Even more importantly, they became life partners following Cage’s divorce from his wife, the surrealist sculptor Xenia Kashevaroff Cage in 1946 (or 1945 no one seems to know for sure!).Īlmost all the music Cage composed from the late 1930s through the 1940s was for various percussion ensembles and for prepared piano.
JOHN CAGE CACTUS MUSIC PROFESSIONAL
The professional relationship between Cage and Cunningham continued for decades, and Cage eventually became the music director for Merce Cunningham’s dance company. In April of 1944, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) – at the time a dancer in Martha Graham’s dance company – presented his first solo concert in association with Cage. Knowing Cage as I do, I’ve no doubt that if someone called him a “charlatan”, he’d put an index finger in the air, smile his big toothy grin, and say something on the lines of “Yes, but a charlatan of genius!”) He was in fact a brilliant, personable, extremely funny man, someone who refused to live by any rules other than his own. To my beloved readers who only know Cage from such works as 4’33” and assume that he was a charlatan, well, he was most certainly not, as even a cursory examination of his music for prepared piano will bear out.
constitute but a tiny part of the international musical and artistic community, which was in fact deeply – even profoundly – influenced by Cage during the mid and late-twentieth century. To my adored East Coast academic colleagues who, upon reading the paragraph above, will only roll their eyes and shake their heads: I would remind you that Ivy League music departments and their offshoots across the U.S. According to Cage, Cowell was nothing less than “the open sesame for new music in America.”Ĭage took Cowell’s teachings and beliefs about the universal, pan-cultural nature of music and sound to an entirely new level, and in doing so changed forever the way twentieth-century composers thought about music. Among the many young American musicians on whom Cowell had a decisive impact was a native Los Angelino and graduate of Los Angeles High School named John Milton Cage, Jr. Cowell was a charismatic human dynamo, and a composer and teacher of genius, someone whose pioneering impact on the American musical community in the 1920s and 1930s was singular.
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