John Cage – 1912-1992

The son of an American inventor, Cage pursued the serious study of music and included among his teachers Arnold Schoenberg and the American innovator Henry Cowell. Cage experimented with a wide variety of instruments and techniques, simultaneously expanding the musical vocabulary and paring it down to its essentials. A pioneer of aleatory music, in which chance figures prominently, Cage pushed the frontiers separating musical expression from random noise, even producing in 1952 one work, 4?33?, in which the performer sits silently before his instrument and his audience for exactly four minutes, thirty-three seconds.