John Cage – American Inventor

Photograph by Vincent Mentzel 1988/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux.

” Cage requires a fundamentally different mode of listening: you need to relinquish expectations that successive sounds will fall into familiar harmonic relationships, or indeed relationships of any kind, and instead treat each moment in isolation. You “regard” the sounds as you would objects in a gallery. More and more, audiences are arriving with the right expectations, or, at least, without the wrong ones. On a deeper level, Cage’s anarchic view of the world, his profound distrust of institutions and traditions, may have an especially broad appeal at the present time.”

Alex Ross – The New Yorker – September 4, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/09/john-cage-at-100.html

Background:

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/c/john_cage/index.html

http://seattletimes.com/html/thearts/2019040085_johncage04.html

http://www.kplu.org/post/john-cage-great-musical-avant-garde-seattle-roots