Twentieth Century: Significant Pieces of Music
John Cage (1912-1992, American)
John Cage brought a new element into the musical world when he introduced the concept of chance, where some parts of the composition are left up to chance. He also is the creator of the prepared piano—a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings. Cage is probably best known for his piece 4’33”. If you were to see this piece performed live, you would see the performers sit silently at their instruments for the duration of the piece. The “music” is not produced by the instrumentalists, but instead by the ambient noise of the performance venue and the audience themselves. Cage has said this about the premiere performance: “They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Listen to John Cage's Bacchanale, for prepared piano:
