John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, artist, and music theorist. He helped create music where chance plays a role, music that uses electronic sounds, and music that uses instruments in unusual ways. Cage was one of the most important figures in the post-war avant-garde movement. Experts have praised him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He also helped develop modern dance, especially through his work with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was his romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage studied with Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for changing music in new ways. However, his greatest influences came from East and South Asian cultures. After studying Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage began creating music based on chance, which he started in 1951. He used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese book that helps make decisions, as his main tool for composing for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture called "Experimental Music," Cage described music as "a purposeless play" that "affirms life" without trying to bring order to chaos or improve creation, but instead as a way to notice life more clearly.

Cage's most famous work is the 1952 piece 4′33″, which is performed without intentional sound. Musicians playing the piece do not make any sounds but remain present for the time stated in the title. The music is meant to include the sounds of the environment that the audience hears during the performance. This work challenged ideas about what musicianship and musical experiences are, making it a widely discussed and debated topic in music studies and art. Cage also helped create the prepared piano, a piano with objects placed on or between its strings or hammers to change its sound. He wrote many dance-related pieces and some concert works for the prepared piano, including Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

Life

John Cage was born on September 5, 1912, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. His father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), was an inventor, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), sometimes worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. The family had strong American roots. In a 1976 interview, Cage said that one of his ancestors, named John Cage, helped George Washington survey the Colony of Virginia. Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." His father was known for creating inventions, some of which were unusual, like a theory about the universe called "electrostatic field theory." John Cage Sr. taught his son that "if someone says 'can't,' that shows you what to do." In 1944–45, Cage wrote two short musical pieces dedicated to his parents: Crete and Dad. Dad is a lively piece that ends suddenly, while Crete is a longer, mostly melodic work with complex musical structure.

When Cage was 18 months old, he accidentally swallowed two or three strychnine tablets. A newspaper reported that doctors feared for his life at first, but a stomach pump saved him.

Cage’s first music lessons came from private piano teachers in Los Angeles and relatives, especially his aunt Phoebe Harvey James, who introduced him to 19th-century piano music. He began piano lessons in the fourth grade but preferred learning how to read music over mastering difficult piano techniques. He did not think about composing music at that time. During high school, one of his music teachers was Fannie Charles Dillon. By 1928, Cage decided he wanted to be a writer. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as valedictorian and gave a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl, suggesting a day of silence for all Americans. He believed that being quiet would let people hear others’ thoughts, an idea similar to his famous piece 4′33″, which he created more than 30 years later.

In 1928, Cage enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont as a theology major. At Pomona, he learned about the artist Marcel Duchamp, the writer James Joyce, the philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the composer Henry Cowell. In 1930, he left Pomona after deciding that college was not helpful for a writer. He convinced his parents that a trip to Europe would be better for his writing than continuing school. He traveled to Galveston, sailed to Le Havre, and took a train to Paris. In Europe, he tried different art forms, including architecture, painting, and music. He studied with a teacher named Lazare Lévy and first heard music by composers like Igor Stravinsky and Johann Sebastian Bach.

After reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Cage wanted to return to the United States but stayed in Europe longer at his parents’ request. He traveled across Europe, visiting France, Germany, Spain, Capri, and Mallorca, where he began composing. His early compositions used complex mathematical formulas, but he was unhappy with the results and left the pieces behind. He also started working in theater, inspired by the many sights and sounds he experienced during a walk in Seville.

Cage returned to the United States in 1931 and moved to Santa Monica, California. He earned money by giving lectures on contemporary art and met important figures in the Southern California art world, including Galka Scheyer and Richard Buhlig. By 1933, he decided to focus on music instead of painting. He sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell, who suggested he study with Arnold Schoenberg. Cowell also recommended Adolph Weiss, a former student of Schoenberg.

In 1933, Cage moved to New York City and studied with Weiss and Cowell. He worked at a YWCA in Brooklyn to support himself. He slept only four hours each night and spent four hours daily composing starting at 4 a.m. After improving his skills, he asked Schoenberg to teach him. Schoenberg agreed to teach him for free after Cage promised to dedicate his life to music.

