John Cage

USA, 1938–1992

American composer whose prepared piano, use of chance procedures and the silent 4'33" widened what could be treated as musical material. He is a reference point for experimental and electronic music.

MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced John Cage and 15 artists John Cage influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced John Cage?

• Henry Cowell — Henry Cowell was John Cage's direct teacher — he introduced Cage to non-Western music, extended piano techniques and American experimentalism.
• Fannie Charles Dillon — Dillon was Cage's music teacher at Los Angeles High School in the late 1920s; her practice of transcribing bird calls into scores planted the seed for Cage's lifelong interest in incorporating natural and environmental sounds into music.
• Arnold Schoenberg — Schoenberg was Cage's direct teacher in Los Angeles, though Cage later rejected twelve-tone writing entirely in favour of chance.

Which artists did John Cage influence?

• Karlheinz Stockhausen — Cage's Darmstadt lectures and aleatoric methods directly triggered Stockhausen's use of chance in 'Klavierstück XI' and subsequent works.
• Brian Eno — Cage's concept of music-as-process and his embrace of silence and chance were the philosophical backbone of Eno's ambient and generative music.
• The Velvet Underground — John Cale entered the Velvet Underground from La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, a group directly built on Cage's drone and noise aesthetics.
• Cabaret Voltaire — Cabaret Voltaire's embrace of noise as music and tape collage as composition drew explicitly on Cage's expanded definition of sound.
• Genesis P-Orridge — P-Orridge cited Cage's redefinition of music and performance art as a primary philosophical model for Throbbing Gristle's industrial practice.
• Gavin Bryars — Cage and his aesthetics of chance and found sound are the direct conceptual source of Bryars's approach to found recordings.
• La Monte Young — Young's early Fluxus-period work grew directly from Cage's ideas — his word pieces answer Cage's chance operations.
• Morton Feldman — Feldman met Cage in 1950 — the friendship that founded the New York School; Cage's liberation of sound made Feldman's music possible, as he said all his life.
• Pauline Oliveros — Oliveros's text scores and meditations grew from the experimental permission Cage created — a lineage she acknowledged while turning it toward listening itself.
• Alvin Lucier — Lucier's phenomena-as-music descends from Cage's opening of music to all sound — the acknowledged frame of the Sonic Arts Union generation.
• Cornelius Cardew — The 1958 Cage/Tudor visit to Europe converted Cardew to indeterminacy — Treatise is unthinkable without it.
• Christian Wolff — The teenage Wolff joined Cage's circle in 1950 — and gave Cage the I Ching from his father's publishing house, the book that changed Cage's music forever.
• The United States of America — Joseph Byrd came out of the New York avant-garde around Cage — his Fluxus-era work and the band's electronic theory descend from Cage's aesthetics.
• Ryuichi Sakamoto — Cage's ideas about sound, silence and chance shaped Sakamoto's experimental side; the two eventually worked together.
• Toru Takemitsu — Meeting Cage in 1964 was the shock that sent Takemitsu back to Japanese tradition and to indeterminacy and graphic scores.