Duets Stepping Stones |
John Cage was born in Los
Angeles in 1912. He
studied with Richard
Buhlig, Henry Cowell,
Adolph Weiss, and Arnold
Schoenberg. In 1952, at
Black Mountain College, he
presented a theatrical
event considered by many to
have been the first
Happening. He was
associated with Merce
Cunningham from the early
1940's and was Musical
Advisor for the Merce
Cunningham Dance Company
until his death in 1992.
Cage and Cunningham were
responsible for a number of
radical innovations in
musical and choreographic
compositions, such as the
use of chance operations and
the independence of dance and
music.
Cage was the recipient of
many awards and honors,
beginning in 1949 with a
Guggenheim Fellowship and an
Award from the National
Academy of Arts and Letters
for having extended the
boundaries of music through
his work with percussion
orchestra and his invention
in 1940 of the prepared
piano. Cage was elected to
the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 1978, and was
inducted into the 50-member
American Academy of Arts and
Letters in May, 1989. He was
named Commander of the Order
of Arts and Letters by the
French Minister of Culture in
1982, and received an
Honorary Doctorate of
Performing Arts from the
California Institute of the
Arts in 1986. Cage was the
Charles Eliot Norton
Professor of Poetry at
Harvard University for the
1988-1989 academic year. He
was laureate of the 1989
Kyoto Prize given by the
Inamori
Foundation.
In 1987, he wrote, designed
and directed Euroceras 1 &
2, with the assistance of
Andrew Culver, for the
Frankfurt Opera. 101
(1989) was commissioned by
the Boston Symphony Orchestra
and the Fromm Foundation at
Harvard University.
Euroceras 3 & 4 was
commissioned by the Almeida
Music Festival and Modus
Vivandi Foundation in 1990.
The 1991 Zurich June Festival
was devoted to the work of
John Cage and James
Joyce.
Cage is the author of
Silence, A Year
from Monday, M,
Empty Words, and
X (all published by
the Wesleyan University
Press). I-VI (the
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
delivered at Harvard in
1988-89) was published by the
Harvard University Press in
the Spring of 1990. This book
includes transcripts of the
question and answer periods
that followed each lecture,
and an audiocassette of Cage
reading one of the six
lectures. Conversations
with Cage, a book-length
composition of excerpts from
interviews by Richard
Kostelantz, was published in
1988 by Limelight Editions.
Cage's music is published by
the Henmar Press of C. F.
Peters Corporation and has
been recorded on many
labels.
Since 1958, many of Cage's
scores have been exhibited in
galleries and museums. A
series of fifty-two
watercolors, the New River
Watercolors, executed by
Cage at the Miles C. Horton
Center at the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and
State University was shown at
the Phillips Collection in
Washington, D.C. in
April-May, 1990. In 1991, the
Cunningham Dance Foundation
produced
Cage/Cunningham, a
documentary film on the
collaboration of Merce
Cunningham and John Cage,
partly funded by PBS, under
the direction of Elliot
Caplan. John Cage died in New
York City on August 12,
1992. |
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