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John Cage picking mushrooms [1967], photo by William Gedney
The annual festival CAGE100, in which this event takes place, honors one of the most extraordinary composers and artists of the 20th Century whose oeuvre includes not only music
but also performance concepts, different writings, paintings, a feature film -‐ yes, even a book
about mushrooms was released by John Cage.
Cage was born on the 5th of September 1912 in Los Angeles and died on the 12th of August 1992 in
New York. He is considered to be one of the most important and influential composers of the 21.
century. Many contemporary artists, but also philosophers and scholars still refer to his work,
which is mainly known for the use of chance operations, of silence, and the inclusion of noise in
music.
Cage grew up as the only child of the inventor John Milton Cage and the editor Lucretia Harvey. In
his early years Cage's creative mind showed itself already. As a teenager he initiated a regular and
very successful youth program on the local radio station, wrote poetry, published a French-‐
language school newspaper, participated in speech competitions and learned to play piano. In
1930 Cage went to Europe for a few months, where he studied architecture more or less eagerly
and took piano lessons with the renowned pianist Lazare Lévy among other things. During this time he made his first attempts on composing, which are not maintained, however.
Back in the USA, Cage studied harmony with Adolph Weiss, a student of the famous and to
America emigrated composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Another teacher of that time was the
composer Henry Cowell. Cowell was one of the first composers to write piano music, which use the interior of the piano as a sound body, a technique that John Cage would revolutionize later.
à Music example (Henry Cowell The Banshee)
From 1935 to 1937 John Cage took private lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, the back then well known teacher, composer and inventor of the so-‐called 12-‐tone technique, a process in which all 12 tones of an octave are equal and the traditional major / minor harmonies are no longer
relevant. "If possible, I always went to the head of the company," as Cage is quoted, who at that
time had in his circle of acquaintances famous people such as the art collectors couple Walter and
Louise Arensberg, the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger and the composer and later friend Lou Harrison.
Cage, who always suffered great material hardship, earned his money with various side jobs such
as giving music courses for housewives up to industrial cleaning during that time. Since he could not afford any more money for musicians, he came up with the idea of preparing the piano with
various objects to make it sound like a percussion ensemble. The technique of the prepared piano,
which is still used today by many composers, is considered Cage's first groundbreaking invention.
He used screws, gums, clamps, etc. to alter the sound of the piano.
à Music example (John Cage »Sonatas and Interludes«)
After a deep personal crisis in the 1940s Cage turned to Eastern philosophies such as the Zen
Buddhism. Later, in the 1950s he took a 2 year course of the famous Zen master Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, who has also influenced the famous painter Paul Klee for example. Through the study of Zen Buddhism Cage's outlook on life and his composing technique changed fundamentally.
All his life John Cage was not afraid of crossing boundaries of music and thought. A horrified audience member who told him that his works have nothing to do with music, he replied humorously: "Call it something else, if the word music bothers you." Cage's ideas are partly of such a groundbreaking nature, that it requires a great effort to perform them. All his life he was traveling and was always inspired by other cultures, artists, philosophers and scientists, which makes his work so complex. Meanwhile, he is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century.
Chance in John Cages Work
As composer John Cage was driven by the desire and the search of original and new sounds. A process, which Cage developed to achieve this goal, was the composing with chance operations. Compositional decisions such as pitches, durations and certain harmonies were not determined by Cage himself anymore but by chance1. This led Cage permanently to surprising sound results and helped him to avoid the repetition of traditional sound patterns.
1 In this way Cage pursued his ideal of freeing the composition process from the subject of the composer and to create a
Due to this fact Cage is often blamed of arbitrariness and randomness. But when taking a closer look one realizes that the way Cage uses chance operations in his compositions, it is always set stringently, clearly and unambiguously.
