Like many artists, John Cage was ahead of his time and wasn’t recognized for his creativity until his old age. His most famous piece is 4 '33, a piece in pure silence on the musician's end. However, there really isn’t silence in this composition. Instead, the noise comes from the audience and their reaction, which for John Cage included people leaving and yelling during the third act. This piece is often defined as “an act of framing, of enclosing environmental and unintended sounds in a moment of attention in order to open the mind to the fact that all sounds are music”. Through this piece John Cage provided insight on that anything can be music and that music doesn’t have a structure, which influenced greater genres like jazz and electronic music. It’s no mistake that John Cage treated music like art, as his longtime partner, Merce Cunnigham, was a choreographer. Dance incorporates movements of life that wouldn’t traditionally be used, much like how John Cage utilizes objects in a way to create music in a way they wouldn’t normally be. Along with this, Marcel Duchamp, a huge figure in the dada movement, was also a huge inspiration for John Cage. Marcel Duchamp’s pieces like The Fountain inspired John Cage to further utilize things in a seemingly unconventional way. Radio’s seem unconventional to music the same way that an upside down urinal seems unconventional to an art museum. Overall, John Cage utilized a unique approach as seeing sound, or therefore the lack of, as music and extends this idea to seeing music as art.
Related Posts
