Trivia

Did scholarly research into the science of fungology (the study of mushrooms and other fungi).

His most (in)famous composition was 4' 33", consisting of musicans seated in front of their instruments without touching them for three movements, totaling four minutes and thirty three seconds. The sheet music simply reads "TACIT" (silent) for each movement.

Once performed one of his pieces on "I've Got a Secret," using among other items a grand piano, a duck call, a toaster, a transistor radio, and a bathtub.

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume 3, 1991-1993, pages 89-91. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2001.

Life partner of dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham for fifty years, from 1942 until Cage's death in 1992.

Inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1982.

Graduated from UCLA School of Music.

A 2012 project was curated by Juraj Kojs to celebrate the centenary of Cage's birth, titled On Silence: Homage to Cage. It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the globe such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus . The program was supported by the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts, Laura Kuhn and the John Cage Trust.

In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living".[.

A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.

Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces. These include Sonatas and Interludes (1946-48).

Cage's 1952 composition 4 min 33 secis performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who present the work do nothing aside from being present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance. The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance.

Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.

The archive of the John Cage Trust is held at Bard College in upstate New York.

At the Ruhrtriennale in Germany, Heiner Goebbels staged a production of Europeras 1 & 2 in a 36,000 sq ft converted factory and commissioned a production of Lecture on Nothing created and performed by Robert Wilson.

Throughout his adult life, Cage was also active as lecturer and writer. Some of his lectures were included in several books he published, the first of which was Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961). Silence included not only simple lectures, but also texts executed in experimental layouts, and works such as Lecture on Nothing (1949), which were composed in rhythmic structures. Subsequent books also featured different types of content, from lectures on music to poetry-Cage's mesostics.

He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives.

John Cage Day was the name given to several events held during 2012 to mark the centenary of his birth.

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933-35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage's major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures.

The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text decision-making tool, which uses chance operations to suggest answers to questions one may pose, became Cage's standard composition tool for the rest of his life.

Jacaranda Music had four concerts planned in Santa Monica, California, for the centennial week.

Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.

In 2012, amongst a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations, an eight-day festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more amongst the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces. Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York.[.

Cage was an American composer and music theorist.

In a homage to Cage's dance work, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in July 2012 "performed an engrossing piece called 'Story/Time'. It was modeled on Cage's 1958 work 'Indeterminacy', in which [Cage and then Jones, respectively,] sat alone onstage, reading aloud ... series of one-minute stories [they]'d written. Dancers from Jones's company performed as [Jones] read.".