of August 12. He was 79. According to his wishes, Cage's body was cremated and his ashes scattered in
6424-419: Is often referred to as "separated" or "detached" rather than having a defined or numbered amount by which to reduce the notated duration. Violin players use a variety of techniques to perform different qualities of staccato. The manner in which a performer decides to execute a given articulation is usually based on the context of the piece or phrase, but many articulation symbols and verbal instructions depend on
6570-427: Is one component of music that has as yet, no standardized nomenclature. It has been called "... the psychoacoustician's multidimensional waste-basket category for everything that cannot be labeled pitch or loudness," but can be accurately described and analyzed by Fourier analysis and other methods because it results from the combination of all sound frequencies , attack and release envelopes, and other qualities that
6716-521: Is produced by the sequential arrangement of sounds and silences in time. Meter measures music in regular pulse groupings, called measures or bars . The time signature or meter signature specifies how many beats are in a measure, and which value of written note is counted or felt as a single beat. Through increased stress, or variations in duration or articulation, particular tones may be accented. There are conventions in most musical traditions for regular and hierarchical accentuation of beats to reinforce
6862-554: Is the lowness or highness of a tone , for example the difference between middle C and a higher C. The frequency of the sound waves producing a pitch can be measured precisely, but the perception of pitch is more complex because single notes from natural sources are usually a complex mix of many frequencies. Accordingly, theorists often describe pitch as a subjective sensation rather than an objective measurement of sound. Specific frequencies are often assigned letter names. Today most orchestras assign concert A (the A above middle C on
7008-407: Is the study of theoretical frameworks for understanding the practices and possibilities of music . The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the " rudiments ", that are needed to understand music notation ( key signatures , time signatures , and rhythmic notation ); the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to
7154-605: The Cornish College of the Arts . The Cornish School years proved to be a particularly important period in Cage's life. Aside from teaching and working as accompanist, Cage organized a percussion ensemble that toured the West Coast and brought the composer his first fame. His reputation was enhanced further with the invention of the prepared piano—a piano which has had its sound altered by objects placed on, beneath or between
7300-408: The I Ching was far from simple randomization. The procedures varied from composition to composition, and were usually complex. For example, in the case of Cheap Imitation , the exact questions asked to the I Ching were these: In another example of late music by Cage, Etudes Australes , the compositional procedure involved placing a transparent strip on the star chart, identifying the pitches from
7446-464: The I Ching ; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation". His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will: When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic,
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#17327722275697592-452: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) , Guggenheim withdrew all support, and, even after the ultimately successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed and penniless. The commissions he hoped for did not happen. He and Xenia spent the summer of 1942 with dancer Jean Erdman and her husband Joseph Campbell . Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing
7738-772: The Ramapo Mountains , near Stony Point , New York, at the same place where he had scattered the ashes of his parents. The composer's death occurred only weeks before a celebration of his 80th birthday organized in Frankfurt by composer Walter Zimmermann and musicologist Stefan Schaedler. The event went ahead as planned, including a performance of the Concert for Piano and Orchestra by David Tudor and Ensemble Modern . Merce Cunningham died of natural causes in July 2009. Cage's first completed pieces have been lost. According to
7884-508: The University of Chicago . At one point, his reputation as percussion composer landed him a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a soundtrack for a radio play by Kenneth Patchen . The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat , was received well, and Cage deduced that more important commissions would follow. Hoping to find these, he left Chicago for New York City in the spring of 1942. In New York,
8030-572: The "horizontal" aspect. Counterpoint , which refers to the interweaving of melodic lines, and polyphony , which refers to the relationship of separate independent voices, is thus sometimes distinguished from harmony. In popular and jazz harmony , chords are named by their root plus various terms and characters indicating their qualities. For example, a lead sheet may indicate chords such as C major, D minor, and G dominant seventh. In many types of music, notably Baroque, Romantic, modern, and jazz, chords are often augmented with "tensions". A tension
8176-591: The 1950s until his death in 1992. At the university, the philosopher, poet, and professor of classics Norman O. Brown befriended Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. In 1960 the composer was appointed a fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wesleyan, where he started teaching classes in experimental music. In October 1961, Wesleyan University Press published Silence ,
8322-559: The 1958 lecture Indeterminacy : 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." Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years, but although he admired his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told
