Biography
John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and died in New York in 1992. He studied with Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell among others, having dropped out of Pomona College. In the 1940s he developed the prepared piano, altering its sound with objects placed between the strings. From the early 1950s, influenced by Zen Buddhism and the Chinese I Ching, he systematically used chance operations to free music from personal intention. His best-known work, the four-and-a-half-minute silence of 4′33″ (1952), directed listeners' attention to the ambient sounds of the concert hall. Cage is regarded as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century and shaped the Happening and Fluxus movements.
On Stagelog
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