John Cage Quotes

John Cage's reflections feel playful and experimental, nudging listeners to hear music in everyday life.

32 quotes

1. A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

2. Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

3. A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

4. I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

5. I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall'.

6. 'What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.'

7. 'Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.'

8. Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.

9. We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

10. I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is poetry/ as I need it.

11. If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

12. Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

13. I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

14. I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

15. The living, for the first time in history, now outnumber the dead

16. In Zen, it is said, if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

17. The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

18. As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

19. I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.

20. It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.

21. So somebody has talent? So what? Dime a dozen. And we're overpopulated. Actually we have more food than we have people and more art. We've gotten to the point of burning food. When will we begin to burn our art?

22. The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

23. There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

24. To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.

25. Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.

26. There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.

27. People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.

28. Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

29. My work became an exploration of non-intention.

30. As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.

31. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.

32. Why make art ? To quiet the mind thus making it susceptible to divine influences.