John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr.was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. 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 American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth5 September 1912
CountryUnited States of America
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
There are no secrets.It's just we thought that they said dead. When they said bread.
Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.
There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do.
If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.
Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.
If someone says can't, that shows you what to do.
A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
...we make our lives by what we love.