The mathematical basics for his chance operations were mostly taken from the Chinese book of oracles I Ching2. The I Ching includes 64 so called hexagrams. These are groupings of 6 solid or open lines each. Depending on the arrangement of the lines a number as well as a title is assigned to each hexagram:
2 The I Ching or Yi Jing 易经 or Zhouyi 周易 is also known as "Book of Changes, "" Changes of Zhou "or" Classic of Changes ". The collection of line drawings and phrases is one of the oldest Chinese texts. The book was written in the Western Zhou dynasty and was acribed to Duke Dan of Zhou 周公 旦, to Fuxi
Originally the I Ching was used for prophecies. Someone could ask a question about ones future and the I Ching gave the answer. The questioner simply had to toss 6 times 3 coins and add their sum after each toss. Heads has a value of 3, tails of 2. Is the sum of the three coins an even number, the questioner draws a open line, is the sum odd, he draws a solid one. After 6 coin tosses the hexagram is complete and the questioner can draw references to his future with the description given for each hexagram in the I Ching.
Cage applied this system to his compositional process. The first time he used the I Ching is for his piece Concert for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra from 1950/51. Before composing the first movement, Cage organizes the entire sound material, which the orchestra is using, in form of single notes, chords and tone sets on tables. He then connects each one of the 64 hexagrams with one musical event of the table and determines the timing of the musical elements in the score by coin tosses. In the course of his creative processes Cage subjugates not only the sound material to chance operations but also many different other musical parameters. In Child of Tree the interpret has to determine by coin flip, which of the ten previously selected instruments he/she wants to play, before the actual performance even takes place. In other pieces Cage generated the preparation of the piano or the location of the player in the concert room for instance with the I Ching oracle.
Composing with the I Ching method characterizes Cages work especially in the 1950s. In the following decades, the oracle book fades into the background, and other methods for the random generation of sound structures find their way into his oeuvre.
In the 1960s Cage was often inspired by graphic elements for this. For Music for Carillon No. 4 [1961] for example he placed a transparent score stencil on a star map and noted points on the lines where the stars were located. For Music for Carillon No. 5 [1967] he drew a stave on five plywood boards and gave the performer the instruction to play a sound always there, where the grain of the wood crosses a line of a stave or a space. In Music for Piano [85 works, 1952 - 1962] he already proceeded similarly, but he used irregularities and defects in the used paper sheets for this.
A third way Cage let chance take influence on the final musical result, is the handling of the different conditions on the location of the performance. In Fifteen Domestic Minutes [1982], the interpreter has to collect different records for his performance. Cage gives the instruction for this to go in the records archive of a radio station and to reach for records on the left or right of archive in accordance to a specific number of steps and running meters. The information about the way are always the same. Due to the different arrangements in the archives, it is always a different records that fall into the interpreters hands as a basis for his performance.
After still struggling to survive with a teaching assignment as répétiteur in the 1940s and 1950s, John Cage international breakthrough came in the late 1950s. In Europe in particular his impact on
the contemporary composer was enormous, even though many critics dismissed him and his aleatoric technique (Alea [Greek] = cube) as charlatanry. In particular, his performance compositions were highly controversial.
Sound, noise and silence – Cage's understanding of music
If someone gets engaged with Cage and lets his thoughts and ideas get inspired, so he soon
recognizes that it is very hard to judge what music basically is and what not. Silence actually appears to be the opposite of sound and noise; but is there such a thing as silence at all?
Cage asked himself this question too and in the early 1950s dared to venture an experiment. He
went to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and entered a special anechoic room, a
room without reverberation and no sound coming in from outside. In this room Cage finally discovered that something like absolute silence doesn't exist. The sound of his own breath was
omnipresent and though he didn’t move and tried not to produce any sound at all, he noticed two tones. A bright high tone and a low tone. Later he asked an engineer from the university why two different tones could be heard in this anechoic room. The engineer explained to Cage that the high
tone was produced by his own nervous system and the low tone was caused by his blood circulation.
Silence, that was Cage's consideration, cannot be understood as the opposite of sound and noise. Silence occurs when only a few or even no sounds at all can be heard, which on the other side
were produced without intention. So after Cage silence is not soundless but a state free from intention.
