John Cage
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr.was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth5 September 1912
CountryUnited States of America
I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.
What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.