8468-588: The Cages first stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim . Through them, Cage met important artists such as Piet Mondrian , André Breton , Jackson Pollock , and Marcel Duchamp , and many others. Guggenheim was very supportive: the Cages could stay with her and Ernst for any length of time, and she offered to organize a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After she learned that Cage secured another concert, at
8614-470: The University of California, Los Angeles. He produced music for choreographies and at one point taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA, with his aunt Phoebe. It was during that time that Cage first started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and so on. This was inspired by Oskar Fischinger , who told Cage that "everything in
8760-709: The Western tradition. During the thirteenth century, a new rhythm system called mensural notation grew out of an earlier, more limited method of notating rhythms in terms of fixed repetitive patterns, the so-called rhythmic modes, which were developed in France around 1200. An early form of mensural notation was first described and codified in the treatise Ars cantus mensurabilis ("The art of measured chant") by Franco of Cologne (c. 1280). Mensural notation used different note shapes to specify different durations, allowing scribes to capture rhythms which varied instead of repeating
8906-418: The accidentals, clefs, and playing techniques. A whole series of works was created by applying chance operations, i.e. the I Ching , to star charts : Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), and a series of etudes: Etudes Australes (1974–75), Freeman Etudes (1977–90), and Etudes Boreales (1978). Cage's etudes are all extremely difficult to perform, a characteristic dictated by Cage's social and political views:
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#17327722275699052-523: The assembled students that he was trying to make it impossible for them to write music. Much later, Cage recounted the incident: "... When he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music." Although Schoenberg was not impressed with Cage's compositional abilities during these two years, in a later interview, where he initially said that none of his American pupils were interesting, he further stated in reference to Cage: "There
9198-409: The auditorium in the time for which they were there. Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie 's Socrate , and, as both listeners and Cage himself noted, openly sympathetic to its source. Although Cage's affection for Satie's music was well-known, it was highly unusual for him to compose
9344-460: The chart, transferring them to paper, then asking the I Ching which of these pitches were to remain single, and which should become parts of aggregates (chords), and the aggregates were selected from a table of some 550 possible aggregates, compiled beforehand. Finally, some of Cage's works, particularly those completed during the 1960s, feature instructions to the performer, rather than fully notated music. The score of Variations I (1958) presents
9490-470: The chord C major may be described as a triad of major quality built on the note C . Chords may also be classified by inversion , the order in which the notes are stacked. A series of chords is called a chord progression . Although any chord may in principle be followed by any other chord, certain patterns of chords have been accepted as establishing key in common-practice harmony . To describe this, chords are numbered, using Roman numerals (upward from
9636-425: The classes include George Brecht's Time Table Music and Al Hansen's Alice Denham in 48 Seconds . As set forth by Cage, happenings were theatrical events that abandon the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration. Instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest
9782-424: The composer's part–requiring two full-time assistants and two computers humming day and night." These pieces caused quite a stir in the world of opera at the time with their unconventional methods for staging and sequencing. Many standard pieces of operatic repertoire were used, but not in any preset order; rather, they were selected by chance, meaning no two performances were exactly alike. Many of those who were to be
9928-500: The composer, the earliest works were very short pieces for piano, composed using complex mathematical procedures and lacking in "sensual appeal and expressive power." Cage then started producing pieces by improvising and writing down the results, until Richard Buhlig stressed to him the importance of structure. Most works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), are highly chromatic and betray Cage's interest in counterpoint . Around
10074-514: The concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and real life. The term "happenings" was coined by Allan Kaprow, one of his students, who defined it as a genre in the late fifties. Cage met Kaprow while on a mushroom hunt with George Segal and invited him to join his class. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud 's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double , and
10220-497: The course of the 1980s, Cage's health worsened progressively. He suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis . He had a stroke that left the movement of his left leg restricted, and, in 1985, broke an arm. During this time, Cage pursued a macrobiotic diet . Nevertheless, ever since arthritis started plaguing him, the composer was aware of his age, and, as biographer David Revill observed, "the fire which he began to incorporate in his visual work in 1985
10366-444: The development of modern dance , mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham , who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures . Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in
10512-402: The difference in octave. For example, a high C and a low C are members of the same pitch class—the class that contains all C's. Musical tuning systems, or temperaments, determine the precise size of intervals. Tuning systems vary widely within and between world cultures. In Western culture , there have long been several competing tuning systems, all with different qualities. Internationally,
10658-562: The difficulty would ensure that "a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible"—this being Cage's answer to the notion that solving the world's political and social problems is impossible. Cage described himself as an anarchist, and was influenced by Henry David Thoreau . Another series of works applied chance procedures to pre-existing music by other composers: Cheap Imitation (1969; based on Erik Satie), Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978; based on Belcher ), and Hymns and Variations (1979). In these works, Cage would borrow
10804-481: The early 1970s his hands were painfully swollen and rendered him unable to perform. Nevertheless, he still played Cheap Imitation during the 1970s, before finally having to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts also became difficult: before, published versions of pieces were done in Cage's calligraphic script; now, manuscripts for publication had to be completed by assistants. Matters were complicated further by David Tudor's departure from performing, which happened in
10950-471: The early 1970s. Tudor decided to concentrate on composition instead, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, had to start relying on commissions from other performers, and their respective abilities. Such performers included Grete Sultan , Paul Zukofsky , Margaret Leng Tan , and many others. Aside from music, Cage continued writing books of prose and poetry ( mesostics ). M was first published by Wesleyan University Press in 1973. In January 1978 Cage
11096-427: The era yet also his absorption of the writings of both Marshall McLuhan , on the effects of new media, and R. Buckminster Fuller , on the power of technology to promote social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller , incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and
11242-457: The ever-expanding conception of what constitutes music , a more inclusive definition could be the consideration of any sonic phenomena, including silence. This is not an absolute guideline, however; for example, the study of "music" in the Quadrivium liberal arts university curriculum, that was common in medieval Europe , was an abstract system of proportions that was carefully studied at
11388-657: The figure, motive, semi-phrase, antecedent and consequent phrase, and period or sentence. The period may be considered the complete melody, however some examples combine two periods, or use other combinations of constituents to create larger form melodies. A chord, in music, is any harmonic set of three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously . These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may, for many practical and theoretical purposes, constitute chords. Chords and sequences of chords are frequently used in modern Western, West African, and Oceanian music, whereas they are absent from
11534-491: The first " happening " (see discussion below) in the United States, later titled Theatre Piece No. 1 , a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that "that would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices". In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor. From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for
11680-616: The first opera company to hold a Cage Musicircus on March 3, 2012, at the London Coliseum . The ENO's Musicircus featured artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO music director Edward Gardner , the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and a collective of professional and amateur talents performing in the bars and front of house at London's Coliseum Opera House. Music theorist Music theory
11826-521: The first type (technical manuals) include More philosophical treatises of the second type include The pipa instrument carried with it a theory of musical modes that subsequently led to the Sui and Tang theory of 84 musical modes. Medieval Arabic music theorists include: The Latin treatise De institutione musica by the Roman philosopher Boethius (written c. 500, translated as Fundamentals of Music )
11972-406: The graphic above. Articulation is the way the performer sounds notes. For example, staccato is the shortening of duration compared to the written note value, legato performs the notes in a smoothly joined sequence with no separation. Articulation is often described rather than quantified, therefore there is room to interpret how to execute precisely each articulation. For example, staccato
12118-1002: The greatest music had no sounds. [...] Even the music of the qin zither , a genre closely affiliated with Confucian scholar-officials, includes many works with Daoist references, such as Tianfeng huanpei ("Heavenly Breeze and Sounds of Jade Pendants"). The Samaveda and Yajurveda (c. 1200 – 1000 BCE) are among the earliest testimonies of Indian music, but properly speaking, they contain no theory. The Natya Shastra , written between 200 BCE to 200 CE, discusses intervals ( Śrutis ), scales ( Grāmas ), consonances and dissonances, classes of melodic structure ( Mūrchanās , modes?), melodic types ( Jātis ), instruments, etc. Early preserved Greek writings on music theory include two types of works: Several names of theorists are known before these works, including Pythagoras ( c. 570 ~ c. 495 BCE ), Philolaus ( c. 470 ~ ( c. 385 BCE ), Archytas (428–347 BCE ), and others. Works of
12264-434: The happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement. In October 1960, Mary Bauermeister 's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and the video artist Nam June Paik (Cage's friend and mentee), who in the course of his performance of Etude for Piano cut off Cage's tie and then poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of Cage and Tudor. In 1967, Cage's book A Year from Monday
12410-506: The idea of music as means of communication: the public rarely accepted his work, and Cage himself, too, had trouble understanding the music of his colleagues. In early 1946 Cage agreed to tutor Gita Sarabhai , an Indian musician who came to the US to study Western music. In return, he asked her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy. Cage also attended, in late 1940s and early 1950s, D. T. Suzuki 's lectures on Zen Buddhism , and read further
