JOHN CAGE
John Cage is a very famous musical composer that changed the music scene in the early 1900s. Cage was born in 1912 in Los Angeles and was a very gifted smart child. He did very good in school, and he started taking piano lessons with his Aunt Phoebe. He entered Pomona when he was sixteen and challenged the conventional teaching styles. One story that I really liked about Cage was he was assigned to read a certain number pages of his text book before his exam. Instead he read the same amount of assigned reading but on other topics. He ended up getting an A on the exam, I believe that was an interesting test he did and it was just the start of him believing in chance. His work revolved around chance, and he had really great mentors such as Buhlig and Schonberg. He chose to stick with serialism since he worked with Schonberg and widen his skills with music. He married Xenia Andreevna Kashevaroff and had many hard times keeping a good living. He worked many jobs, but he eventually wrote some very famous pieces such as Sixteen Dances and Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra. Cage also worked in theatre and dances, he liked the idea of writing music to choreographed dance moves. Later he loved working with contact microphones that could amplify sounds. Cage had a laid back attitude and really believed it was more important to loose control than to attempt to control it.
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