John Cage’s thoughts about music have had a significant impact as much as his music. He was both a composer and a music philosopher, engaging both readers and listeners with inquiries about the similarities and differences between the nature of sound and music. Any discussion of the 1960s would be incomplete without mentioning John Cage’s pieces, emblematic of the second generation of avant-garde music (Lomnitz, 2022). His work also challenges several aspects of the historiography surrounding the counterculture. Although Cage’s political ideology aligns with many of the counterculture’s goals, it has not been given its place in history. Instead, the evidence points to his ideas and those of the new avant-garde as part of a persistent tradition that permeated the counterculture.
The idea that music could only be used to convey ideas troubled Cage, so he almost gave up on his career as a composer. If music was only the means of communication, he thought he would give up unless he came up with a more substantial justification. He then started studying Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophies and thought of music as something that could be developed from anything rather than just what a composer could make. He thought music was made to “sober and quiet the mind, making it susceptible to heavenly influence, (Lomnitz, 2022).” With the help of his well-honed compositional concepts, Cage broadened the meaning of music and started experimenting with indeterminism (Lomnitz, 2022). To assure unpredictability, he employed numerous tools. In his later works, he expanded these liberties to encompass additional forms of media, such as light displays, slide presentations, uniformed artists, etc. Cage started gazing into nothingness and realized that silence was not the elimination of sound but rather the unplanned functioning of his nervous system and the pumping of his blood. From that point on, his work evolved into an examination of non-intention, which he eventually incorporated into his compositional methods.
Reference
Lomnitz, R. (2022). Experimental Music and the political: Performativity in the art of John Cage. Performance Philosophy, 48–67.