Composer
Biography:
JOHN CAGE Like no other composer of his generation, he pushed ahead with the revaluation of aesthetic criteria so radically and successfully and thus created a new world view of the artist of our time. His work has had a greater influence on the course of art in general than any of his musical contemporaries.
Born in Los Angeles in 1912, he originally wanted to be a writer and went to Europe in 1930, where he studied architecture and piano and tried his hand at poetry, painting and composition. Back in America, he trained as a composer from 1932 and, as a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schönberg, learned the musical language at the height of the times. From 1942 in New York, he became a living legend as an innovator of artistic means in connection with aesthetic-philosophical concepts that had no place in music until then. From 1948 he formed a trio of taboo-breaking avant-garde artists together with the dancer Merce Cunningham and the painter Robert Rauschenberg. Erik Satie's sounding Ameublements and the writings of Henry David Thoreau and James Joyce served as starting points for his journey into the unknown.
Without Cage's impulses, the story of "composed" happenings and the Fluxus movement would be unthinkable. Prompted by Cowell, he brought the prepared piano into the concert hall with him 4'33” introduced silence as a »composition« and established the principles of playful lack of intention, random chance and the de-subjectification of sound events as compositional means.
In the last five years until his death in 1992, his late work consists exclusively of pieces that are titled with consecutive numbers, combined with the number of players - this is also an expression of the Zen-influenced ideal of intentionlessness, which makes his art so open and free from conventional references.
Albums:
Ensemble VERTIGO from the Bern University of the Arts – Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain:
Darmstadt Aural Documents Box 2 John Cage – Communication:
Salzburg Biennale – Festival for New Music 2009:
