John Cage: Avant-Garde Composer

Random playfulness of chance performances challenge the role of the music maker.

Apr 12, 2006

John Cage's aleatoric (or chance) compositions are difficult to listen to, but his reduction of composer involvement paves the way for a better understanding of the perfo

Suppose you went to a concert where the performer sat at a piano bench doing absolutely nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. The performer opens the piano lid a few times and bangs it shut. Maybe he coughs and shuffles his feet. Perhaps he leans over the body of the piano and blows on the strings. But, unlike 99.99% of all other piano performers, this pianist avoids depressing the keys of the instrument.

After four minutes and thirty-three seconds of this display, the performance is over. The audience might leave the concert confused: how did this collection of random, bizarre, and incoherent sounds actually count as music?

If you are up on the avant-garde scene, then you probably recognized the piece I just described as John Cage's 4'33", perhaps one of the most cited works to challenge Western ideas concerning what counts as music.

John Cage, heavily influenced by zen Buddhism, tried to create music that reflected the random playfulness he perceived in the world. He experimented with chance (or aleatoric) techniques that left a large portion of the composition up to the performer.

In pieces such as 1'1/2" for a String Player, for example, Cage indicates where the player is to stop the string on his instrument (limiting the range of notes to be played), but gives no instructions on the precise sequence of those notes. That decision is left up to the performer.

Because Western philosophy since the Enlightenment has emphasized the mind over the body, the intellect of the composer usually trumps the activity of the performer when determining authorship of a piece of music. Yet Cage's compositions (or noncompositions, depending upon how you look at it) reduce composer involvement and in turn highlight the contributions that performers make to the creation of music.

Instead of appearing to be passive conduits of a dead man's ideas about music, performers of Cage's works are given the chance to be explicitly recognized as co-creators in the work of music.

The copyright of the article John Cage: Avant-Garde Composer in Classical Music is owned by Sarah Canice Funke. Permission to republish John Cage: Avant-Garde Composer in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.