Cage artistic influences

"We live in a time I think not of mainstream, but of many streams, or even, if yo insist upon a river of time, that we have tome to the delta, maybe even beyond delta to an ocean which si goign back to the skies." John Cage in KPFA Radio, 1992
In this post I will share some of my discoveries of the artistic influences that shaped the music of John Cage.

Interestingly, Cage's father, John Milton Cage, was an inventor, no doubt stimulating the composer's interest in tinkering with gadgets.
In 1930, Cage abandoned two years of study at Pamona to make a trip to Europe in 1930 in which he explored painting, poetry, and music. Mark Katz writes in Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music that Cage attended a "phonograph concert" presented by Hindemith and Ernst Toch that featured prerecorded sounds of spoken music and wanted to continue their work, resulting in several works for phonograph and ensemble.
Alex Ross notes in The Rest is Noise that, "for Cage, the classical tradition was worn-out kitch ripe for deconstruction, in the manner of his intellectual hero, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp." The futuristic surrealism of Duchamp's works have always appealed to me, as well. Without attempting a comprehensive discussion of that artist, here are a few of my favorite works which might have influenced Cage:

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912)

 

Bicycle Wheel (1913 lost, reconstructed in 1953). This work fits in Duchamp's category of readymades in which he hoped to question the adoration of art. This questioning of the essence of art seems to have directly influenced Cage's own radical questioning of the established conventions and traditions.

 

Apparently Duchamp also had quite the sense of humor giving the title as a lewd French pun.

There are many other works, especially fascinating moving sculptures, but Duchamp's most interesting connection with Cage may be in his musical compositions. There are two musical works composed by chance operations: one for three voices published in 1934 and another unpublished for a mechanical recording device.