walking upstream…
John Cage
photo: rob bogaerts / anefo · cc0 ↗John Cage
sourcesWikipedia2 · James Pritchett
Born in Los Angeles in 1912, John Cage studied briefly and intensely with Arnold Schoenberg before abandoning conventional harmony altogether in favor of rhythm, noise, and eventually pure chance, using tools like the I Ching to remove his own taste and intention from composition. He is best remembered for 4'33", a piece of notated silence that reframes ambient sound as music, and for inventing the "prepared piano" by wedging screws, bolts, and rubber between piano strings to turn it into a one-man percussion orchestra. By the time of his death in 1992, Cage had become the most influential and confrontational figure in American experimental music, as much a philosopher of sound as a composer of it.
the sound in question
1952
4'33"John Cage
walk the tributaries ↓
Arnold Schoenberg1910s–20s · Contemporary classical / Atonal / Twelve-tone
Cage studied composition privately, and at USC and UCLA, with Schoenberg in the 1930s. When Cage confessed he had "no feeling for harmony," Schoenberg reportedly warned he'd eventually hit a wall he couldn't get through — to which Cage replied he'd beat his head against that wall for the rest of his life. He never mastered orthodox harmony, but Schoenberg's rigor and insistence on structural discipline pushed Cage toward organizing systems of his own, including an early tone-row technique in the twelve-tone spirit of his teacher.
listen: upstream & heresource: British Journal of Music Education ↗
1912
Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21: I. MondestrunkenArnold Schoenberg
1938
MetamorphosisJohn Cage
listen forListen to the eerie Sprechstimme vocal line of Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" hovering outside normal tonality, then play Cage's own 1938 piano suite "Metamorphosis," built from a repeating, transposed tone row, even though Cage never adopted Schoenberg's twelve-tone method wholesale.
Henry Cowell1920s · Contemporary classical / Experimental / Avant-garde
Cage moved to New York in 1933 specifically to study with Henry Cowell at the New School, taking his courses on non-Western and contemporary music and serving for a time as his assistant. Cowell — who had already been reaching directly inside the piano to play its strings — gave Cage both a direct model for treating the piano as a percussion instrument and grounding in the rhythmic and non-Western ideas that fed his own later experiments with prepared piano and percussion ensembles.
listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia ↗
1925
The BansheeHenry Cowell
1939
First Construction (in Metal)John Cage
listen forListen to Cowell reach inside the piano and stroke the strings by hand on "The Banshee," conjuring howls and moans no key could produce — then play Cage's "First Construction (in Metal)," scored for anvils, brake drums, and gongs, and notice the same core idea: unconventional objects, not the tempered keyboard, generating the sound.
Erik Satie1910s · Contemporary classical / Impressionist / Avant-garde
Cage became one of Satie's most devoted latter-day champions, writing that "Erik Satie is indispensable" and organizing — and performing in — a notorious 1963 marathon performance of Satie's Vexations. That devotion became direct compositional material in 1969's "Cheap Imitation," which Cage built by taking the exact phrase structure and rhythm of Satie's "Socrate" and using I Ching chance operations to generate new pitches over that same skeleton.
listen: upstream & here
1918
SocrateErik Satie
1969
Cheap ImitationJohn Cage
listen forPlay the spare, hypnotic vocal line of Satie's "Socrate," its phrases plain and understated rather than dramatic, then listen to Cage's "Cheap Imitation" and notice how the phrasing and rhythmic contour feel eerily familiar even though every pitch has been replaced by chance — a direct trace of Satie's shape under Cage's own note choices.