These thoughts and experiences, as well as his strong curiosity and his affinity to anything new,
resulted in his decision to leave himself as a composer out of the compositional process, more
precisely he wanted to exclude the individual itself, with it every individual decision and
everything subjective. Cage finally managed to produce unintentional and unplanned sound
events by involving chance operations in his compositional process. Cage conceives traditional
western music with its harmonic functions – like for example tonic, dominant, subdominant – and its basing on tonality, as "worn out through intellectualization". With including noises and non-‐
intentional sounds – also noises and sounds from everyday life – in his music, he manages to let
sounds be heard and experienced "fresh and new" again and without pre-‐built attributions. Cage himself said once: "I don’t hear music when I am composing; I compose to hear something that I
don’t know yet". In a similar context he was asked by a journalist what the purpose of his
experimental music is, to what he answered with just three words: "No Purpose. Sounds".
Therefore it wasn’t important for him that music would lead to a certain goal, like a finale or a
climax, but that it would emphasize the concentration on the single sound event, which appears
just once and is determined by chance, as the main aim of compositional work.
4'33'' – Cage's best known composition
Cage wanted to make his experience from the anechoic laboratory room and the resulting insights
accessible to a broader public and therefore composed his famous piece 4'33'' in 1952. In this
piece, which is separated in three movements and lasts for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, a pianist is
sitting at his grand piano but produces no tones or sounds at all. The missing of music violated the
most basic expectation of the audience -‐ that they would hear piano music -‐ and drew its attention inevitably to the sounds of the surrounding, to non-‐intentional sounds. Through the rustling or
people coughing, clearing their throat or starting to talk, shouts of outrage and complaint, through
the sounds and noises produced by the audience, the audience itself became a body of sound, a
instrument and the orchestra of their own music.
This so far shows that Cage's Music demands from all listeners to listen closely, in a new way and
to become aware of the usually ignored and vivid acoustic environment. Cage named only one requirement for experiencing this new music. He said: "You just have to have the ears to hear it". Cage never stopped developing new ideas to leave his compositional decisions to chance and
intentionally left many decisions to musicians and interpreters of his music. By staying on this way consequently he not only managed again and again to write “unheard” music , but he also
changed the perception of art in general. His ideas questioned basic terms like the work of art,
authorship and authenticity. He not only changed the general understanding of music itself but also influenced many following musicians and composers, as well as other artists, scientists, philosophers and sociologists.
The cactus as an instrument
In his compositions Cage frequently uses everyday objects and natural material like conchs, screws, wood, typewriters, plants etc. and explores their possibilities to produce sound. His way to
make even very quiet sounds and noises audible is through electric amplification. In this way Cage
made the cactus a electrically amplified music instrument which he used in his works "Child of
Tree", "Braches" and "Song Books" for example.
à Listening/Video Sample (John Cage »Child of Tree«)
To amplify the cactus a "piezo"-‐pickup is used. Other than the pickup of a electric guitar the
“piezo” doesn’t work with electromagnetism, which in the case of the electric guitar is caused by
the swinging of the metal strings, but with the electric voltage which appears when mechanic
pressure is supplied on a solid body or when this solid body gets deformed. This is what happens
when you pluck the needle of a cactus. To amplify the cactus the “piezo” simply has to get glued onto the cactus and get connected to an amplifier.
(cactus as exhibition object)
à Exhibition Object: Cactus
»Water Music«
The first, as a performance composition designed work is the Water Music of 1952. The pianist David Tudor, with whom Cage collaborated to an old age just like he did with the choreographer Merce Cunningham, has performed this work many times and contributed strongly to its fame by doing so. Water Music was composed in spring 1952 and had its premiere performance in May 1952. It is for several reasons and in special measures suitably to be performed, recorded and
represented worldwide via Internet at the most different places and countries.
On the one hand, the piece is one of Cage's first performance compositions. Among other things
this is seen by the fact that the pianist also appears as an interpreter of duck whistle, siren, deck of
cards and natural water. In addition the grand piano has to be prepared by the pianist during the
performance which means that the sound of the piano is changed by objects made of different materials like wood, bones, iron, plastic and rubber, since these objects are being stuck between
the piano strings or put on top of them.
Like many of Cages compositions this piece cannot be subdivided into bars, since it doesn't have a
certain meter which can be applied. Only the time is the basic authoritative unit. By not only
taking minutes and seconds into consideration but milliseconds as well and by simultaneously operating the piano as well as the mentioned artifacts, the actual performance is turning into a
audio-‐visual event for the audience, as well as into a virtuoso challenge for the pianist.
