John Cage

John Milton Cage (1912-1992), composer

Sourced

"A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection." (1949)
- Source: Forerunners of Modern Music, first published in the New York journal A Tiger's Eye, later collected in Silence.
- Notes: many of Cage's works are "unfinished" in the traditional sense, only becoming complete when performed (often as a result of leaving certain elements to chance).

"Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?"
- Source: "Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures given in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence.
- Notes: many of Cage's works use sounds traditionally regarded as unmusical (radios not tuned to any particular station, for instance): he really did believe that the sound of a truck and the sounds made in a factory had just as much musical worth as the sounds made in a music school. There is also a suggestion expressed in the quote that in order to determine the artistic worth of something, it is necessary to examine the context in which it exists.

"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."
- 1955, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

"I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment."
- 1952, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."
- Earle Brown, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
I have nothing to say. I am saying it, and that is poetry.
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
Value judgements are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.