John Cage was born in late 1912 and died on August 12th, 1992. And yet, his mark still remains on music and art history. Cage challenged the very idea of what constitutes music, playing amplified cacti and plant materials with a feather:
‘Waterwalk’, in which Cage uses a variety of things (mostly containing water and surrounding a piano):
John Cage’s music challenges the very notion of what music is. Just as we as media practitioners must find the malleability within our art form, Cage constantly tests the boundaries of what music is by distilling it down to its purest and most basic forms and then experimenting. By doing this he creates his own ideas about sound and does not rely on the limitations already put in place by musicians before him.
In Cage’s 4’33”, Cage performs, quite literally silence, but as you will notice, silence does not exist, as when a room has no external sounds, we become acutely aware of all the other sounds constantly surrounding us, such as our heartbeats, breathing, coughs, chair squeaks, etc. Any sounds that we’d normally place in the background come forward. I could place a video example here, there are plenty of them on YouTube, examples of people performing nothing, or you could just find a silent spot and sit and listen to the ‘silence’ for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
The question is though, is this music? Cage is quoted as saying that, “everything we do is music.”, so every sound, every little exclamation or breath we take is music. We just don’t hear it very often because it’s cluttered by all the other sounds we create and subject ourselves to for entertainment. Cage was very interested by the concept, or sounds which silence produced:
John Cage, even though he may be a practitioner of sound, ‘silence’ and music, is vital to study when undertaking any arts related course, because looking at Cage’s work forces you to look differently at a medium you may have unknowingly perceived as being within a strict, stationary box. Whereas Cage’s work, and many other experimentalists like him prove, that there is no limit to what can be achieved with a medium.