John Cage

Born in Los Angeles in 1912, he studied briefly at Pomona College and later with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA. Through engagement with Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s he developed a practice of chance composition, using the I Ching to make musical decisions and remove personal taste from the creative process. His 1952 work 4'33", in which performers produce no deliberate sound for the duration specified, proposed that listening itself was the primary act of music. He pioneered the prepared piano, invented the happening, and his writings in Silence (1961) became foundational texts of the postwar avant-garde. He died in New York in August 1992.