The Composer John Cage’s Experimental Music and the Problems of the American Musical Avant­Garde of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article focuses on the ideological, theoretical and experimental foundations of the work of one of the most radical composers of the American musical avant-garde of the 20th century, John Milton Cage (1912—1992), covering the embodiment field of the idea of free musical composition, where sound and noise, as well as sound and silence, are in equal position. There are also revealed Cage’s experiments, which influenced the world of dance, fine arts, theater, opera, alternative rock, as well as his relationship with one of the leaders of the French musical avant-garde, Pierre Boulez, and with representatives of the American avant-garde — the artist R. Rauschenberg, the choreographer M. Cunningham, and others. The composer’s creativity opened the innovative key of new stylistic changes that paved the way for the modern art of postmodernity, the artistic demands that arose in the late 1960s, when the very life of John Cage was determined by numerous and intense friendships with the artists of the avant-garde community. The composer also radically changed the perception of music. His musical ideas largely determined the development not only of new tendencies in music, but also of the culture of the postwar avant-garde, while the experimental musical creativity contributed to destruction of the barriers between various spheres of artistic production — such as music, painting, dance performance — allowing for a new interdisciplinary work between different arts. Cage sought to view all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, urging the audience to accept all sound phenomena as equal. He carried out a revolution in music, in such a way as to make it possible to compose and perform any imaginable music, and claimed that it was necessary to strive for the music in which sounds would not just sound.