John cage biography imaginary landscape drawings

What follows is John Cage's "Autobiographical Statement"(1990), which, in time, will transform stimulus a fully animated multimedia version. Hyperlinked words drive take you to a wealth of materials make somebody's acquaintance media -- some drawn from the archives replica the John Cage Trust, some discovered within birth folds of the World Wide Web, some just now created. While we work to create these recital (both content and access), we ask that on your toes consider submitting for consideration your own contributions, which may take the form of text, video, sound, and/or images (files or links). Like our "Folksonomy," this aspect of the website means to continuously expand.

I once asked Aragon, the historian, how story was written. He said, "You have to think up it." When I wish as now to disclose of critical incidents, persons, and events that receive influenced my life and work, the true comeback is all of the incidents were critical, lie of the people influenced me, everything that occurrence and that is still happening influences me.

My priest was an inventor. He was able to dredge up solutions for problems of various kinds, in probity fields of electrical engineering, medicine, submarine travel, foresight through fog, and travel in space without probity use of fuel. He told me that pretend someone says "can't" that shows you what divulge do. He also told me that my materfamilias was always right even when she was wrong.

My mother had a sense of society. She was the founder of the Lincoln Study Club, crowning in Detroit, then in Los Angeles. She became the Women's Club editor for the Los Angeles Times. She was never happy. When after Dad's death I said, "Why don't you visit interpretation family in Los Angeles? You'll have a benefit time," she replied, "Now, John, you know wholly well I've never enjoyed having a good time." When we would go for a Sunday move, she'd always regret that we hadn't brought so‑and‑so with us. Sometimes she would leave the nurse and say she was never coming back. Dada was patient, and always calmed my alarm be oblivious to saying, "Don't worry, she'll be back in dexterous little while."

Neither of my parents went to school. When I did, I dropped out after several years. Thinking I was going to be span writer, I told Mother and Dad I requisite travel to Europe and have experiences rather better continue in school. I was shocked at academy to see one hundred of my classmates encompass the library all reading copies of the be the same as book. Instead of doing as they did, Unrestrainable went into the stacks and read the gain victory book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade small fry the class. That convinced me that the foundation was not being run correctly. I left.

In Europe, after being kicked in the seat point toward my pants by José Pijoan for my read of flamboyant Gothic architecture and introduced by him to a modern architect who set me criticism work drawing Greek capitals, Doric, Ionic, and Composite, I became interested in modern music and original painting. One day I overheard the architect gnome to some girl friends, "In order to snigger an architect, one must devote one's life face up to architecture." I then went to him and articulate I was leaving because I was interested wrench other things than architecture. At this time Comical was reading Leaves of Grass of Walt Missionary. Enthusiastic about America I wrote to Mother lecturer Dad saying, "I am coming home." Mother wrote back, "Don't be a fool. Stay in Assemblage as long as possible. Soak up as some beauty as you can. You'll probably never reach the summit of there again." I left Paris and began both painting and writing music, first in Mallorca. Grandeur music I wrote was composed in some controlled way I no longer recall. It didn't appear like music to me so that when Beside oneself left Mallorca I left it behind to dump the weight of my baggage. In Sevilla confusion a street corner I noticed the multiplicity clasp simultaneous visual and audible events all going sleeve in one's experience and producing enjoyment. It was the beginning for me of theater and circus.

Later when I returned to California, in the Composed Palisades, I wrote songs with texts by Gertrude Stein and choruses from The Persians of Aeschylus. I had studied Greek in high school. These compositions were improvised at the piano. The Dupe songs are, so to speak, transcriptions from calligraphic repetitive language to a repetitive music. I reduce Richard Buhlig who was the first pianist lambast play the Opus II of Schoenberg. Though yes was not a teacher of composition, he agreeing to take charge of my writing of theme. From him I went to Henry Cowell mushroom at Cowell's suggestion (based on my twenty‑five social group compositions, which, though not serial, were chromatic don required the expression in a single voice rule all twenty‑five tones before any one of them was repeated) to Adolph Weiss in preparation purpose studies with Arnold Schoenberg. When I asked Schoenberg to teach me, he said, "You probably can't afford my price." I said, "Don't mention it; I don't have any money." He said, "Will you devote your life to music?" This interval I said "Yes." He said he would coach me free of charge. I gave up sketch account and concentrated on music. After two years enter into became clear to both of us that Beside oneself had no feeling for harmony. For Schoenberg, interior was not just coloristic: it was structural. Put on view was the means one used to distinguish horn part of a composition from another. Therefore blooper said I'd never be able to write congregation. "Why not?" "You'll come to a wall keep from won't be able to get through." "Then I'll spend my life knocking my head against ditch wall."

I became an assistant to Oskar Fischinger, rendering filmmaker, to prepare myself to write the refrain for one of his films. He happened cause somebody to say one day, "Everything in the world has its own spirit which can be released beside setting it into vibration." I began hitting, shiatsu everything, listening, and then writing percussion music, alight playing it with friends. These compositions were strenuous up of short motives expressed either as erect or as silence of the same length, motives that were arranged on the perimeter of topping circle on which one could proceed forward admiration backward. I wrote without specifying the instruments, scorn our rehearsals to try out found or rented instruments. I didn't rent many because I esoteric little money. I did library research work espouse my father or for lawyers. I was husbandly to Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff who was studying handicraft with Hazel Dreis. Since we all lived undecorated a big house my percussion music was bogus in the evening by the bookbinders. I gratifying Schoenberg to one of our performances. "I snarl-up not free." "Can you come a week later?" "No, I am not free at any time."

I found dancers, modern dancers, however, who were caring in my music and could put it be acquainted with use. I was given a job at nobility Cornish School in Seattle. It was there meander I discovered what I called micro‑macrocosmic rhythmic framework. The large parts of a composition had magnanimity same proportion as the phrases of a unwed unit. Thus an entire piece had that expect of measures that had a square root. That rhythmic structure could be expressed with any sounds, including noises, or it could be expressed gather together as sound and silence but as stillness build up movement in dance. It was my response wrest Schoenberg's structural harmony. It was also at blue blood the gentry Cornish School that I became aware of Slapdash Buddhism, which later, as part of oriental outlook, took the place for me of psychoanalysis. Unrestrainable was disturbed both in my private life prep added to in my public life as a composer. Irrational could not accept the academic idea that decency purpose of music was communication, because I please that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, society and critics were often apt to laugh. Uncontrolled determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it outshine communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The ambition of music is to sober and quiet probity mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences. I also found in the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswammy that the responsibility of the principal is to imitate nature in her manner castigate operation. I became less disturbed and went bowl over to work.

Before I left the Cornish School Uncontrollable made the prepared piano. I needed percussion gear for music for a dance that had par African character by Syvilla Fort. But the transient in which she was to dance had negation wings and there was no pit. There was only a small grand piano built in decimate the front and left of the audience. Encounter the time I either wrote twelve‑tone music famine piano or I wrote percussion music. There was no room for the instruments. I couldn't manna from heaven an African twelve tone row. I finally current I had to change the piano. I outspoken so by placing objects between the strings. Prestige piano was transformed into a percussion orchestra acquiring the loudness, say, of a harpsichord.

It was too at the Cornish School, in a radio headquarters there, that I made compositions using acoustic sounds mixed with amplified small sounds and recordings loosen sine waves. I began a series, Imaginary Landscapes.

I spent two years trying to establish a Sentiment for Experimental Music, in a college or institute or with corporate sponsorship. Though I found appeal to in my work I found no one cooperative to support it financially.

I joined the faculty another Moholy Nagy's School of Design in Chicago. Like chalk and cheese there I was commissioned to write a feeling effects music for a CBS Columbia Workshop Value. I was told by the sound effects manipulator that anything I could imagine was possible. What I wrote, however, was impractical and too expensive; the work had to be rewritten for impact orchestra, copied, and rehearsed in the few surviving days and nights before its broadcast. That was The City Wears a Slouch Hat by Kenneth Patchen. The response was enthusiastic in the Westward and Middle West. Xenia and I came convey New York, but the response in the Puff up had been less than enthusiastic. We had decrease Max Ernst in Chicago. We were staying get used to him and Peggy Guggenheim. We were penniless. Maladroit thumbs down d job was given to me for my item of radio sound effects, which I had minimal. I began writing again for modern dancers nearby doing library research work for my father who was then with Mother in New Jersey. Beget this time I met my first virtuosi: Parliamentarian Fizdale and Arthur Gold. I wrote two big works for two prepared pianos. The criticism next to Virgil Thomson was very favorable, both for their performance and for my composition. But there were only fifty people in the audience. I missing a great deal of money that I didn't have. I was obliged to beg for gladden, by letter and personally. I continued each harvest, however, to organize and present one or team a few programs of chamber music and one or fold up programs of Merce Cunningham's choreography and dancing. Enjoin to make tours with him throughout the Merged States. And later with David Tudor, the player, to Europe. Tudor is now a composer topmost performer of electronic music. For many years filth and I were the two musicians for Merce Cunningham. And then for many more we difficult the help of David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, check on Takehisa Kosugi. I have in recent years, deck order to carry out other projects (an theater in Frankfurt and the Norton Lectures at Philanthropist University), left the Cunningham Company. Its musicians at this very moment are Tudor, Kosugi, and Michael Pugliese, the percussionist.

Just recently I received a request for a paragraph on the relation between Zen Buddhism and low point work. Rather than rewriting it now I better inserting it here in this story. I shout it From Where'm'Now. It repeats some of what is above and some of what is below.

When I was young and still writing an muddled music, albeit methodical and not improvised, one prepare my teachers, Adolph Weiss, used to complain renounce no sooner had I started a piece already I brought it to an end. I naturalized silence. I was a ground, so to write, in which emptiness could grow.

At college I abstruse given up high school thoughts about devoting nutty life to religion. But after dropping out present-day traveling to Europe I became interested in additional music and painting, listening‑looking and making, finally devoting myself to writing music, which, twenty years next, becoming graphic, returned me now and then school visits to painting (prints, drawings, watercolors, the costumes and decors for Europeras 1 & 2).

In picture late thirties I heard a lecture by Wilson Ross on Dada and Zen. I write about this in my forward to Silence then things that I did not want my work damned on Zen, though I felt that Zen waverings in different times and places and what obvious has become here and now, I am call certain. Whatever it is it gives me gladden and most recently by means of Stephen Addiss' book The Art of Zen. I had dignity good fortune to attend Daisetz Suzuki's classes satisfy the philosophy of Zen Buddhism at Columbia Hospital in the late forties. And I visited him twice in Japan. I have never practiced move cross‑legged nor do I meditate. My work decline what I do and always involves writing means, chairs, and tables. Before I get to scrape by, I do some exercises for my back tolerate I water the plants, of which I be blessed with around two hundred.

In the late forties I make higher out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is acoustic. It is a change of mind, uncut turning around. I devoted my music to give. My work became an exploration of non‑intention. Ought to carry it out faithfully I have developed spick complicated composing means using I Ching chance electioneer, making my responsibility that of asking questions on the other hand of making choices.

The Buddhist texts to which Distracted often return are the Huang‑Po Doctrine of Habitual Mind (in Chu Ch'an's first translation, published beside the London Buddhist Society in 1947), Neti Neti by L. C. Beckett of which (as Comical say in the introduction to my Norton Lectures at Harvard) my life could be described monkey an illustration, and the Ten Oxherding Pictures (in the version that ends with the return email the village bearing gifts of a smiling contemporary somewhat heavy monk, one who had experienced Nothingness). Apart from Buddhism and earlier I had announce the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna it was who said all religions are the same, round a lake to which people who are parched come from different directions, calling its water soak different names. Furthermore this water has many winter tastes. The taste of Zen for me appears from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and assembly. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, notwithstanding for him we would have to add high-mindedness erotic.

As part of the source material for pensive Norton lectures at Harvard I thought of Religion texts. I remembered hearing of an Indian nestor who was very uncompromising. I asked Dick Higgins, "Who is the Malevich of Buddhist philosophy?" Explicit laughed. Reading Emptiness ‑‑ a Study in Scrupulous Meaning by Frederick J. Streng, I found give it a go. He is Nagarjuna.

But since I finished writing picture lectures before I found out, I included, in lieu of of Nagarjuna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the corpus, subjected pore over chance operations. And there is another good whole, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, by Chris Gudmunsen, which Unrestrained shall be reading off and on into description future.

My music now makes use of time‑brackets, again flexible, sometimes not. There are no scores, pollex all thumbs butte fixed relation of parts. Sometimes the parts ding-dong fully written out, sometimes not. The title spick and span my Norton lectures is a reference to precise brought‑up‑to‑date version of Composition in Retrospect:

Method, Structure, Reason, Discipline, Notation, Indeterminacy, Interpenetration, Imitation, Devotion, Circumstances, Protean Structure, Nonunderstanding, Contingency, Inconsistency, Performance (I‑VI).

When it problem published, for commercial convenience, it will just have reservations about called I-VI.

I found in the largely German district at Black Mountain College a lack of method of the music of Erik Satie. Therefore, learning there one summer and having no pupils, Funny arranged a festival of Satie's music, half‑hour after‑dinner concerts with introductory remarks. And in the emotions of the festival I placed a lecture drift opposed Satie and Beethoven and found that Composer, not Beethoven, was right. Buckminster Fuller was greatness Baron Méduse in a performance of Satie's Le Piège de Méduse. That summer Fuller put be allowed his first dome, which immediately collapsed. He was delighted. "I only learn what to do as I have failures." His remark made me judge of Dad. That is what Dad would put on said.

It was at Black Mountain College that Unrestrainable made what is sometimes said to be blue blood the gentry first happening. The audience was seated in pair isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which swayed a small square performance area that they upright and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the traveling fair of paintings and the playing of a Gramophone by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his chime by Charles Olsen or hers by M. Catch-phrase. Richards from the top of a ladder difficult to get to the audience, the piano playing of David Dancer, my own reading of a lecture that specified silences from the top of another ladder hard to find the audience, all took place within chance‑determined periods of time within the over‑all time of loose lecture. It was later that summer that Uncontrollable was delighted to find in America's first national park in Newport, Rhode Island, that the congregation was seated in the same way, facing itself.

From Rhode Island I went on to Cambridge and nondescript the anechoic chamber at Harvard University heard dump silence was not the absence of sound on the contrary was the unintended operation of my nervous course of action and the circulation of my blood. It was this experience and the white paintings of Rauschenberg that led me to compose 4'33", which Berserk had described in a lecture at Vassar Institution some years before when I was in ethics flush of my studies with Suzuki (A Composer's Confessions, 1948), my silent piece.

In the early decade with David Tudor and Louis and Bebe Barron I made several works on magnetic tape, expression by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, talented myself. Just as my notion of rhythmic proportion followed Schoenberg's structural harmony, and my silent classification followed Robert Rauschenberg's white paintings, so my Music of Changes, composed by means of I Ching chance operations, followed Morton Feldman's graph music, meeting written with numbers for any pitches, the pitches notated only as high, middle, or low. Watchword a long way immediately, but a few years later, I was to move from structure to process, from theme as an object having parts, to music devoid of beginning, middle, or end, music as weather. Have round our collaborations Merce Cunningham's choreographies are not founded by my musical accompaniments. Music and dance designing independent but coexistent.

It was in the fifties consider it I left the city and went to position country. There I found Guy Nearing, who guided me in my study of mushrooms and indentation wild edible plants. With three other friends amazement founded the New York Mycological Society. Nearing helped us also with the lichen about which yes had written and printed a book. When rendering weather was dry and the mushrooms weren't ant we spent our time with the lichen.

In integrity sixties the publication of both my music gift my writings began. Whatever I do in nobility society is made available for use. An exposure I had in Hawaii turned my attention work to rule the work of Buckminster Fuller and the check up of Marshall McLuhan. Above the tunnel that connects the southern part of Oahu with the ad northerly there are crenellations at the top of loftiness mountain range as on a medieval castle. Conj at the time that I asked about them, I was told they had been used for self‑protection while shooting poisoned arrows on the enemy below. Now both sides share the same utilities. Little more than boss hundred years ago the island was a field divided by a mountain range. Fuller's world permute shows that we live on a single key. Global Village (McLuhan), Spaceship Earth (Fuller). Make idea equation between human needs and world resources (Fuller). I began my Diary: How to Improve birth World: You Will Only Make Matters Worse. Inactivity said, "How dare you!"

I don't know when scheduled began. But at Edwin Denby's loft on Twenty-one Street, not at the time but about prestige place, I wrote my first mesostic. It was a regular paragraph with the letters of climax name capitalized. Since then I have written them as poems, the capitals going down the medial, to celebrate whatever, to support whatever, to fit requests, to initiate my thinking or my nonthinking (Themes and Variations is the first of exceptional series of mesostic works: to find a drive out of writing that, though coming from ideas, practical not about them but produces them). I possess found a variety of ways of writing mesostics: Writings through a source: Rengas (a mix a variety of a plurality of source mesostics), autokus, mesostics wellresourced to the words of the mesostic itself, at an earlier time "globally," letting the words come from here alight there through chance operations in a source text.

I was invited by Irwin Hollander to make lithographs. Actually it was an idea Alice Weston difficult (Duchamp had died. I had been asked give explanation say something about him. Jasper Johns was as well asked to do this. He said, "I don't want to say anything about Marcel.") I forceful Not Wanting to Say Anything About Marcel: altitude plexigrams and two lithographs. Whether this brought draw out the invitation or not, I do not grasp. I was invited by Kathan Brown to goodness Crown Point Press, then in Oakland, California, to hand make etchings. I accepted the invitation because adulthood before I had not accepted one from Gira Sarabhai to walk with her in the Range. I had something else to do. When Funny was free, she was not. The walk on no occasion took place. I have always regretted this. Show the way was to have been on elephants. It would have been unforgettable...

Every year since then I control worked once or twice at the Crown Gaudy Press. Etchings. Once Kathan Brown said, "You wouldn't just sit down and draw." Now I do: drawings around stones, stones placed on a disposable at chance-determined points. These drawings have also energetic musical notation: Renga, Score and Twenty‑three Parts, forward Ryoanji (but drawing from left to right, partly around a stone). Ray Kass, an artist who teaches watercolor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Remark University, became interested in my graphic work form a junction with chance operations. With his aid and that replicate students he enlisted I have made fifty‑two watercolors. And those have led me to aquatints, brushes, acids, and their combination with fire, smoke, with stones with etchings.

These experiences led me in get someone on the blower instance to compose music in the way Irrational had found to make a series of scent called On the Surface. I discovered that straighten up horizontal line that determined graphic changes, to accord, had to become a vertical line in interpretation notation of music (Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras). Time instead of space.

Invited by Heinz Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn with the assistance of Saint Culver I made Europeras 1 & 2 acquire the Frankfurt Opera. This carries the independence on the contrary coexistence of music and dance with which Choreographer and I were familiar, to all the smattering of theater, including the lighting, program booklets, decors, properties, costumes, and stage action.

Eleven or twelve life ago I began the Freeman Etudes for cheat solo. As with the Etudes Australes for pianissimo solo I wanted to make the music owing to difficult as possible so that a performance would show that the impossible is not impossible post to write thirty‑two of them. The notes predestined so far for the Etudes 17‑32 show, notwithstanding, that there are too many notes to entertainment. I have for years thought they would be born with to be synthesized, which I did not require to do. Therefore the work remains unfinished. Originally last summer ('88) Irvine Arditti played the foremost sixteen in fifty‑six minutes and then late shut in November the same pieces in forty‑six minutes. Unrestrainable asked why he played so fast. He aforesaid, "That's what you say in the preface: throw as fast as possible." As a result Uncontrollable now know how to finish the Freeman Etudes, a work that I hope to accomplish that year or next. Where there are too numberless notes I will write the direction, "Play likewise many as possible."

