Historian/composer Kyle Gann describes Cage as "the most influential and controversial, well-loved and widely ridiculed composer of the second half of the twentieth century."

Historian/composer Peter Manning's summarizes Cage as having a "quality that recognizes no boundaries to means of artistic expression that has influenced so many composers and elicited a grudging respect even from those who find his work perplexing, frustrating, or annoying in the extreme."

Born in Los Angeles, Cage dropped out of college after two years in 1930 to travel in Europe. On returning to the United States, he continued to travel and took up the study of music. In 1933, he was inspired by a performance of Varèse's Ionisation, performed at the Hollywood Bowl (conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky). He also was convinced by abstract filmmaker Oscar Fischinger that "all objects have a soul," a soul which could be released via sound by a musician. He studied under Henry Cowell in New York (1933-34) and then under Arnold Schoenberg (1935) who had moved to Los Angeles to escape the Nazis. Schoenberg commented that Cage had no feeling for harmony, and that without a better feel for it he would never be able to write good music -- it would be as though he had come to a wall through which he could not pass. Cage replied, "In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall."

Cage did, however, apply serially-inspired operations on sequences of rhythms, allying himself in many ways with Webern as he applied row operations to elements of music other than pitch. Rhythm was not given a high priority in dodecaphonic theories, but this was the area that Cage often found himself most interested in.

In 1937 he moved to Seattle where he became an accompanist for a dance studio, founded a percussion orchestra, and wrote a number of early pieces that explored rhythmic combinations that were effective as music for modern dance.

Along with exploring rhythmic developments, the use of electronics became part of Cage's musical vision, as he explained in 1937:

"I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard...whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds...Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments...If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth-and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound." (Sound familiar?)

Electronics began to appear in Cage's music in 1939 with Imaginary Landscapes #1, which called for variable speed phonograph turntables playing records of sine wave tones. Imaginary Landscapes #3 (1942) called for electronic oscillators.

In 1940 he was asked to write a dance accompaniment, but had to perform on a stage too small for a percussion ensemble. With only a piano to work with, Cage placed objects -- newspaper, ashtrays, keys, pie plates -- on the strings to alter the piano's sound. As they tended to bounce off the strings, Cage began to use smaller objects, such as bolts and screws, that could be wedged more securely between the strings. This new type of instrument came to be called the prepared piano, and it put the sounds of a percussion orchestra at the disposal of one player.

In 1945, Cage's heterosexual marriage of ten years ended in divorce. He suffered from a nervous breakdown and underwent psychoanalysis. Unsatisfied with this form of treatment, he turned to Indian music and philosophy. Asian ideas were to permeate his output for the rest of his life. His instructor told him that in India music's role was to "quiet the mind and render it susceptible to divine influences." This fit perfectly with the type of meditation on noise and non-musical sounds that Cage had described in 1937 (see above). With this in mind, Cage had found the direction that would guide him for the rest of his life. He began to conceive of music as blocks of time filled with sound -- any sound. Composition became a process of choosing a sonic territory of some kind and using all possible sounds within that territory.

At this time, Cage became involved (romantically and professionally) with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage and Cunningham were to remain partners in life and art until Cage's death in 1992, and their efforts represented one of America's most productive and innovative creative pairings.

Joel Chadabe describes Cage's work as:

... structures ... based on process and random juxtapositions rather than fixed relationships between sounds. His...music suggests a happy anarchy where all things can be and coexist as themselves. It does not convey control, technique, expertise; it does not convey personal, subjective, poetic expression. It does convey a sense of adventure, of totality, of all things being available to us in the world around us -- of exuberance, discovery, surprise, and good humor.

Cage's spirit and philosophy can be appreciated further with the following quotations:

If you don't think what I do is music, then, by all means, call it something else.

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

I think one of the things that has happened is that it's become clear that we can be -- not just with our minds but with our whole being -- responsive to sound, and that sound doesn't have to be the communication of some deep thought. It can be just a sound. Now that sound could go in one ear and out the other, or it could go in one ear, permeate the being, transform the being, and then perhaps go out, letting the next one in.

SOURCES:
Joel Chadabe, Electric Sound: The Past and Promise of Electronic Music." Prentice Hall, 1997.
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/cage-quotes.html
Daniel Charles, liner notes to John Cage: works for Percussion, Wergo 6203-2.