Cage studied with Schoenberg in California, first at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Los Angeles. Schoenberg had a major influence on Cage, who admired him deeply. Cage later said that even when he no longer needed to write music, he continued composing because of the promise he made to Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s teaching methods and their impact on Cage are described in lectures and writings, including a famous 1958 lecture titled Indeterminacy.

Cage studied with Schoenberg for two years but left after Schoenberg said he was trying to make it hard for students to write music. Cage later said this made him determined to compose music more than ever. Though Schoenberg did not think Cage was a strong composer at the time, he later called Cage an "inventor of genius." Cage later accepted the title of "inventor" and said he was not a composer.

During 1934–35, while studying with Schoenberg, Cage worked at his mother’s home.

Music

John Cage's earliest completed musical pieces are no longer available. The composer said his first works were short piano pieces created using complicated math and lacked "sensual appeal and expressive power." Later, Cage began composing by improvising and writing down his ideas until Richard Buhlig encouraged him to focus on structure. Many works from the early 1930s, such as Sonata for Clarinet (1933) and Composition for 3 Voices (1934), used many notes outside the standard scale and showed Cage's interest in counterpoint, a technique where multiple melodies are played at the same time. Around the same time, Cage developed a method using tone rows with 25 notes. After studying with Arnold Schoenberg, who did not teach dodecaphony to his students, Cage created another tone row method. In this approach, the row was divided into short musical ideas, which were repeated and changed according to rules. This technique first appeared in Two Pieces for Piano (c. 1935) and later in works like Metamorphosis and Five Songs (both 1938).

Soon after, Cage began writing music for percussion and modern dance. He started using a technique that made rhythm the most noticeable part of the music. In Imaginary Landscape No. 1 (1939), the piece is divided into four sections with 16, 17, 18, and 19 bars each. Each section is further split into smaller parts. First Construction (in Metal) (1939) expanded this idea: it has five sections with 4, 3, 2, 3, and 4 units, each containing 16 bars. The music is built from sixteen musical motives. These "nested proportions," as Cage called them, became a common feature in his music during the 1940s. This technique became even more complex in later works like Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48), where some sections used non-integer numbers (such as 1¼, ¾, 1½), and in A Flower, a song for voice and closed piano, where two sets of proportions were used at the same time.

In the late 1940s, Cage began exploring ways to move away from traditional harmony. For example, in String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), he created "gamuts," which are chords with fixed instruments. The piece moves from one gamut to another, selecting each based only on whether it includes the note needed for the melody. In Concerto for prepared piano (1950–51), Cage used charts with information about durations, dynamics, and melodies, choosing elements using simple geometric patterns. The final movement of the concerto was an early step toward using chance procedures, which Cage later adopted.

A chart system, combined with nested proportions, was used in Music of Changes (1951), where material was selected from charts using the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination system. From 1951 onward, all of Cage's music was composed using chance procedures, most often the I Ching. For example, works from Music for Piano used imperfections on paper to determine pitches, coin tosses and I Ching numbers to decide accidentals, clefs, and playing techniques. A series of works, such as Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62) and the Etudes series (Etudes Australes, Freeman Etudes, Etudes Boreales), used the I Ching to apply chance operations to star charts. Cage's Etudes are extremely difficult to perform, a choice influenced by his belief that challenging music could show that difficult tasks are possible. Cage described himself as an anarchist and was inspired by Henry David Thoreau.

Another series of works used chance procedures to adapt music by other composers. For example, Cheap Imitation (1969) was based on Erik Satie's music, Some of "The Harmony of Maine" (1978) on Belcher, and Hymns and Variations (1979) on other sources. In these pieces, Cage borrowed the original rhythms and filled them with pitches determined by chance, or replaced some notes. A final series of works, the Number Pieces, completed in the last five years of Cage's life, used "time brackets," where the score includes short musical fragments with instructions on when to start and end them (e.g., between 1′15" and 1′45", and ending between 2′00" and 2′30").

Cage's use of the I Ching was not random. The process varied for each composition and was often complex. For example, in Cheap Imitation, Cage asked the I Ching specific questions, such as:
1. Which of the seven musical scales (based on white notes) should be used?
2. Which of the twelve chromatic transpositions should be used?
3. Which note from the scale should be used to copy a note from Satie's music?

In Etudes Australes, Cage used a transparent strip on a star chart to identify pitches, then asked the I Ching which pitches should remain single and which should form chords. The chords were chosen from a list of 550 possible combinations.

Some of Cage's works, especially those from the 1960s, included instructions for performers instead of fully written music. For example, the score of Variations I (1958) gave performers six transparent squares with points and lines to use as a coordinate system for sound characteristics. Similar challenges appeared in graphic scores like Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Fontana Mix (both 1958). Other works, such as 0′00″ (1962; also called 4′33″ No. 2), had only text instructions, such as: "In a situation with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.

Musicircus (1967) invited performers to gather and play together. The first Musicircus had many performers and groups in a large space, starting and stopping at specific times with instructions on when to play individually or in groups. The event created a layered mix of music through chance, producing a theatrical experience. Musicircus events continued after Cage's death, including one held by the English National Opera (ENO) in 2012, featuring artists like John Paul Jones and Michael Finnissy.

The idea of a "circus" remained important to Cage throughout his life, appearing in works like Roaratorio, an Irish-inspired piece.

Visual art, writings, and other activities

John Cage began painting when he was young, but he later stopped to focus on music. His first major visual art project, Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel, was created in 1969. This work includes two lithographs and a set of pieces Cage called plexigrams, which are silk screen prints on plexiglas panels. All parts of the project use small pieces of words in different fonts, arranged using random methods.

From 1978 until his death, Cage worked at Crown Point Press, making a series of prints each year. His first project there was Score Without Parts (1978), made from detailed instructions and inspired by drawings by Henry David Thoreau. That same year, he created Seven Day Diary, which he drew with his eyes closed but followed a strict structure based on chance methods. Thoreau’s drawings also influenced Cage’s final works of 1978, called Signals.

Between 1979 and 1982, Cage made several large print series: Changes and Disappearances (1979–80), On the Surface (1980–82), and Déreau (1982). These were his last works using engraving. In 1983, he began using unusual materials like cotton batting and foam, and later used stones and fire (Eninka, Variations, Ryoanji, etc.) to make visual art. From 1988 to 1990, he created watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop.

In the 1980s, Cage participated in the Mountain Lake Workshop, an art event in southwestern Virginia led by Ray Kass of Virginia Tech. There, he made collaborative visual works that used chance methods, including large watercolor and print projects. Starting in 1983, he used watercolors with techniques like controlled pours, grids based on chance, and painting around stones with feather brushes. These methods showed how randomness could fit within a structured process. The workshop helped Cage apply his musical ideas to visual art, and this time became an important part of his later work. This period is described in The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Art in Locale (2018).

The only film Cage made was One, part of his Number Pieces series. It was commissioned by composer and filmmaker Henning Lohner, who worked with Cage to create and direct the 90-minute black-and-white film. It was finished weeks before Cage’s death in 1992. One shows images of random light patterns. It premiered in Cologne, Germany, on September 19, 1992, with a live performance of the orchestra piece 103.

Throughout his adult life, Cage also gave lectures and wrote books. His first book was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961), which included lectures, experimental text layouts, and works like Lecture on Nothing (1949), written in rhythmic structures. Later books covered topics such as music, poetry, and Cage’s mesostics.

Cage was also an amateur mushroom expert. In 1969, he gave a lecture about edible mushrooms at the University of California, Davis, as part of his “Music in Dialogue” course. He co-founded the New York Mycological Society with friends, and his mushroom collection is now kept in the Special Collections department of the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Reception and influence

John Cage's early works, especially those from the late 1940s like Sonatas and Interludes, received praise from critics. The Sonatas were performed at Carnegie Hall in 1949. In 1951, Cage began using chance methods in his music, which caused some of his friends to distance themselves and led to criticism from other composers. Composers who followed serialism, such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, did not support Cage's use of chance. Boulez, who had once been friends with Cage, said Cage's approach was influenced by ideas from Eastern cultures and showed a lack of skill in writing music. Iannis Xenakis, a critic of serialism, also opposed Cage's use of chance, calling it a misuse of musical language and a failure to fulfill a composer's role.

