MP3 Exclusives New Arrivals   Alt-Country Alternative Blues Electronic Jambands Jazz Metal Pop Punk R&B Rap/Hip Hop Reggae Rock   Top Downloads Features Archive Contests Control Panel MUSICBLITZ Alert!   METALBLITZ REGGAEBLITZ BLUESBLITZ Musician's Friend   Alt-Country Alternative Blues Electronic Jambands Jazz Hip Hop Metal Pop Punk R&B Reggae Rock   Getting Started Free Players	Welcome !      John Cage An iconoclast who changed the face of 20th-century music, John Cage rejected musical conventions such as serial composition and tonality, and his creations relied on fate rather than logic. The Los Angeles native pursued architecture and painting before deciding to devote himself to music. After dropping out of college to travel throughout Europe, Cage began studying with 12-tone pioneer Arnold Schoenberg in 1934. While his teacher saw Cage's "lack of feeling" for harmony as an impediment, Cage used it to his advantage, writing a circular series of percussion pieces and developing his own rigorously atonal system. While working at Cornish College in Seattle, Cage developed his own concept of rhythmic structure and experimented with musique concrete (resulting in the seminal Imaginary Landscape No. 1). Finding his compositions misunderstood by audiences, Cage searched for some other purpose to music besides communication. He discovered it in the writings of Gira Sarabhai, who believed that music was meant to quiet the mind, thus allowing divine influences to be felt; and Ananda Coomaraswammy, who wrote that the artist's duty was to imitate the operations of nature. Around this time, Cage also became aware of Zen Buddhism, which inspired his formulation of "indeterminism" -- an artistic process that relied on chance rather than choice. Space limitations in Cornish's theater spurred Cage to invent the prepared piano: placing household objects between a regular piano's strings allowed the performer to become a kind of one-person percussion orchestra. After leaving Seattle, Cage tried unsuccessfully to obtain funding for an experimental music center while mounting chamber music performances and collaborative efforts with modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham. He continued to experiment with the piano, and even wrote a suite for the toy piano in 1948. The following year, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1952, Cage created his most notorious composition, 4' 33" (sometimes referred to as Silence), which required the performer to sit before a piano without playing it for exactly four minutes and 33 seconds. While working at Black Mountain College, Cage mounted what has since been acknowledged as the first "happening", featuring Cunningham's dancing, paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, and poetry by Charles Olsen and M.C. Richards. In later years, Cage's interest in electronic music grew, and he composed pieces that incorporated radios and tapes of amplified household sounds and the like. He was elected to the Institute of American Arts and Letters in 1968, and continued to compose and perform music until his death from a stroke in 1992.     John Cage In The Name of the Holocaust MP3 Alternative, Electronic A startling, unadorned work for the prepared piano, written early in the ground-breaking composer's career, and given an expert performance by pianist Margaret Leng Tan.
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