Composer
Biography:
Like no other composer of his generation, John Cage radically and successfully promoted the revaluation of aesthetic criteria, thereby creating a new world view for the artists of our time. His work has had a greater influence on the course of art in general than that of all his musical contemporaries.
Born in Los Angeles in 1912, he originally wanted to become a writer and moved 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 onwards and, as a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, learned the musical language of the time. From 1942 onwards, he lived in New York, where he became a living legend as an innovator of artistic means in connection with aesthetic-philosophical concepts that had previously had no place in music. From 1948 onwards, he formed a trio with dancer Merce Cunningham and painter Robert Rauschenberg that broke all the taboos of the avant-garde. Erik Satie's musical Ameublements and the writings of Henry David Thoreau and James Joyce served as starting points for his journey into the unknown.
Without Cage's influence, the history of ‘composed’ happenings and the Fluxus movement would be unthinkable. Inspired decisively by Cowell, he brought the prepared piano into the concert hall, introduced silence as a ‘composition’ with 4'33", and established the principles of playful purposelessness, random chance, and the de-subjectification of sound events as compositional means.
In the last five years before his death in 1992, his late work consisted exclusively of pieces titled with consecutive numbers combined with the number of performers – another expression of the ideal of purposelessness influenced by Zen practice, which makes his art appear so open and free of conventional references.
Albums:
Ensemble VERTIGO der Hochschule der Künste Bern – Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain:
Darmstadt Aural Documents · Box 2 · John Cage – Communication:
Salzburg Biennale – Festival for New Music 2009:
