Cage, John United States Contemporary 1912 1991 New York School John Cage was born September 5, 1912 in Los Angeles. He is today regarded as one of the central figures in the music history of our century. The extent of his influence and the far-reaching effect of his ideas is immeasurable. In Europe his work began to be recognized during the fifties, thereby strengthening his position in the USA considerably. Since the thirties Cage has been composing continually for all available media. Above all, his inclusion of chance operations for compositional decisions became famous - a procedure based on a totally new understanding of what music is, what art is. Frequently Cage provides no more than a framework or situation, the content of which can always be filled anew by the musicians and which varies with every repetition. Occasionally, however, Cage also records the results of these chance operations in precise notation, resulting in a fixed text for the interpretation he did so for the first time in 1951 for his Music of Changes and the Imaginairy Landscape No.4. Since then, decisions based on chance and made with the help of the ancient Chinese book of oracles I Ching become a central component of his working method. Up to the present Cage has written over 150 compositions and published several volumes of his collected writings, a majority of which can be regarded as musical compositions. Stolen from http://www.xs4all.nl/~gaud/biobak/c/cagej.htm