ns, 1965, p. 79). It was during that time that Cage decided to abandon the idea of being a pianist and to dedicate his life to the craft of musical composition. He returned to Los Angeles and began searching for a composition teacher while supporting himself by giving door-to-door lectures on modern art (Hines, 1994, p. 89).
Cage's first teacher was Richard Buhlig, a modernist composer whose style was somewhat similar to that of Schoenberg. In 1933, Cage went to New York to study with Adolph Weiss. After that, he took classes at the New School for Social Research under Henry Cowell, a composer known for the use of dissonant "tone clusters" on the piano. In the fall of 1934, Cage returned to Los Angeles and began studying composition, counterpoint and music analysis under Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg's theory of atonality had a strong influence on the early compositional efforts of John Cage. Thus, many of Cage's piano works of the late 1930s, such as Metamporhosis (1938), utilized Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. Cage's early works were also influenced by the style of Edgar Varese, whose most famous piece, Ionization, was written for forty-one percussion instruments and two sirens (Tomkins, 1965, p. 86). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Cage wrote many compositions for percussion orchestra. Many of these called for the use of unusual instruments, such as the Third Construction (1941), in which "rattles, drums, tin cans, claves, cowbells, lion's roar, cymbal, ratchet, teponaxtle, quijadas, cricket caller and conch shell" were used (Cage "Notes on Compositions I," 1993, p. 8).
In June, 1935, John Cage married an art student named Xenia Kashevaroff. In 1938, he was invited to Seattle to provide music for the dance classes at the Cornish School. There, Cage met a young dancer named Merce Cunningham, with whom he soon formed a close relationship. After Cage divorced Xenia in 1945, he and Cunningham remained lifelon...