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September 5th marked the 100th birthday of the late, great avant-garde musician, composer, wrtier, and theorist, John Cage. In honor of this momentous centennial organizations, symphonies and arts foundations all across the globe are throwing month-long events to celebrate not only the legend Cage left behind, but the man himself. |
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“The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists, for art serves no useful purpose. It has to do with changing minds and spirits.” – John Cage.
September 5th marked the 100th birthday of the late, great avant-garde musician, composer, wrtier, and theorist, John Cage. In honor of this momentous centennial organizations, symphonies and arts foundations all across the globe are throwing month-long events to celebrate not only the legend Cage left behind, but the man himself.
Cage was born to a inventor father and a mother “who was always right even if she was wrong.” After dropping out of college and spending time in Europe, John Cage worked as an assistant to filmmaker Oskar Fischinger in order to prepare music for one of his films. It was with Fischinger that he began experimenting with non-instruments, with anything that could be rubbed, hit, thrown..etc to produce sound.
It was in Seattle that Cage discovered what he called micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure; a composition of which the large parts had the same proportion and phrases of a single unit. This structure he felt could be expressed with any sounds as well as silence. It was also in Seattle, at the Cornish School that he became aware of Zen Buddhism which came to inform much of his musical ideas regarding silence and stillness.
At Black mountain college, Cage created what is often cited as the first “happening” :
“The audience was seated in four isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which touched a small square performance area that they faced and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the exhibition of paintings and the playing of a Victrola by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his poetry by Charles Olsen or hers by M. C. Richards from the top of a ladder outside the audience, the piano playing of David Tudor, my own reading of a lecture that included silences from the top of another ladder outside the audience, all took place within chance‑determined periods of time within the over‑all time of my lecture.”
After living in Rhode Island at the Black Mountain College, Cage moved to Cambridge. It was there that Cage, influenced by Rauschenberg’s white paintings, composed 4’33”, which is among his most well known and cited pieces.
Here at NY Arts, we’re celebrating the legend of John Cage by providing you with a directory of events not to miss out on:
Cage Hop, organized by NYC’s ARETE Ensemble and featuring musicians, dancers, lecturers, and composers is a month long festival taking place across the New York city area.
To learn more visit www.cagehop.com/
120 Hours for John Cage: An open call for works celebrating Cage’s radio compositions will take place each Saturday for the month of September. Selected works will be broadcast on free103.9’s FM radio station (WGXC 90.7-FM in upstate New York) and streamed online throughout a month-long program September 2012.
To learn more visit: http://www.wgxc.org/events/3641
One/00 Days: A Cage Exchange is a 100 day program of interaction with ideas, influences, and works of John Cage and his many collaborators. To celebrate the artist’s work, Made In Art is inviting artists from anywhere in thw orld to set up any kind of public performance of music, poetry, theatre, visual art, publications and more that engage with the ideas that have been left by Cage.
To learn more visit: http://madeinart.weebly.com/one–00-days.html
SOUND & SILENCE: JOHN CAGE COMPOSING HIMSELF
Sound & Silence; John Cage Composing Himself will take place from September through December at the Northwestern Music Library which holds some of the most important collection of Cage’s work. Co-curated by the Music Library’s assistant head Greg MacAyeal, and Nina Barrett, the Library’s communications specialist, Sound & Silence uses this collection to illustrate the major achievements of Cage’s life and to highlight some of its less well-studied episodes—especially an early stint in Chicago when Cage was still developing what would become his unique philosophy of sound, and a series of later visits he made to the Chicago area and the Northwestern campus for residencies and musical festivals.
The exhibit kicks off on September 5 with a performance of 4’33” in which performers are instructed not to play their instruments for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
To learn more visit: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/news-events/exhibits/current-exhibits