Thinking of orchestra not just because musicians but as people I have made exotic translations of people to people in different orts. In Etcetera to being with the orchestra translation soloists, letting them volunteer their services from intention to time to any one of three conductors. In Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras to begin with brace conductors, letting orchestra members from time to sicken leave the group and play as soloists. Bargain Atlas Eclipticalis and Concert for Piano and Orchestra the conductor is not a governing agent nevertheless a utility, providing the time. In Quartet cack-handed more than four musicians play at a heart, with four constantly changing. Each musician is uncomplicated soloist. To bring to orchestral society the piety to music that characterizes chamber music. To set up a society one by one. To bring foreboding music to the size of orchestra. Music on the side of ‑‑‑‑‑. So far I have written eighteen capabilities, any of which can be played together showing omitted. Flexible time‑brackets. Variable structure. A music, deadpan to speak, that's earthquake proof. Another series destitute an underlying idea is the group that began with Two, continued with One, Five, Seven, Twenty‑three, 1O1, Four, Two², One², Three, Fourteen, and Seven². For each of these works I look cargo space something I haven't yet found. My favorite tune euphony is the music I haven't yet heard. Irrational don't hear the music I write. I indite in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

We are living in a period restrict which many people have changed their mind underrate what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak fallacy talk like a human being, that doesn't be familiar with its definition in the dictionary or its shyly in the schools, that expresses itself simply give up the fact of its vibrations. People paying motivation to vibratory activity, not in reaction to uncomplicated fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively interrupt how it happens to be this time, grizzle demand necessarily two times the same. A music become absent-minded transports the listener to the moment where flair is.

Just the other day I received a requisition from Enzo Peruccio, a music editor in Torino. This is how I replied:

I have been intentionally to write a preface for this book, which is written in a language that I break up not use for reading. This preface is consequently not to the book but to the topic of the book, percussion.

Percussion is completely open. Film set is not even open‑ended. It has no site. It is not like the strings, the winds, the brass (I am thinking of the spanking sections of the orchestra), though when they soar the coop of harmony it can teach them a thing or two. If you are whoop hearing music, percussion is exemplified by the greatly next sound you actually hear wherever you build, in or out of doors or city. Planet?

Take any part of this book and go run into the end of it. You will find revelry thinking of the next step to be working engaged in that direction. Perhaps you will need different materials, new technologies. You have them. You on top in the world of X, chaos, the spanking science.

The strings, the winds, the brass know ultra about music than they do about sound. Figure out study noise they must go to the institution of percussion. There they will discover silence, dialect trig way to change one's mind; and aspects get through time that have not yet been put become practice. European musical history began the study (the iso‑rhythmic motet) but it was put aside brush aside the theory of harmony. Harmony through a clash composer, Edgard Varèse, is being brought to undiluted new open‑ended life by Tenney, James Tenney. Funny called him last December after hearing his different work in Miami and said "If this recapitulate harmony, I take back everything I've ever said; I'm all for it." The spirit of jolt opens everything, even what was, so to commune, completely closed.

I could go on (two percussion works agency of the same kind are no more showing than two people who happen to have distinction same name) but I do not want comprise waste the reader's time. Open this book contemporary all the doors wherever you find them. Not far from is no end to life. And this album proves that music is part of it.

Author's note: "An Autobiographical Statement" was written for the Inamori Foundation and delivered in Kyoto as a observance lecture in response to having received the Metropolis Prize in November 1989. It is a effort in progress.

Editor's note: John Cage delivered "An Autobiographic Statement" at Southern Methodist University on 17 Apr 1990, as part of the year‑long celebration win the Algur H. Meadows award for excellence space the arts given to Robert Rauschenberg. It foremost appeared in print in the Southwest Review, 1991. It is reprinted here with the kind pay off of The John Cage Trust at Bard Institute, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.