Composer- John Cage - Research Paper Example

He dropped out from college in his second year and sailed to Europe where he wrote his first pieces of music, but not liking them, he left them behind on his return to America, after being in Europe for 18 months. Cage was tutored by Schoenberg for free on the condition he “devoted his life to music”, which Cage readily agreed, but after two years he stopped his lessons because of the fact that he had no feeling for harmony. After that, he began to experiment with percussion instruments and gradually made the rhythm the basis of his music instead of harmony, structuring pieces according to the duration of sections.

He went to the Cornish School of Arts in Seattle, Washington in the late 1930’s where he found a job as an accompanist for dancers and was asked to write music to accompany a dance by Syvilla Fort called Bacchanale. He wanted to write a percussion piece but had to write for a piano because there was no pit at the performance venue for a percussion ensemble.While working on the piece, Cage experimented by placing a metal plate on top of the strings of the instrument. He liked the produced sound and eventually he invented the prepared piano with screws, bolts, strips of rubber and other objects placed between the strings of the piano to change the instrument’s character.

It may be that Cage was influenced by his old teacher Henry Cowell who also treated the piano in a non-standard way. For example, asking the performers to strum the strings with their fingers. Widely seen to be his greatest work for prepared piano are The Sonatas and Interludes of 1946-48. Pierre Boulez organized the European premiere of the work and the two composers struck up a correspondence. Unfortunately, this correspondence stopped with a disagreement over Cage’s use of chance in his music.

While being at Cornish, Cage also founded a percussion orchestra for which he wrote his First Construction (In Metal) in 1939, a piece in which loud rhythmic music is created by metal percussion instruments, and the Imaginary Landscape No. 1, which is the first example of using record players as instruments. In later years, Cage wrote a number of other Imaginary Landscape pieces. In order to introduce an element of chance over which he would have no control, Cage began to use the I Ching in the composition of his music.

In the Music of Changes for solo piano in 1951, he used it to determine which notes should be used and when they should be heard. He used chance in Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951) as well. This peace was written for twelve radio receivers. Each radio has two players- one that controls the frequency and the other that controls the volume. “Cage wrote very precise instructions in the score about how the performers should set their radios and change them over time, but he could not control the actual sound coming out of them, which was dependent on whatever radio shows were playing at that particular place and time of performance.

”( http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Aleatoric_music) Cage’s friend and colleague from Black Mountain college had produced a series of white paintings while working at the college. These paintings, apparently blank canvases, changed according to varying light conditions in the rooms in which they were hung, the shadows of people in