12556-611: The instrument and musical period (e.g. viol, wind; classical, baroque; etc.). Fannie Charles Dillon Fannie Charles Dillon was born in Denver, Colorado in 1881. She moved with her family to Long Beach, California in 1890. She graduated from Pomona College and studied composition with Heinrich Urban , Hugo Kaun and Rubin Goldmark , and piano with Leopold Godowsky in Berlin . After completing her studies, Dillon worked as
12702-426: The interval between adjacent tones is called a semitone , or half step. Selecting tones from this set of 12 and arranging them in patterns of semitones and whole tones creates other scales. The most commonly encountered scales are the seven-toned major , the harmonic minor , the melodic minor , and the natural minor . Other examples of scales are the octatonic scale and the pentatonic or five-tone scale, which
12848-481: The key-note), per their diatonic function . Common ways of notating or representing chords in western music other than conventional staff notation include Roman numerals , figured bass (much used in the Baroque era ), chord letters (sometimes used in modern musicology ), and various systems of chord charts typically found in the lead sheets used in popular music to lay out the sequence of chords so that
12994-475: The late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance -controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching , an ancient Chinese classic text and decision-making tool, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, "Experimental Music", he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply
13140-481: The mid-1960s, Cage was receiving so many commissions and requests for appearances that he was unable to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a busy touring schedule; consequently Cage's compositional output from that decade was scant. After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts , which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)." The score of 0′00″ , completed in 1962, originally comprised
13286-438: The moral character of particular modes. Several centuries later, treatises began to appear which dealt with the actual composition of pieces of music in the plainchant tradition. At the end of the ninth century, Hucbald worked towards more precise pitch notation for the neumes used to record plainchant. Guido d'Arezzo wrote a letter to Michael of Pomposa in 1028, entitled Epistola de ignoto cantu , in which he introduced
13432-625: The movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things . In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative , a community in Stony Point, New York , where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards , Karen Karnes , Stan VanDerBeek , and Sari Dienes . The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on
13578-572: The music of many other parts of the world. The most frequently encountered chords are triads , so called because they consist of three distinct notes: further notes may be added to give seventh chords , extended chords , or added tone chords . The most common chords are the major and minor triads and then the augmented and diminished triads . The descriptions major , minor , augmented , and diminished are sometimes referred to collectively as chordal quality . Chords are also commonly classed by their root note—so, for instance,
13724-399: The musician may play accompaniment chords or improvise a solo. In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches ( tones , notes ), or chords . The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic line , or
13870-497: The nature and functions of music. The Yueji ("Record of music", c1st and 2nd centuries BCE), for example, manifests Confucian moral theories of understanding music in its social context. Studied and implemented by Confucian scholar-officials [...], these theories helped form a musical Confucianism that overshadowed but did not erase rival approaches. These include the assertion of Mozi (c. 468 – c. 376 BCE) that music wasted human and material resources, and Laozi 's claim that
14016-517: The new approach were Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor, whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death. Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing music. The I Ching became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on
14162-475: The number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints. Cage went on to write some forty such Number Pieces , as they came to be known, one of the last being Eighty (1992, premiered in Munich on October 28, 2011), usually employing a variant of the same technique. The process of composition, in many of the later Number Pieces,
14308-532: The older composer asked whether Cage would devote his life to music. After Cage replied that he would, Schoenberg offered to tutor him free of charge. Cage studied with Schoenberg in California: first at University of Southern California and then at University of California, Los Angeles , as well as privately. The older composer became one of the biggest influences on Cage, who "literally worshipped him", particularly as an example of how to live one's life being
14454-524: The opportunity to hear what other people think," anticipating 4′33″ by more than thirty years. Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major in 1928. Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Henry Cowell . In 1930 he dropped out, having come to believe that "college
14600-594: The orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony , followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff . Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, Earle Brown , David Tudor and Cage's pupil Christian Wolff came to be referred to as "the New York school". In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with
14746-444: The performance or perception of intensity, such as timbre, vibrato, and articulation. The conventional indications of dynamics are abbreviations for Italian words like forte ( f ) for loud and piano ( p ) for soft. These two basic notations are modified by indications including mezzo piano ( mp ) for moderately soft (literally "half soft") and mezzo forte ( mf ) for moderately loud, sforzando or sforzato ( sfz ) for
