Tue January 8, 2013 Musical Space: John Cage John Cage, one of
the most influential and revolutionary composers of the 20th
Century, was born almost exactly 100 years ago. He was very well
schooled as a composer, but it seems as though his mission was
to reject nearly every compositional technique he was taught,
and instead push the boundaries, even the very definition of
music. His results were, to say the least, interesting. Cage’s
earliest work was organized using arbitrary sequences of numbers
and simple mathematical processes. In 1940 he began writing for
what he called the “prepared piano”: nuts, bolts and pieces of
rubber were attached to strings of a grand piano, vastly
expanding the tonal range of the instrument but rendering it
nearly unidentifiable. By the 1950s Cage began using chance
operations; compositional choices were left to the I Ching, star
charts, and other random number generators. Sometimes his scores
used invented notation systems, for instance, lines drawn on a
coordinate graph. Other