[10][11] The work's challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance.

He graduated that year from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian,[20] having also in the spring given a prize-winning speech at the Hollywood Bowl proposing a day of quiet for all Americans.

Often crossing disciplines again, though, he encountered at Pomona the work of artist Marcel Duchamp via Professor José Pijoan, of writer James Joyce via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Henry Cowell.

After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after he read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, with whom he regularly exchanged letters during the entire trip, persuaded him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent.

[28] Cage's association with theater also started in Europe: during a walk in Seville he witnessed, in his own words, "the multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible events all going together in one's experience and producing enjoyment.

Although Cage was involved in relationships with Don Sample and with architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline,[19] when he met Xenia, he fell in love immediately.

Harrison soon helped Cage to secure a faculty member position at Mills College, teaching the same program as at UCLA, and collaborating with choreographer Marian van Tuyl.

Without the percussion instruments, Cage again turned to prepared piano, producing a substantial body of works for performances by various choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had moved to New York City several years earlier.

Cage also countered the lack of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio.

[49] Early in 1946, his former teacher Richard Buhlig arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had escaped from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941.

[51] After a 1949 performance at Carnegie Hall, New York, Cage received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to make a trip to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez.

[53][54] In early 1951, Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching[55]—a Chinese classic text which describes a symbol system used to identify order in chance events.

[59]Although Cage had used chance on a few earlier occasions, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51),[60] the I Ching opened new possibilities in this field for him.

Although he still had an apartment at 326 Monroe Street (which he occupied since around 1946), his financial situation in 1951 worsened so much that while working on Music of Changes, he prepared a set of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the piece in the event of his death.

Cage conceived "a silent piece" years earlier, but was reluctant to write it down; and indeed, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York) caused an uproar in the audience.

[30] After the orchestral Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), a work based on star charts, which was fully notated, Cage gradually shifted to, in his own words, "music (not composition)."

They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins, as well as many others Cage invited unofficially.

In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the happenings of this period can be viewed as a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement.

The title referred to the number of performers needed; the music consisted of short notated fragments to be played at any tempo within the indicated time constraints.

They were commissioned by the Frankfurt Opera to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday, and according to music critic Mark Swed, they took "an enormous effort on the composer's part–requiring two full-time assistants and two computers humming day and night.

Days before Europas 1 & 2 were to be premiered,  Frankfurt's opera house burned down, setting into motion a series of setbacks leading to a theatrical run met with mixed reactions, including a performance so bad that Cage penned a letter to his musicians criticizing their interpretation of his composition.

[99] Yet another series of works, the so-called Number Pieces, all completed during the last five years of the composer's life, make use of time brackets: the score consists of short fragments with indications of when to start and to end them (e.g. from anywhere between 1′15" and 1′45", and to anywhere from 2′00" to 2′30").

The earliest project completed there was the etching Score Without Parts (1978), created from fully notated instructions, and based on various combinations of drawings by Henry David Thoreau.

While Mr. Cage's famous silent piece [i.e. 4′33″], or his Landscapes for a dozen radio receivers may be of little interest as music, they are of enormous importance historically as representing the complete abdication of the artist's power.

[126][127][128] For example, many composers of the English experimental school acknowledge his influence:[129] Michael Parsons, Christopher Hobbs, John White,[130] Gavin Bryars, who studied under Cage briefly,[131] and Howard Skempton.

[135] The John Cage Award was endowed and established in 1992 by Foundation for Contemporary Arts in honor of the late composer, with recipients including Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, and Toshi Ichiyanagi.

[146] Radiohead undertook a composing and performing collaboration with Cunningham's dance troupe in 2003 because the music-group's leader Thom Yorke considered Cage one of his "all-time art heroes".

[148] In 2012, among a wide range of American and international centennial celebrations,[149][150] an eight-day festival was held in Washington DC, with venues found notably more among the city's art museums and universities than performance spaces.

Earlier in the centennial year, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas presented Cage's Song Books with the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York.

It consisted of 13 commissioned works created by composers from around the globe such as Kasia Glowicka, Adrian Knight and Henry Vega, each being 4 minutes and 33 seconds long in honor of Cage's famous 1952 opus, 4′33″.