The American composer John Cage

The American composer John Cage (1912-1992) was known primarily for his experiments in chance operations. Chance music, also known as aleatory music or indeterminacy, involves the use of random methods such as rolling dice or tossing coins in order to determine the notes and other elements of a piece. In addition, Cage was known for experimenting with a variety of other creative approaches, such as his innovative means for scoring notation. He also wrote many essays and poetic works and created some visual art works as well. This paper will discuss the life and career of John Cage, as well as some of his specific works and what they mean.

John Cage was born on September 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, California. Both of his parents were talented and creative people. His father was an engineering consultant and inventor, and his mother was an editor for the Los Angeles Times who also led a womens' study club (Hines 70). Like his parents, John Cage was an extremely creative person. This led Arnold Schoenberg to claim that Cage was not a composer, but "an inventor - of genius" (Lindenberger, 1994, p. 157). Cage began taking piano lessons at a young age, and one of his early teachers, Fannie Charles Dillon, helped to encourage the boy's developing sense of inventiveness. In addition to performing on the piano, Dillon wrote pieces for the instrument which were based on experimental techniques. For example, her work Little Bird Stories utilized bird calls as the basis for it

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In 1961 he compiled the material for his first book of essays and prose experiments, Silence. In 1967, he produced his second book of writings, A Year From Monday. Several other books followed over the years, such as M (1973), Empty Words (1979), X (1986) and I-VI (1990). In 1962, Cage's fascination with the collecting and cooking of mushrooms led him to become a co-founder of the New York Mycological Society. During the 1970s, Cage began writing a number of "mesostics." In these works, Cage took lines from fictional works by such authors as James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau or Allen Ginsberg, and rearranged the words so that they had the appearance of poetry in which certain letters "were highlighted under one another, forming a spine which spelled out [a] name or a word" (Revill, 1992, p. 234). In the late 1970s, Cage switched to a Zen macrobiotic diet in order to overcome certain problems with his health. In this diet, an effort is made to balance yin (or sweet) foods with those which are yang (or salty). Cage claimed that the diet cleared up the swellings and pains in his body, helped him lose weight, made him feel calmer, and gave him more energy than he had ever had before (p. 258). During the 1980s, Cage became int

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