August 13, 1992
OBITUARY
John Cage, 79, a Minimalist Enchanted With Sound, Dies
By ALLAN KOZINN, The New York Times
John Cage was a central influence on the work of the choreography of Merce Cunningham, whom he had known since they were students at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle more than 50 years ago. It was Mr. Cage who persuaded Mr. Cunningham to start his own dance company, with which Mr. Cage toured as composer, accompanist and music director. He was also an influence on the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were his friends, and on several generations of performance artists.
In the music world, of course, Mr. Cage's influence was extremely far-reaching. He started a revolution by proposing that composers could jettison the musical language that had evolved over the last seven centuries, and in doing so he opened the door to Minimalism, performance art and virtually every other branch of the musical avant-garde. Composers as different in style from one another -- and from Mr. Cage -- as Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Frederic Rzewski have cited Mr. Cage as a beacon that helped light their own paths.
"Perhaps no one living artist has such a great influence over such a diverse lot of important people," Richard Kostelanetz, a writer who edited several books about Mr. Cage, wrote in a New York Times Magazine article in 1967.
He composed for every imaginable kind of instrument, from standard orchestral strings to "prepared" pianos, altered by putting nails, paper, wood, rubber bands or other objects between their strings to make them sound percussive and otherworldly. He wrote electronic and tape works, and works that involved only spoken texts. His often impish scoring, in fact, might include radios, toys, the sounds of water being sipped or vegetables being chopped.
"I do what I feel it is necessary to do," he told an interviewer. "My necessity comes from my sense of invention, and I try not to repeat the things I already know about."
He was ambivalent about his musical studies at first. He did not regard himself as a virtuoso pianist, and throughout his life he frankly spoke and wrote of his lack of traditional musical skills, going as far as proclaiming, in his book "A Year From Monday": "I can't keep a tune. In fact I have no talent for music."
Eventually, Mr. Cage drifted toward the world of dance. In 1937, he joined the modern dance ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles as an accompanist and composer, and he formed his own ensemble to play his early percussion works. In 1937, he moved to Seattle, where he worked as composer and accompanist for Bonnie Baird's dance classes at the Cornish School. While in Seattle, he organized another percussion band, collected unusual instruments and toured the Northwest. It was also at this time that he met and began his lifelong collaboration with Merce Cunningham.
In 1942, after brief stays in San Francisco and Chicago, Mr. Cage moved to New York City, which remained his home base thereafter. He again assembled a percussion group, which gave its first New York performance at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1943. The concert received a great deal of attention, not all of it favorable. Among the listeners who objected to Mr. Cage's eclectic instrumental arsenal, which included flower pots, cow bells and frequency oscillators, was Noel Straus, whose review in The New York Times said Mr. Cage's music "had an inescapable resemblance to the meaningless sounds made by children amusing themselves by banging on tin pans and other resonant kitchen utensils."
Soon after he arrived in New York, Mr. Cage undertook his first collaboration with Mr. Cunningham, "Credo in Us," and in the mid-1940's they toured extensively together. In 1947, Mr. Cage was commissioned to write "The Seasons" for the Ballet Society. A graceful, consonant work with a pronounced Indian influence that reflected Mr. Cage's growing interest in Eastern philosophy, "The Seasons" is one of his few scores for traditional symphony orchestra.
In 1950, after returning to the United States from a tour of Europe with Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Cage discovered the "I Ching," the Chinese "book of changes" that one consults after tossing a set of coins. This method gave Mr. Cage the idea that lies at the heart of his "chance" compositions. If readings in the "I Ching" could be governed by the chance toss of a coin, why couldn't musical composition? Indeed, why couldn't musical works be created using chance processes with the audience looking on, so that the composition and the performance were one and the same?
Among Mr. Cage's earliest works using this principle was "Music of Changes" (1951). The musical elements of the piece -- pitch, duration, timbre, dynamics -- were determined by the performers using charts based on the "I Ching" and by tossing coins. "Imaginary Landscape 4" (1951) explored chance procedures in a different way: The work is scored for 12 radios, operated by two performers. One performer changed stations, the other worked the volume control. The dial turning was precisely notated, but what was heard depended on what was being broadcast during the performance. "Europera 5" (1991) works similarly.
As he continued writing chance works, Mr. Cage developed a novel view of composition, in which he came to regard composing not as a way of imposing order on nature, but as a way of creating the circumstances in which art could adapt itself to its surroundings. Probably the purest example of this philosophy is Mr. Cage's "4'33"" (1952), in which a performer stands silently on stage. Inevitably, listeners were forced to focus on nonmusical sounds, or in the case of an unusually quite audience, on the quality of silence itself.
As his works, and the varied reactions to it, brought him increasing notoreity, Mr. Cage came to be increasingly in demand as a lecturer, teacher and performer. He undertook tours of Europe and Japan with Mr. Tudor, one of his electronic music collaborators, and he continued to tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He taught classes in experimental music in Darmstadt, Germany, and lectured on his theories of indeterminate composition at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. And at the New School, in New York, he taught classes on mushroom identification, another of his lifelong interests.
Mr. Cage was a soft-spoken, mercurial man who remained keenly interested in new music. He made himself easily accessible to young composers and critics, and was often seen at concerts in downtown Manhattan.
Mr. Cage's marriage to Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff ended in divorce in 1945. From 1970 until his death, he lived with Mr. Cunningham.
