John Milton Cage. A look at the most famous composer of the American avant-garde of the twentieth century.

Abstract

The subject of the research in the article is the work of the American composer John Milton Cage (1912-1992), who is considered one of the most famous and influential avant-garde musicians of the twentieth century. The composer's ideas about sound, the "open form of music", "random operations", "extended" musical instruments and many others were developed in the complex technical, discursive, institutional, cultural and political conditions of life in the United States, constantly changing in the course of his long and productive career. The article analyzes the "artistic and theoretical" legacy of composer John Cage in a philosophical and aesthetic way and shows how his work problematized artistic inventions in music, blurring the boundaries between artistic expressive forms, and his legacy became not only interdisciplinary, but also transdisciplinary, as a result of which the composer's musical experiments were reflected in the work of such American artists like Bill Childs, Fritz Reiner, David Tudor, Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Cornelius Cardew, etc. The scientific novelty of the article is that the author attempts to comprehend the creative path of the composer as one of the radical innovators in music, whose musical innovations during the 50s, 60s of the twentieth century led to paradigmatic changes in all areas of American art. Cage fundamentally rebuilt the ideas of what music was and what music could be, eventually becoming one of the most influential avant-garde composers of his time, largely predetermined the trends of the movement of American musical culture of the twentieth century. Cage's experimental innovation, the composer's ability to capture the spirit of the times and the anticipation of many creative ideas related to the nature of sound, made his works an integral part of world culture, an important milestone in the modern development of music