John Cage, Avant-Garde Music Theorist & Composer

For our brief artist research report, I was tasked with the music theorist and avant-garde artist John Cage. I noticed that in The Medium Is the Message, author Marshall McLuhan does not have much about John Cage other than several quotes just as obscure as McLuhan’s book. McLuhan voices many problems with the advent of modern technology and how it affect our individuality and hamper our ability to proper socialize, and it seems to me that Cage offers a solution to some of those problems with the little page space he has in McLuhan’s book. The argument that I make is that Cage’s solution consists of us taking time to remove ourselves from modern technology.

~ Cage and his prepared piano experiment ~

~ Cage playing on a ridiculously small piano for 4'33' ~