John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr was born on September 5, 1912 to John Milton Cage and Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey in Las Angeles, California. Neither of John’s parents went to college (Inamori Foundation , 1990). However, his father was an inventor and his mother was the founder of the Lincoln Study Club and later became the editor of the Woman’s Club for the Los Angeles Times. John describes his mom as a “sense of society.” John went to Pamona College for two years when he realized that college was not for him. After he dropped out he decided that he would travel the world (PBS, 2001). He traveled to Europe for a year and a half and worked with Jose Pijoan for a little while. There he became interested in music and painting. He left Paris, moved to Mallorca and there his amazing career started. While in Mallorca, he started writing music and painting. In Europe he experimented with different types of paintings for example, Greek and Gothic architecture. He started to find the painting and writing boring so he did theater for a little while (Pitchett, 1993). He returned to the United States in 1931 and he started giving lectures in Santa Monica on contemporary music. During that time he met his first teacher, Richard Buhlig. Two years later he decided to quit the painting and focus on his music because “The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my painting had to say about my paintings.” (Inamori Foundation , 1990) After sending some of his compositions to Henry Cowell, Mr. Cowell recommended that he take lessons from Adolph Weiss and Arnold Schoenberg. So following Cowells suggestion he moved to New York and started studying with Adolph and also with Henry (Inamori Foundation , 1990). After several months he started studying with Arnold Schoenberg, free of charge, at the University of Southern California and then at the University of California, Los Angeles. Two years later both John and Arnold realized that John had