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John Cagc (Los Angeles 1912 - New York 1992) has been
one of the leading and most polemíc creatíve spirits of the
twentieth century, because his influence, which goes beyond
music, has permeated to the fine arts, drama and poetry. A
pupil of Arnold Schdnberg and Henry Cowell, foUowcr of
Satíe and Weber, he expanded atonal music with the íntro-duction
of noise, silence, the onphasis on action and etectroa-coustic
technique. Inventor of the prepated piano he trans-formed
the most well-tempered of instniments into a vessel
of unique sounds, whíle transforming scores into graphic
works of art A disciple of Suzuki, Zen, Ki^oon and Tibetan
Buddhism, he has been the genuiíK catalyst of postmodernism,
because as he respects and positively valúes chance, he aban-dons
the introspection of the ego (dominant theme of the
Romantic movement which gave rise to aesthetic Modemity)
for an impetsonalism that his fríends Morton Feldman, David
Tudor, Early Brown and Christian WoUT have similarly aspi-red
to. Intímate friend of Jasper J<Ans, Rauschenberg,
Duchamp and coUaborator of the dancer and chorec^rapher
Merce Cunningham for over forty years, he conceíved the
first Happeaing, an tvpeñtmx that integrates the arts (music,
painting, poetry, dance, rhetoric) that induded George Brecht,
Dick Higgins and'Al Hansen, as well as the ZAJ group and
the serialist dissidents, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti.
He has coined the term Musidrcus to desígnate ambiental
sonoroiK extiavaganzas that distil his concepts of "omniaten-tivity"
and "pluriccntraBty", combimng lodc, jazz, piano, dec-tronic,
vocal, pantomime, dance, films and slides. Cage, who
was able to do dmay with the structural rigidity of serialism,
and had distanced himself from the idea of contingency, or
omttolled chance, drfended by Fierre Boulez and Kail Hdnz
Stockhausen, ínspired wiüi his collective piano interjvetation
of Satie's VexBtioas (18 hours of playing repeating a brief
secuence of sounds) MinimaUsm, the sóial repetttk>n df sligjit
sonorous acts, of northamericans La Monte Young, Terry
Riley and Steve Rdch, and of the eng^ish Gavin Bryars and
Nfichael Newman.
VICENTE CARRETÓN CANO-In
1987 he began to write operas (Europeras 1-5) while d
he carried on artistic activities that culminate with filmic images.
Cage has been the paradigm of freedom for a whole gene-ration
of artists. In Spain, Juan Hidalgo, Ramón Barce, Llo-renc
Barber, Carlos Santos and José Iges have experíenced
sound phenomenom from angles that without him would'nt
have existed. His thought system symbolised one of the most
solid ethical consdences in the aestíietics of the 20th century,
a role model for present and fiíture creators. The celebrations
of his eightieth birthday (which would have been the Sth of
September) had begun in february at the Contemporary Art
Museum of Chicago with the exhibition of fíve manuscrípt
scores from the 50's, the decade during whidí Iw ean»d inter-nation^
prestige, together with some 60 works of his intímate
friend Robert Rauschenberg, of the same period.
It was Rauschenberg's White Paintings, Mies Van der
Rohe's glass houses, and Richard Lippard's wire sculptures,
together with convictions the impossibility of communication
and on silence that inspired Cage to créate one of the prin-dpal
sound achievenwnts of our time, his work 4' 33', a score
for piano devoid of any notation that diluted the boundaries
between music and ambiental noise.
In may, the Appolohuis Room at Eindhoven (Holland), in
coUabotation witíi the Van Abbenmuseum dedicated a mini-festival
to the theme of his music's ties with the Emtum
Musical or contingent muñe of Marcel Dudiamp. Then similar
events took place in Italy, Czechoslovakia and Germany,
which he attended personally. Death came upon him on the
12th of August in a New Ymk as he witnessed the great sum-mer
celebration organized by the MOMA. The premier of his
posthumous work 103 in september, takes on the solemnity
of a Réquiem. Anyhow, as he states in his book Silence oí
1937, "One need'nt fear for the future of music". Because,
"therell be sounds till I die. And they will continué after my
*****•" Madrid, Sth September 1992
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