John Cage
Bogaerts, Rob / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom."

John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. His father was an eccentric inventor and his mother was a journalist. Although he received some piano lessons in his youth, he grew up wanting to be a writer. A very bright student, he graduated valedictorian of his high school in 1928 and enrolled at Pomona College to study theology. However, he dropped out after just two years, believing the college discouraged original thinking and was of no use. Instead, he travelled to Europe and stayed for several years, informally studying architecture, poetry, painting, and music.

He returned to the United States just after the beginning of the Great Depression and scrapped a living together giving lectures on art and fed himself by eating wild mushrooms.

In 1933, Cage approached Arnold Schönberg, who was by that point teaching at the University of California Los Angeles, and asked to study for him. Cage could not afford the teaching rates, but Schönberg agreed to teach him for free if he promised to devote his life to music. Schönberg later said that Cage was not a composer, but an inventor.

While studying with Schönberg, Cage met Xenia Kashevaroff, the daughter of a Russian priest from Alaska, and married her in 1935. The couple moved to Hollywood. There, Cage became interested in modern dance, and in 1940 moved to Seattle to work as a dance accompanist at Cornish College for the Arts. He also composed for percussion, and began a series of experimentations that eventually became his “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano.” In these works, various objects are placed onto the strings of a piano to create unique sounds when the instrument is played.

Various projects and commissions took Cage from Seattle to Chicago and then New York in 1942, where he befriended surrealist painter Max Ernst and socialite Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim gave him a place to stay and offered to arrange a concert of his works at her art gallery. However, when she found out Cage had also made arrangements for another concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she cut him off, leaving him homeless. Around this time, Cage had an affair with a choreographer named Merce Cunningham, divorced his wife, and began studying Indian music and Zen Buddhism. He began to deeply ponder the purpose of music. Later in his autobiography, he would write, "I determined to give up composition unless I could find a better reason for doing it than communication. I found this answer from Gira Sarabhai, an Indian singer and tabla player: The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences."

In 1949, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, an organization run by Peggy Guggenheim’s uncle. This allowed him to continue composing, but he began to approach the task in increasingly non-traditional ways. He began composing aleatoric, or chance-based, music using a copy of the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination from the Zhou Dynasty. The outcome of this was his 1952 work, “Imaginary Landscapes for Twelve Radio Receivers.”

That same year, Cage “composed” the “piece” of “music” for which he is most famous, 4’ 33”. This is a three-movement piece where each movement is marked tacet. The purpose of the work is to make the listener aware of the ambient sounds of the performance space, rather than filtering out everything but the sounds the composer chose for you, even leading the listener to question to the nature of music itself.

Despite his growing fame, Cage’s financial situation continued to deteriorate, and in 1954 he moved to “The Land,” an artist’s commune in upstate New York run by a friend, where he enjoyed foraging for mushrooms in the woods. He took various jobs and continued to find new ways to innovate, including the use of graphic notation in his 1958 “Concert for Piano and Orchestra.”

In 1959, Cage appeared on an Italian game show called “Lascia o Raddoppia” (Double or Nothing.) He was asked to choose a trivia category for the chance to win $10,000. He chose mushrooms and was asked to give the twenty-four names of the white-spored Agaricus contained in Atkinson’s Studies of American Fungi. Cage listed them alphabetically, won the $10,000, and used the money to buy a piano and a Volkswagen bus.

The same year, he was asked to teach a music class at The New School in New York City, and agreed as long as he could also teach a class on mushrooms. In 1962, he co-founded the New York Mycological Society and began adding to his income by supplying restaurants throughout New York with mushrooms he had found in the woods. Two years later, he received an achievement award from the North American Mycological Association.

In 1967, Cage became composer-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati. The following year, he composed a piece where audio excerpts were triggered by a live game of chess. He followed this with “HPSCHD,” an electronic piece that, in addition to audible qualities, featured laser lights and other multimedia effects. Over the next decade, he continued to push the boundaries of composition, using microphones to amplify the sounds of plants, tracing star charts onto musical staves, writing books and giving lectures about his musical theories. One 1985 composition, "ORGAN²/ASLSP," has a tempo marked "as slow as possible," which is currently being performed at a church in Halberstadt, Germany. The performance began in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640. During the 1980s he developed a computer program that replicated the chance-based results of the I Ching and used this in composing as well.

He suffered a stroke in 1985, but continued writing and composing, and also became deeply involved in visual art, applying the same aleatoric principles as he had in music. After a second stroke in 1992, he passed away at the age of 79.