John Cage

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Lore & Background

Cage was born September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr., was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia Harvey, worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. When Cage was 18 months old, he ate two or three strychnine tablets; a stomach pump was administered with success. He first received piano lessons in fourth grade and enjoyed music, but expressed more interest in sight reading than technique. By 1928, he was convinced he wanted to be a writer, graduating from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian after giving a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans. He enrolled at Pomona College as a theology major in 1928 but dropped out in 1930, believing college was of no use to a writer. He hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Europe, staying for some 18 months. In Europe, he studied Gothic and Greek architecture, took up painting, poetry, and music, and first heard the music of contemporary composers like Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith. After reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, his enthusiasm for America revived, but his parents persuaded him to stay longer. He started composing in Mallorca using dense mathematical formulas, but was displeased with the results and left the finished pieces behind. In Seville, he witnessed 'the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment.'

Reader's Guide

Cage's teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35). Following Cowell's advice, Cage traveled to New York City in 1933 and studied with Adolph Weiss and Cowell himself at The New School, supporting himself by washing walls at a YWCA in Brooklyn. His routine allowed just four hours of sleep on most nights, with four hours of composition every day starting at 4 am. When he approached Schoenberg, 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 USC, then at UCLA, as well as privately. In a well-known conversation, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' Cage explained he had no feeling for harmony. Schoenberg said he would always encounter an obstacle, like coming to a wall through which he could not pass. Cage replied, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.' Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, he came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching became his standard composition tool for the rest of his life. His best known work is 4′33″ (1952), performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title, and the content is the sounds of the environment heard by the audience. He was also a pioneer of the prepared piano, for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, including Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

Did You Know?

• When Cage was 18 months old, he ate two or three strychnine tablets; a stomach pump was administered with success.
• In 1928, Cage gave a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans, anticipating 4′33″ by more than thirty years.
• Cage dropped out of Pomona College after seeing one hundred classmates all reading copies of the same book in the library; he instead read the first book by an author whose name began with Z and received the highest grade in the class.
• Cage studied with Arnold Schoenberg free of charge after promising to devote his life to music.
• When Schoenberg told Cage he would always encounter an obstacle due to his lack of feeling for harmony, Cage replied, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'