History of Western music can be divided into B.C. (Before Cage) and A.C. (After Cage). I was a lucky girl to have bumped into him in my roller coaster life. Us downtown artists called him J.C., for Jesus Christ ... not to his face, but when we spoke about him amongst us.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160327305/33-musicians-on-what-john-cage-communicates
Phil Kline. John Cage communicated music in and of the now — music contained by neither material nor tradition, made by player and listener alike, born of sound and mind, freedom and discipline, process, community, everything and its opposite.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160327305/33-musicians-on-what-john-cage-communicates
“In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.”. n 1952, David Tudor sat down in front of a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and did nothing.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/
In the ’70’s, with inspirations like Thoreau and Joyce, Cage began to take literary texts and transform them into music. “Roratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake” (1979), was an outline for transforming any work of literature into a work of music.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/
John Cage communicated the freedom to rethink, to ask questions, to reinvent and to trust. He rethought the traditional models of music. He put a focus on percussion (YES!) like no one else and therefore he questioned melody and harmony and the organization of sound.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160327305/33-musicians-on-what-john-cage-communicates
Many of Cage’s ideas about what music could be were inspired by Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionized twentieth-century art by presenting everyday, unadulterated objects in museum settings as finished works of art, which were called “found art,” or ready-mades by later scholars.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/
Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied for a short time at Pamona College, and later at UCLA with classical composer Arthur Schoenberg. There he realized that the music he wanted to make was radically different from the music of his time.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/
While his interest in chance procedures and found sound continued throughout the sixties, Cage began to focus his attention on the technologies of recording and amplification. One of his better known pieces was “Cartridge Music” (1960), during which he amplified small household objects at a live performance.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-cage-about-the-composer/471/
Cage was born 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 (1885–1969), worked intermittently as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
Cage was known throughout his career for experimental, indeterminant avant-garde compositions. In 1958, he asked a series of questions during a lecture at Darmstadt, which were later published as Composition as Process in his book Silence. The lecture muses at length about music, sound and listening.
http://www.npr.org/2012/08/30/160327305/33-musicians-on-what-john-cage-communicates
where was john cage born in
John Cage was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. John Cage born at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles.