John Cage

September 5, 1912 ”“ August 12, 1992

1934-1935: studies with Arnold Schoenberg in California.

1938: composes Imaginary Landscape 1, possibly the first composition to employ record players as instruments. It consists of a quartet using "a muted piano, a suspended cymbal, and two variable-speed turntables on which single-frequency radio test records were played at various steady speeds and also sliding between speeds in siren-like glissandos.

1948: Cage (36) joins the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly works on collaborations with Merce Cunningham.

1951: Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is written for twelve radio receivers.

1952: The premiere of the three-movement 4'33" is given by David Tudor on August 29, in Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music.

1958: Cage begins teching a course in musical composition at the New School for Social Research, New York. His course brought together, as guest lecturers and pupils, a number of personalities who would be crucial to the development of what would later become known as Fluxus.

1969: HPSCHD, a long-running multimedia work made in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, incorporated the mass superimposition of seven harpsichords playing chance-determined excerpts from the works of Cage, Hiller, and a potted history of canonical classics, with fifty-two tapes of computer-generated sounds, 6'400 slides of designs many supplied by NASA, and shown from sixty-four slide projectors, with forty motion-picture films. The piece was initially rendered in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_cage

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