Another unusual feature of the composition -‐ besides the aspect that the title of the piece changes
with the place of the performance – is the use of a radio as an instrument which also must be
»played« by the pianist. Within the piece Cage gives different playing instructions on how to
operate the radio in form of clear instructions on frequency and loudness.
Due to the circumstance that different radio stations and with that all sorts of news,
advertisements, music directions and interfering noises can be heard on the specific frequencies in every country, each performance gets its own unique, place-‐specific local color and is never equal
to another one.
During the performance and the recording of the concerts it has to be taken into account, that the
score sheets must be hung up like posters according to playing instructions of John Cage. When
doing so the audience as well as the pianist must still be able to see the sheets.
The Water Music Project as part of CAGE100
With the »Water Music Project« the FZML [forum of contemporary music Leipzig] together with
the twin cities of Leipzig will realize a large-‐scale and spectacular live concert which will be
broadcasting worldwide on the Internet as one of the highlights of the international art and music
festival CAGE100.
As a comparable event one can perhaps refer to the Helikopter Streichquartett of Stockhausen which was also produced as an Internet live concert and was seen by a broad audience worldwide
on BBC.
In every of Leipzigs twin cities John Cages »Water Music« will be performed as a concert. This six-‐minute composition for piano solo has the unusual feature that the name or title changes with the
place of the performance; in this way the concert can correspondingly be entitled as »Addis Ababa
Music 2013« in Addis Ababa and in Leipzig as »Leipzig Music 2013« for example through which it becomes a unique piece in the history of music.
The performances of all participating towns will take place within the period of the 8th to the 22nd of March 2013. In every twin city an experienced technician will have a video camera and stereo
microphone to make a recording which then will be put as Live stream on the Internet platform of
the festival http://www.cage100.com. In this way the concerts can be followed online worldwide and at the same time.
The concert of every city will be available on the Internet platform lastingly, too and further can be
reproduced together with every or with selected other concerts in different twin cites
simultaneously, which then can generate a multiphone concert of its own and new art product which every Internet user can completely create and arrange him/herself in agreement with John
Cages thinking.
The towns can choose between two different forms of the participation: in the smaller version the twin city can decide to show the merely the six-‐minute piece of music in a representative room in
the city.
In the greater version on one hand the possibility of integrating the concert into a full-‐length
program is given, on the other an introduction or presentation of the city in form of a
documentation can be made before the concert. This then will also be a part of the Live streaming.
Concert for Piano and Orchestra
The large-‐scale composition "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" was made 1957-‐58 and dedicated to Elaine de Kooning. On the 15th of May 1958 it was first performed in New York City.
Elaine de Kooning [1918 – 1989] was a famous American painter and art critic. She was a
representative of abstract expressionism and exerted as a writer, art professor and accurate
observer of the so-‐called "New York School" an important influence on the development of
modern art in the USA.
[Self-‐Portrait of the artist, 1944]
Different from usual orchestral works, the "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" has no overall score.
Each voice of the orchestra can be played as solo or on any random combination with the other instruments of the orchestra. Depending on which instruments or instrument groups play
together, the name of the piece changes for example to "Solo for Cello", or to "Concert for Piano,
Trumpet, Violoncello and Bass".
Since the end of the 1940s John Cage's involvement in studying the teachings of philosophical and religious teachings from Far-‐East increased. Particularly Zen-‐Buddhism but also the spirituality of
Hinduism fascinated him and had a strong impact on his work as an artist; Cage's basic concept of eliminating everything subjective, familiar and intentional from his compositional process and
introducing chance as a structuring element can be related to this influences. In a letter from 1951
to Pierre Boulez, the patron of the CAGE100 Festival, he wrote: "I freed myself from what I
thought to be freedom, and which actually was only the accretion of habits and tastes."
With "Music of Changes" from 1951 Cage completed his first composition, which was exclusively
based on chance operations of the "I Ching"-‐Book. In the following years Cage intensively explored
other possibilities of composing on the basis of different chance operations. Seven Years after
"Music of Changes" he gave with the "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" a kind of compendium
which contains all of his up-‐to-‐date developed possibilities of composing with chance operations.
