John Cage was an American composer most noted for pioneering so-called ‘chance music’, and electronic music, and is certainly one of the leading figures of the post-1945 avant garde. He was also influential in the development of modern dance, through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage's partner. Cage is best known for his notorious 1952 composition 4′33″, performed without a single note being played by the performers. The composition is to be perceived as sounds of the environment that the audience hears while it is “performed”, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of complete silence, and the piece became arguably the most controversial composition of the immediate post-war period. Cage is also noted for the prepared piano (a piano whose sounds are altered by placing various objects along and between the strings), for which he composed numerous dance-related works and some concert pieces from the late 1940s onwards.
Taught by Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), Cage's major influences later came from Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-element music, which he started composing in the early 1950s.
A very important determinant in Cage's later music from the 1950s came from the East, yet was not a musical style or idea but the ‘I Ching’ (ancient Chinese classic text on changing events), Cage's compositional tool for virtually the rest of his life. Whilst his music has been a source of curiosity for many, its abstract and extra-musical schematics have polarized views on his output’s purely musical worth, and alienated audiences in general. Unsurprisingly he has been enormously influential on subsequent generations of composers the world over.
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