In an article titled Tradition and Responsibility, teacher and critic Michael Steinberg criticized avant-garde music in general. Douglas Kahn, a writer and critic, also criticized Cage's artistic choices in his 1999 book Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Kahn acknowledged Cage's influence on culture but noted that Cage's methods sometimes limited the social aspects of music.

Although much of Cage's work remains controversial, his impact on many composers, artists, and writers is significant. After Cage introduced chance methods into his music, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Xenakis remained critical but later used chance techniques in their own works, though with fewer restrictions. Stockhausen's piano compositions in his later Klavierstücke were influenced by Cage's Music of Changes and David Tudor. Other composers who used chance methods included Witold Lutosławski and Mauricio Kagel. Music that includes elements of chance in composition or performance is called aleatoric music, a term popularized by Boulez. Helmut Lachenmann's work was influenced by Cage's use of extended techniques in music.

Cage's experiments with rhythm and sound inspired many composers. His American colleagues, such as Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff, were among the first to be influenced. Later, composers like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass also adopted Cage's ideas. In Europe, composers from the English experimental school, including Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White, Gavin Bryars, and Howard Skempton, acknowledged Cage's influence. The Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu also cited Cage as an influence. In 1986, Cage received an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts. He was awarded the Kyoto Prize in 1989, and the John Cage Award was established in 1992 by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

After Cage's death, Simon Jeffes, founder of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, composed a piece titled CAGE DEAD, using the notes from the title in order: C, A, G, E, D, E, A, and D.

Cage's influence extended beyond classical music. Rock bands like Sonic Youth and Stereolab acknowledged his work, and composer Frank Zappa was inspired by Cage's ideas. Musicologist Paul Hegarty traced the origins of noise music to Cage's 4′33″. Cage's work also influenced electronic music, as Brian Eno's label, Obscure Records, released Cage's works in the 1970s. The prepared piano, a technique Cage popularized, appears in Aphex Twin's 2001 album Drukqs. Cage's research helped bring attention to Erik Satie's music, and his friendship with artists like Robert Rauschenberg introduced his ideas into visual art. His influence also reached sound design, as Academy Award-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom cited Cage as a major inspiration. In 2003, Radiohead collaborated with Merce Cunningham's dance troupe because the band's leader, Thom Yorke, considered Cage an important artistic influence. In 2000, the Canadian band The Tragically Hip referenced Cage in their song Tiger the Lion.

In 2012, many events celebrated Cage's 100th birthday. An eight-day festival in Washington, D.C., included performances at art museums and universities. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas performed Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall. In Germany, the city of Darmstadt renamed its central train station the John Cage Railway Station during its annual music courses. At the Ruhrtriennale, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of Europeras 1 & 2 and commissioned a performance of Lecture on Nothing by Robert Wilson. Jacaranda Music held four concerts in Santa Monica, California, during the centennial week. Events called John Cage Day were held worldwide to honor his legacy.

A 2012 project titled On Silence: Homage to Cage, curated by Juraj Kojs, featured 13 works by composers from around the world. Each piece was 4 minutes and 33 seconds long, in honor of Cage's famous piece 4′33″. The project was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn, and the John Cage Trust.

In a tribute to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company performed a piece titled Story/Time in 2012. The performance was inspired by Cage's 1958 work Indeterminacy, in which Cage and later Jones read aloud one-minute stories they had written while dancers performed.

Archives

• The collection of the John Cage Trust is kept at Bard College in upstate New York.
• The John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, which is part of the Music Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, includes most of the composer's written works. These materials consist of drafts, practice pages, finished versions, and incomplete pieces.
• The John Cage Papers are stored in the Special Collections and Archives department of Wesleyan University's Olin Library in Middletown, Connecticut. This collection includes written works, interviews, letters from fans, and small items. It also holds newspaper clippings, catalogs from art shows, a group of Cage's books and magazines, posters, objects, postcards from events, and brochures from conferences and organizations.
• The John Cage Collection at Northwestern University in Illinois includes the composer's letters, small items, and the Notations collection.
• The John Cage Materials are part of the Oral History of American Music (OHAM) collection at the Irving S. Gilmore Library at Yale University.