Parallel to his detailed chance research Cage developed various new ways of music notation,
mostly highly creative. The newly arising formal and musical Relations in this way find also visual expression in the composition. Just the pianist score within its 63 pages contain 84 different ways
of notation for example. [See Fig. 1-‐4]
[Fig. 1: Section from Solo for Piano]
[Fig. 2: Section from Solo for Piano]
[Fig. 3: Section from Solo for Piano]
[Fig. 4: Section from Solo for Piano]
à Exhibition Objects: Scores of the Concert for Orchestra and Piano
The individual notation elements concerning the way of playing and the duration can usually be interpreted freely. However, some notation element are preceded by explanatory score instructions which contain practical performance notes for the individual sections like the legend
of a map.
For the letter A [Fig. 1] e. g. the instruction is: »Following the perimeter, from any note on it, play
in opposite directions in the proportion given. Here and elsewhere, the absence of indications of
any kind means freedom fort he performer in that regard.« .
For the Letters AY [Fig. 2] the instruction is the following: »Graph music. 1/10 inch squared: Time
unit. Numbers within are of tones that may complete their appearance within any amount of time
area given them by graph. Vertical graph is frequency, the treble and bass areas mobile as
indicated.«
The score for the orchestra instruments are a little more conventionally than the one of the piano.
They consist of 12-‐16 sides each and every page consists of 5 staves [see Fig. 5].
[Fig. 5: Excerpt from Solo for Trumpets in E Flat, F, D, C, and B Flat]
These note systems can now, analogously to the procedure of the piano and within the limitations
of the playing instructions be interpreted freely. Cage, however, defines in these instructions a deciding prerequisite: As many different game techniques as possible must be used for the
interpretation of the score.
The by now legendary Concert for piano and Orchestra inspired numerous artists and scientists. So
e. g. the computer specialists Benny Sluchin and Mikhail who have developed a computer program which shall support the musician with his/her interpretation of the composition. Equally as
interesting are the researches of Homei Miyashita and Kazushi Nishimoto, who developed,
inspired by Cage's cunning notations in Concert for piano and Orchestra, an experimental live set-‐up which is based on temperature sensors and midi interfaces.
à Video Sample (John Cage »Concert for Piano and Orchestra«)
Fontana Mix
The Fontana Mix is also for various other reasons a central piece in Cage's work. In this piece several of Cage's basic revolutionary principles of composition are combined:
1. The minimizing of the influence of the composer on the musical end result
2. The strengthening of the artist and his influence on the performance of a piece
3. The detachment of a score in traditional sense in favor of a graphical basis for the creation
of music.
For the Fontana Mix Cage has compiled materials for the interpreter, with which he has to
inpedentendly compose a score within certain rules. They break down as follows:
1. 10 pages with 6 different lines each
2. 10 transparent foils with black points ordered arbitrarily
3. 1 grid also printed on transparency from 20 x 100 squares as well as
4. 1 black, straight line printed on transparency.
For the production of a playing score the interpreter takes 1 of the 10 pages, then puts 1 of 10
transparent foils with the points over the lines at own will, takes then the grid and puts it on the
previous material again at own will and uses the black, straight line which he puts over the
transparency at last. The black line must be placed so, that it connects one point outside the grid
and one point one inside the grid with each other. In this way a score page which has
approximately the following appearance arises:
One of these pages stands for a duration of 30 seconds each. Depending on the desired duration
the interpreter can produce any number of score pages.
Cage gives the instruction that only when the black diagonal touches one of the six curved lines a
musical event occurs3. How this musical event actually sounds is left in the hands of the
3 The musician interprets only the part of the sheet, in which the diagonal is located within the grid.
performer. Before the performance he must assign one musical parameter such as pitch or timbre
to each of the 6 different lines.
The only specification Cage makes with regards to the exact musical course, is that the musician
shall play with an increasing intensity if the the diagonal runs from the lower left up to the upper right side and with decreasing intensity if it runs in the opposite direction from the upper left side
down to lower right.
The cast with which Fontana mix can be realized, is selectable completely free. The forum of
contemporary music Leipzig performs the Fontana mix within the festival CAGE100 in a version for percussion solo and in a version for 2 dancers and 1 singer.
à Video Sample (John Cage »Fontana Mix«)
à Exhibition Object: Fontana Mix
