Editing John Cage (section)

===1950s: Discovering chance===
After a 1949 performance at [[Carnegie Hall]], New York, Cage received a grant from the [[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation|Guggenheim Foundation]], which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as [[Olivier Messiaen]] and [[Pierre Boulez]]. More important was Cage's chance encounter with [[Morton Feldman]] in New York City in early 1950. Both composers attended a [[New York Philharmonic]] concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's [[Symphony (Webern)|Symphony]], followed by a piece by [[Sergei Rachmaninoff]]. Cage felt so overwhelmed by Webern's piece that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he met Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason.{{sfn|Revill|1993|loc=101}} The two composers quickly became friends; some time later Cage, Feldman, [[Earle Brown]], [[David Tudor]] and Cage's pupil [[Christian Wolff (composer)|Christian Wolff]] came to be referred to as "the New York school".{{sfn|Pritchett|1993|loc=105}}{{sfn|Nicholls|2002|loc=101}}

In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the ''[[I Ching]]''{{sfn|Kostelanetz|2003|loc=68}}—a [[Chinese classic text]] which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events. This version of the ''I Ching'' was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, [[Kurt Wolff (publisher)|Kurt Wolff]] of [[Pantheon Books]] in 1950. The ''I Ching'' is commonly used for [[divination]], but for Cage it became a tool to compose using chance.{{sfn|Cage|1973|loc=60}} To compose a piece of music, Cage would come up with questions to ask the ''I Ching''; the book would then be used in much the same way as it is used for divination. For Cage, this meant "imitating nature in its manner of operation".{{sfn|Pritchett|1993|loc=97}}{{sfn|Revill|1993|loc=91}} His lifelong interest in sound itself culminated in an approach that yielded works in which sounds were free from the composer's will:

{{blockquote|When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound ... I don't need sound to talk to me.<ref>John Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991. From: ''Listen'', documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003.</ref>}}

Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of ''Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra'' (1950–51),{{sfn|Pritchett|1993|loc=71}} the ''I Ching'' opened new possibilities in this field for him. The first results of the new approach were ''[[Imaginary Landscape|Imaginary Landscape No. 4]]'' for 12 radio receivers, and ''[[Music of Changes]]'' for piano. The latter work was written for David Tudor,{{sfn|Pritchett|1993|loc=78}} whom Cage met through Feldman—another friendship that lasted until Cage's death.{{efn|1=Recent research has shown that Cage may have met [[David Tudor|Tudor]] almost a decade earlier, in 1942, through Jean Erdman: {{cite web| url=http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2008/09/cleaning_up_a_life.html | title=Cleaning Up a Life |website=artsjournal.com| year=2008 |last=Gann|first=Kyle|author-link=Kyle Gann| access-date=August 4, 2009}}}} Tudor premiered most of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped performing on the piano and concentrated on composing music. The ''I Ching'' became Cage's standard tool for composition: he used it in practically every work composed after 1951, and eventually settled on a computer algorithm that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the ''I Ching''.

Despite the fame ''Sonatas and Interludes'' earned him, and the connections he cultivated with American and European composers and musicians, Cage was quite poor. Although he still had an apartment at 326 [[Monroe Street (Baltimore)|Monroe Street]] (which he occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on ''Music of Changes'', he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death.{{sfn|Revill|1993|loc=142}} Nevertheless, Cage managed to survive and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures and performances, etc.

In 1952–1953 he completed another mammoth project—the ''[[Williams Mix]]'', a piece of [[tape music]], which [[Earle Brown]] and [[Morton Feldman]] helped to put together.{{sfn|Revill|1993|loc=143–149}} Also in 1952, Cage composed the piece that became his best-known and most controversial creation: ''[[4′33″]]''. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be perceived as consisting of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed. Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952, at [[Woodstock, New York]]) caused an uproar in the audience.{{sfn|Revill|1993|loc=166}} The reaction to ''4′33″'' was just a part of the larger picture: on the whole, it was the adoption of chance procedures that had disastrous consequences for Cage's reputation. The press, which used to react favorably to earlier percussion and prepared piano music, ignored his new works, and many valuable friendships and connections were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to promote Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's particular approach to the use of chance, and so were other composers who came to prominence during the 1950s, e.g. [[Karlheinz Stockhausen]].<ref>{{harvnb|Revill|1993|loc=174}}</ref>

During this time Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde [[Black Mountain College]] just outside [[Asheville, North Carolina]]. Cage taught at the college in the summers of 1948 and 1952 and was in residence the summer of 1953. While at Black Mountain College in 1952, he organized what has been called the first "[[happening]]" (see discussion below) in the United States, later titled ''Theatre Piece No. 1'', a multi-layered, multi-media performance event staged the same day as Cage conceived it that "that would greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices". In addition to Cage, the participants included Cunningham and Tudor.<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.jdwelch.net/writing/TheOtherFabFour.pdf | title=The Other Fab Four: Collaboration and Neo-dada: a plan for an exhibition weblog | access-date=May 31, 2014 | author=Welch, J.D. | year=2008 | pages=5–8 | archive-date=December 25, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221225100607/https://jdwelch.net/writing/TheOtherFabFour.pdf | url-status=dead }}</ref>

From 1953 onward, Cage was busy composing music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner adopted chance too, out of fascination for the movement of the human body), as well as developing new methods of using chance, in a series of works he referred to as ''The Ten Thousand Things''. In the summer of 1954 he moved out of New York and settled in [[Gate Hill Cooperative]], a community in [[Stony Point, New York]], where his neighbors included David Tudor, [[M. C. Richards]], [[Karen Karnes]], [[Stan VanDerBeek]], and [[Sari Dienes]]. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954 he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. From 1956 to 1961 Cage taught classes in experimental composition at The New School, and from 1956 to 1958 he also worked as an art director and designer of typography.<ref name=compendium>{{cite web| url=http://www.xs4all.nl/~cagecomp/ | title=A John Cage Compendium | publisher=Paul van Emmerik | year=2009 | author=Emmerik, Paul van | access-date=August 6, 2009}}</ref> Among his works completed during the last years of the decade were ''Concert for Piano and Orchestra'' (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of [[graphic notation (music)|graphic notation]],<ref>{{cite book|last1=Iddon|first1=Martin|last2=Thomas|first2=Philip|title=John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2020|isbn=978-0-19-093847-5}}</ref> and ''[[Variations (Cage)|Variations I]]'' (1958).