14892-487: The performer with similar difficulties. Still other works from the same period consist just of text instructions. The score of 0′00″ (1962; also known as 4′33″ No. 2 ) consists of a single sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence. Musicircus (1967) simply invites the performers to assemble and play together. The first Musicircus featured multiple performers and groups in
15038-435: The performer with six transparent squares, one with points of various sizes, five with five intersecting lines. The performer combines the squares and uses lines and points as a coordinate system , in which the lines are axes of various characteristics of the sounds, such as lowest frequency, simplest overtone structure, etc. Some of Cage's graphic scores (e.g. Concert for Piano and Orchestra , Fontana Mix (both 1958)) present
15184-598: The performer's technique. The timbre of most instruments can be changed by employing different techniques while playing. For example, the timbre of a trumpet changes when a mute is inserted into the bell, the player changes their embouchure, or volume. A voice can change its timbre by the way the performer manipulates their vocal apparatus, (e.g. the shape of the vocal cavity or mouth). Musical notation frequently specifies alteration in timbre by changes in sounding technique, volume, accent, and other means. These are indicated variously by symbolic and verbal instruction. For example,
15330-584: The piano) to the frequency of 440 Hz. This assignment is somewhat arbitrary; for example, in 1859 France, the same A was tuned to 435 Hz. Such differences can have a noticeable effect on the timbre of instruments and other phenomena. Thus, in historically informed performance of older music, tuning is often set to match the tuning used in the period when it was written. Additionally, many cultures do not attempt to standardize pitch, often considering that it should be allowed to vary depending on genre, style, mood, etc. The difference in pitch between two notes
15476-434: The piece that became his best-known and most controversial creation: 4′33″ . The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed,
15622-477: The practice of using syllables to describe notes and intervals. This was the source of the hexachordal solmization that was to be used until the end of the Middle Ages. Guido also wrote about emotional qualities of the modes, the phrase structure of plainchant, the temporal meaning of the neumes, etc.; his chapters on polyphony "come closer to describing and illustrating real music than any previous account" in
15768-562: The premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York ) caused an uproar in the audience. The reaction to 4′33″ was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe,
15914-496: The present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built." Music theory is frequently concerned with describing how musicians and composers make music, including tuning systems and composition methods among other topics. Because of
16060-504: The president of the corporation, offered Cage an exclusive contract and instigated the publication of a catalog of Cage's works, which appeared in 1962. Edition Peters soon published a large number of scores by Cage, and this, together with the publication of Silence , led to much higher prominence for the composer than ever before—one of the positive consequences of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman set up an annual grant for living expenses for Cage, to be issued from 1965 to his death. By
16206-404: The quarter tone itself as a direct interval. In traditional Western notation, the scale used for a composition is usually indicated by a key signature at the beginning to designate the pitches that make up that scale. As the music progresses, the pitches used may change and introduce a different scale. Music can be transposed from one scale to another for various purposes, often to accommodate
16352-457: The range of a vocalist. Such transposition raises or lowers the overall pitch range, but preserves the intervallic relationships of the original scale. For example, transposition from the key of C major to D major raises all pitches of the scale of C major equally by a whole tone . Since the interval relationships remain unchanged, transposition may be unnoticed by a listener, however other qualities may change noticeably because transposition changes
16498-408: The relationship of the overall pitch range compared to the range of the instruments or voices that perform the music. This often affects the music's overall sound, as well as having technical implications for the performers. The interrelationship of the keys most commonly used in Western tonal music is conveniently shown by the circle of fifths . Unique key signatures are also sometimes devised for
16644-616: The reply was a "rather vague letter", in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg —Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25- tone row , somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique . Cowell also advised that, before approaching Schoenberg, Cage should take some preliminary lessons, and recommended Adolph Weiss , a former Schoenberg pupil. Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School . He supported himself financially by taking up
16790-467: The resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio . In 1944, he appeared in Maya Deren 's At Land , a 15-minute silent experimental film. Like his personal life, Cage's artistic life went through a crisis in mid-1940s. The composer was experiencing a growing disillusionment with
16936-500: The rhythmic structure of the originals and fill it with pitches determined through chance procedures, or just replace some of the originals' pitches. Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces , all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets : the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15" and 1′45", and to anywhere from 2′00" to 2′30"). Cage's method of using
17082-571: The same fixed pattern; it is a proportional notation, in the sense that each note value is equal to two or three times the shorter value, or half or a third of the longer value. This same notation, transformed through various extensions and improvements during the Renaissance, forms the basis for rhythmic notation in European classical music today. D'Erlanger divulges that the Arabic music scale
