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
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
Each moment presents what happens.
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.
If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.
Nothing more than nothing can be said.
No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.
As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.