John Cage – Early emerging talent for music, language and verse
John Cage was born in Los Angeles on 5 September 1912. The son of the engineer and inventor John Milton Cage, he was interested in music at an early age and took piano lessons as a child. He received further encouragement from his aunt, the singer and pianist Phoebe James, and one of his first musical role models was the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, whom he tried to emulate. He was also a prolific writer and showed great flair for learning foreign languages; he participated in the publication of a French language school newspaper, won an oratory competition for his school, and graduated with the highest score in the history of the school. The study of the poetry of Gertrude Stein triggered in him the wish to become a poet himself. During a trip across Europe, he studied architecture in Paris with Ernó Goldfinger and piano with Lazare Lévy, and composed numerous poems, whilst the journal Transition, edited by Eugene Jolas, introduced John Cage to the artistic ideas of Kurt Schwitters, James Joyce, Hugo Ball and Hans Arp.
Unconditionally bound to the avant-garde as a composer
John Cage finally decided to study composition and attended various universities. Arnold Schönberg, who had been driven into American exile by the National Socialists, even taught Joh Cage for free, on the condition that the gifted young man would henceforth dedicate his life to music. A further important teacher was the Irish composer Henry Cowell. Cage soon received his own teaching posts: as lecturer at the Mills College in San Francisco he met the Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, and his move to New York in the 1940s brought him into contact with the Modernists André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Piet Mondrian. His first work as a composer was on a piano on which he had modified the sound with erasers, nails and other small parts to suit his ideas. He quickly achieved fame on the New York avant-garde scene with this and other experiments, which brought him valuable contacts and opened numerous doors.
Chance as a composer and the significance of silence
Together with his companions Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage is considered the founder of action art. He often cast lots for his compositions, threw coins, consulted oracle books and relied on computer algorithms, whereby the process of creation itself meant more to him than the completed work, in the spirit of Fluxus. His notation was often also inspired by graphic patterns, for example series of numbers, land or star maps. In line with his friend Rauschenberg and his White Paintings, Cage composed the work 4’33, completely made up of silence. He was, however, not the first artist to have composed a piece of silence – this had already been done in 1919 by the composer Erwin Schulhoff, who stood close to Dadaism. Whilst his activity as a fine artist is less familiar - to which John Cage dedicated himself from the end of the 1960s - his drawings made from 1983 onwards with reference to the Buddhist monastery Ryoanji are well known.
John Cage died in New York City on 12 August 1992.
John Cage - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