17228-666: The same time, the composer also developed a type of a tone row technique with 25-note rows. After studies with Schoenberg, who never taught dodecaphony to his students, Cage developed another tone row technique, in which the row was split into short motives, which would then be repeated and transposed according to a set of rules. This approach was first used in Two Pieces for Piano ( c. 1935 ), and then, with modifications, in larger works such as Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938). Soon after Cage started writing percussion music and music for modern dance, he started using
17374-538: The sonority of intervals that vary widely in different cultures and over the ages. Consonance (or concord) is the quality of an interval or chord that seems stable and complete in itself. Dissonance (or discord) is the opposite in that it feels incomplete and "wants to" resolve to a consonant interval. Dissonant intervals seem to clash. Consonant intervals seem to sound comfortable together. Commonly, perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves and all major and minor thirds and sixths are considered consonant. All others are dissonant to
17520-459: The sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound ... I don't need sound to talk to me. Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51), the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of
17666-465: The strings—in 1940. This concept was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to include a full percussion ensemble. It was also at the Cornish School that Cage met several people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham . The latter was to become Cage's lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator. Cage left Seattle in
17812-685: The summer of 1941 after the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (what later became the IIT Institute of Design ). The composer accepted partly because he hoped to find opportunities in Chicago, that were not available in Seattle, to organize a center for experimental music. These opportunities did not materialize. Cage taught at the Chicago School of Design and worked as accompanist and composer at
17958-409: The system known as equal temperament is most commonly used today because it is considered the most satisfactory compromise that allows instruments of fixed tuning (e.g. the piano) to sound acceptably in tune in all keys. Notes can be arranged in a variety of scales and modes . Western music theory generally divides the octave into a series of twelve pitches, called a chromatic scale , within which
18104-552: The texts, was in use for over 1,000 years." Much of Chinese music history and theory remains unclear. Chinese theory starts from numbers, the main musical numbers being twelve, five and eight. Twelve refers to the number of pitches on which the scales can be constructed. The Lüshi chunqiu from about 238 BCE recalls the legend of Ling Lun . On order of the Yellow Emperor , Ling Lun collected twelve bamboo lengths with thick and even nodes. Blowing on one of these like
18250-745: The word dolce (sweetly) indicates a non-specific, but commonly understood soft and "sweet" timbre. Sul tasto instructs a string player to bow near or over the fingerboard to produce a less brilliant sound. Cuivre instructs a brass player to produce a forced and stridently brassy sound. Accent symbols like marcato (^) and dynamic indications ( pp ) can also indicate changes in timbre. In music, " dynamics " normally refers to variations of intensity or volume, as may be measured by physicists and audio engineers in decibels or phons . In music notation, however, dynamics are not treated as absolute values, but as relative ones. Because they are usually measured subjectively, there are factors besides amplitude that affect
18396-692: The works of Coomaraswamy . The first fruits of these studies were works inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts , and others. Cage accepted the goal of music as explained to him by Sarabhai: "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences". Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan , who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941. They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated part of his Music for Piano and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her. In 1949, he received
18542-412: The world has a spirit that can be released through its sound." Although Cage did not share the idea of spirits, these words inspired him to begin exploring the sounds produced by hitting various non-musical objects. In 1938, on Cowell's recommendation, Cage drove to San Francisco to find employment and to seek out fellow Cowell student and composer Lou Harrison . According to Cowell, the two composers had
18688-531: The world reveal details about the music they produced and potentially something of the musical theory that might have been used by their makers. In ancient and living cultures around the world, the deep and long roots of music theory are visible in instruments, oral traditions, and current music-making. Many cultures have also considered music theory in more formal ways such as written treatises and music notation . Practical and scholarly traditions overlap, as many practical treatises about music place themselves within
18834-545: Was "never happy", while his father is perhaps best characterized by his inventions: sometimes idealistic, such as a diesel-fueled submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, the senior Cage being uninterested in an undetectable submarine; others revolutionary and against the scientific norms, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe. John Cage Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45 Cage wrote two small character pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad . The latter
18980-419: Was a touchstone for other writings on music in medieval Europe. Boethius represented Classical authority on music during the Middle Ages, as the Greek writings on which he based his work were not read or translated by later Europeans until the 15th century. This treatise carefully maintains distance from the actual practice of music, focusing mostly on the mathematical proportions involved in tuning systems and on
