John Cage - master of a rule -free and modern music

The 100th birthday of a century musician can be celebrated: On September 5, 2012, the exceptional musician John Cage have been 100 years old! Lean back and commemorate a minute of his music (see the following short video with the song "Ocean of Sounds").

Do you have no work from John Cage from the memory? Yes, probably, at least if you have a really quiet space in your living environment in which you can withdraw. If you do this for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, you have just heard John Cage piece “4.33”, a piece that, according to John Cages, “does not contain any intended sounds” (that is, not a single grade, if the environment is quiet, you only hear your blood rushing).

This piece is now considered the key work of “new music”, until “4.33”, John Cage had already composed over 100 other amazing works, around 150 compositions that also put the world of traditional composition upside down.

Although the “new music” has been around for a while at the beginning of his work: Under this term, the efforts have been summarized since the beginning of the 20th century to lead the music beyond the classic-romantic composition style of the 19th century.

The name comes from a lecture from 1919, which the music journalist Paul Bekker thought about tendencies in the currently emerging music, he was later taken over for the most diverse modernization tendencies of the “serious” music of the 20th, then also of the 21st century.

The turn of the 20th century already initiated a renewal of music with composers such as Gustav Mahler, Ferruccio Busoni, Franz Schreker and Arnold Schönberg. The musicians were looking for new ideas for all musical stylistic devices. Soon there are completely new musical experiments, the possibility of independence of the rhythm was z. B. discovered or noises were made part of the music.

The "new music" does not develop a higher -level, uniform style, but is sometimes shown in many different styles, by individual composers, sometimes in individual works. The 20th century is probably the first century that polystilistics .

In principle, the “new music” was also influenced by the technical innovations of radio technology and sound recording, which made music reproducible for the first time and thus popularized the structure of the previously elite listeners. The musical potential of the new technology itself was also to be researched and gave the composers of time to many compositional experiments.

The Second World War was a devastating cut in this pluralistic development of the new music, which was to be collected after 1945 by providing new institutions for the musicians and their training.

Music universities were reopened with the clear demand for a new beginning or completely re-founded, public service broadcasters gave the composers a new forum, and the allocation of composition orders also stimulates production in order to build on the interrupted development.

While the most important impulses for creating a “new music” from Europe came in the pre -war period, often from the German -speaking area, the development becomes increasingly international after the end of the war. In addition to observing the work in the traditional European music countries such as France, Italy, Poland and Switzerland, the United States is now also paying attention with the district around John Cage and Morton Feldman in international music events.

John Cage took some time before he reached this recognition: in 1912 he was born into a cosmopolitan home, with an engineer and inventor as a father and a journalist as a mother. He spent stimulating childhood in California and received piano lessons at a young age.

The high school Cage graduated in 1928 with the highest number of points awarded so far, followed by two years of studies in the literature. At 18, Cage went to Europe one and a half years, where he studied classical architecture and the music of Bach, wrote poems and had the first homosexual experiences.

Cage met the European artistic avant-garde, the work of Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp , Kurt Schwitters and László Moholy-Nagy, he was in Germany, Algeria and Spain, he painted and wrote his first compositions .

In 1931 Cage returned to the USA, where he partly suffered bitter financial hardship and accepted all sorts of jobs. Nevertheless, he began studying composition in 1932, initially with Richard Buhlig, in 1933 he met Xenia Kashevaroff, she married 1935. In his studies, Cage had now occupied harmony teaching with the first American student Arnold Schönbergs, now he took private lessons in counterpoint composition technology until 1937, although Schönberg was nevertheless able to compose.

The unsteady life continued: in 1938 Cage received a commitment to the Mills College in San Francisco, as a music accompaniment for dance classes, from there he was taught to the Cornish College of the Arts, where he worked for choreographer Bonnie Bird (Martha Graham Group). Afterwards he gave lectures in Seattle and founded a drum ensemble there, in which Merce Cunningham occasionally played along, the most important person in his life.

At first, however, Cage returned to San Francisco in 1940, again worked as a musical companion of the dance class of the Mill College and was then asked by Syvilla for a composition for her ballet. Since ballet music with drums could not be done, Cage used an existing piano, the sound mechanics of which he prepared with small everyday objects in order to elicit the desired African sounds.

From 1941, Cage was able to teach a class in experimental music on the Chicago School of Design and met Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst there, who invited him to New York . Cage moved to New York with his wife, they lived at the Ernst-Guggenheim couple and were introduced to their artists who were known, Ua Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and André Breton.

In 1943 these connections made a concert in the Museum of Modern Art , now he became known in the New York avant-garde circles and was able to make contacts. He met musicians, dancers and visual artists and was able to write some work for celebrities like Marcel Duchamp. Now Cage was finally able to make a living with his composition work.

In the following decade, he worked with numerous artists of the time and also got to know numerous others, Xenia and he separates and Cage finds his life and working partner in Cunningham, with whom he designs and performs numerous dance productions. This was followed by a further stay in Europe together with Cunningham, which founded further artist friendships (Pierre Boulez, Alberto Giacometti, Ellsworth Kelly), the experiments of his compositions became more and more daring, staged in 1952 the first happening in the world , but also wrote down at Columbia University for Zen courses.

The search for a simple life also caused Cage to deal intensively with mushrooms, from collecting to preparation. In the 1950s, Cage also undertook an extensive concert tour through Europe, taught and had a great influence on the fluxus movement , whose artists belonged to his students.

Cage's life remained similar to the next 30 years until he succumbed to a stroke in 1992: he taught and composed and got to know the time sizes , Karlheinz Stockhausen and Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Erik Satie, Joseph Beuys and Claes Oldenburg and probably also every other artist who was open to new experiences and wanted to explore the limits of traditional forms of expression.

When Cage dealt with developing a “dominant music” in which every sound, no sound and sound is equivalent, he has not only irretrievably influenced the development of modern music. John Cage was always because people could also participate in music without money and without training and were given the opportunity to learn to hear and compose.

When he composed “random music”, the grades of which were determined by the oracle I-ging or by star cards, he was less concerned with the sound of the music, but rather to break up hearing habits.

Why? For Cage, openness to a new, experimental form of expression is an attitude that must be conveyed urgently for everyone through school and upbringing. Because if you only hear and read uniform porridge, you can only think in the run. Those who think in the run -in lanes, question little and take a lot of things uncritically ...

If you have become curious: you can listen to a piece by John Cage in the Burchardi Church in Halberstadt . You also do not need to hurry up to Halberstadt, the piece will be listed until 2640, so you still have over 600 years (no, this is not a joke, but a really breathtaking project!).

No more should be revealed here, all further information can be found at www.aslsp.org .