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
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
Nothing more than nothing can be said.
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right...
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.
Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")
We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.