19126-468: Was also used (along with nested proportions) for the large piano work Music of Changes (1951), only here material would be selected from the charts by using the I Ching . All of Cage's music since 1951 was composed using chance procedures, most commonly using the I Ching . For example, works from Music for Piano were based on paper imperfections: the imperfections themselves provided pitches, coin tosses and I Ching hexagram numbers were used to determine
19272-524: Was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times . The family's roots were deeply American: in a 1976 interview, Cage mentioned that George Washington was assisted by an ancestor named John Cage in the task of surveying the Colony of Virginia . Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who
19418-527: Was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left. Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment." Cage returned to the United States in 1931. He went to Santa Monica, California , where he made
19564-405: Was first published by Wesleyan University Press. Cage's parents died during the decade: his father in 1964, and his mother in 1969. Cage had their ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains , near Stony Point, and asked for the same to be done to him after his death. Cage's work from the sixties features some of his largest and most ambitious, not to mention socially utopian pieces, reflecting the mood of
19710-492: Was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to engage in printmaking, and Cage would go on to produce series of prints every year until his death; these, together with some late watercolors , constitute the largest portion of his extant visual art. In 1979 Cage's Empty Words was first published by Wesleyan University Press. In 1987, Cage completed a piece called Two , for flute and piano, dedicated to performers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The title referred to
19856-544: Was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler 's wife Pauline when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately. Cage and Kashevaroff were married in the desert at Yuma, Arizona , on June 7, 1935. The newly married couple first lived with Cage's parents in Pacific Palisades , then moved to Hollywood. During 1936–38 Cage changed numerous jobs, including one that started his lifelong association with modern dance: dance accompanist at
20002-405: Was not being run correctly. I left. Cage persuaded his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college studies. He subsequently hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre , where he took a train to Paris. Cage stayed in Europe for some 18 months, trying his hand at various forms of art. First, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture , but decided he
20148-491: Was not interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then took up painting, poetry and music. It was in Europe that, encouraged by his teacher Lazare Lévy , he first heard the music of contemporary composers (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith ) and finally got to know the music of Johann Sebastian Bach , which he had not experienced before. After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America
20294-491: Was not thinking of composition. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon . By 1928, though, Cage was convinced that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian , having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. By being "hushed and silent," he said, "we should have
20440-414: Was of no use to a writer" after an incident described in his 1991 autobiographical statement: I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution
20586-469: Was one ... of course he's not a composer, but he's an inventor—of genius." Cage would later adopt the "inventor" moniker and deny that he was in fact a composer. At some point in 1934–35, during his studies with Schoenberg, Cage was working at his mother's arts and crafts shop, where he met artist Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff . She was an Alaskan -born daughter of a Russian priest; her work encompassed fine bookbinding , sculpture and collage . Although Cage
20732-520: Was opposed to Cage's particular approach to the use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, e.g. Karlheinz Stockhausen . During this time Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina . Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called
20878-491: Was published years later. Another new direction, also taken in 1987, was opera: Cage produced five operas, all sharing the same title Europera , in 1987–91. Europeras I and II require greater forces than III , IV and V , which are on a chamber scale. They were commissioned by the Frankfurt Opera to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday, and according to music critic Mark Swed , they took "an enormous effort on
21024-498: Was revived after he read Walt Whitman 's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage started traveling, visiting various places in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri and, most importantly, Majorca , where he started composing. His first compositions were created using dense mathematical formulas, but Cage
21170-444: Was selected only based on whether it contains the note necessary for the melody, and so the rest of the notes do not form any directional harmony. Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51) used a system of charts of durations, dynamics, melodies, etc., from which Cage would choose using simple geometric patterns. The last movement of the concerto was a step towards using chance procedures, which Cage adopted soon afterwards. A chart system
21316-413: Was simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures; the music has been linked to Cage's anarchic leanings. One (i.e., the eleventh piece for a single performer), completed in early 1992, was Cage's first and only foray into film. Cage conceived his last musical work with Michael Bach Bachtischa : "ONE13" for violoncello with curved bow and three loudspeakers, which
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