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John Cage (1912-1992)



Musik im technischen Zeitalter: John Cage (1965, dir. Reinhard Elsner)
Variations V (1965)
Klaus Wildenhahn - John Cage (1966)
John Cage and Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Sound?? (1966)
Catch 44 (1971)
Birdcage – 73'20.958" for a Composer (1972)
For the Third Time (1978)
Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art (Part I)
[Merce Cunningham, Nam June Paik & John Cage] (1978)

Cunningham & Cage - Chance Conversations (1981)
3x John Cage (1983, dir. Armin Brunner)
Four American Composers: John Cage (dir. Peter Greenaway) (1983)
"Thirty Second Spots: TV Commercials for Artists (1982-83)
John Cage performs James Joyce (1985) [dir Takahiko Iimura]
"American Masters" John Cage: I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It (1990)
One11 with 103 (1991-1992)
The Making of One11 with 103 (1992) Dir. Henning Lohner
Nineteen Questions (1995) [dir] Frank Scheffer & Andrew Culver]
Fourteen (1995) [dir] Frank Scheffer & Andrew Culver]
Paying Attention (1995) [dir] Frank Scheffer & Andrew Culver]
Overpopulation and Art with Ryoanji (1995) [dir] Frank Scheffer & Andrew Culver]
The Making of Fourteen (1995) [dir] Frank Scheffer & Andrew Culver]
49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs (1995) dir. Roberta Friedman and Don Gillespie
Frank Scheffer - How to Get Out of the Cage (2012)


One of the most celebrated and iconoclastic figures of the American musical avant-garde, John Cage has been instrumental in reshaping postwar Western music. Cage's radical innovations in compositions and theory — the application of chance and "found" sound as an integral compositional device, the creation of musical structures based on rhythm rather than tonality — were influential in altering traditional concepts of musical interpretation.

Cage's seminal compositions include Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), a piece for twelve radios; 4'33" (1952), a "silent" work in which the sounds of the piece originate in the ambient sound of the audience; and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), which features a piano solo using eighty-four different kinds at composition.

Cage was born in 1912 and died in 1992. During his lengthy career, he was active and highly productive as a composer, writer, philosopher, and visual artist. He was elected to the Institute of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1968, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. He received an honorary Doctorate of Performing Arts from the California Institutes of the Arts in 1986, and was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a fellow of the Centers for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University; composer-in-residence at the University of California, Davis; and the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. Cage was the musical director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and the author of numerous books, including Silence (1973), Empty Words (1979), Writings Through Finnegans Wake (1979) and Themes and Variations (1982).


RELATED RESOURCES:
John Cage in UbuWeb Sound
John Cage in UbuWeb Historical