John Cage Quotes (43 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Silence: Lectures and Writings

John Cage

John Cage: 43 quotes 27 likes

Famous John Cage Quotes

“Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.”

John Cage

“In the dark, all cats are black.”

John Cage

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

John Cage

Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (1988) Conversing with Cage
1980s

“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”

John Cage

“Every something is an echo of nothing”

John Cage

“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.”

John Cage

John Cage Quotes about music

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, V.
1930s

“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.”

John Cage

“Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?”

John Cage

"Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures, John Cage gave in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence.
1950s

“Everything we do is music.”

John Cage

Source: Classical Composer, From: 4'33"

“Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”

John Cage

Quote of "Experimental Music", John Cage (1957)
1950s

“We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage: the last lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html
1990s

John Cage Quotes about time

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”

John Cage book Silence: Lectures and Writings

Source: Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Critics frequently cry 'Dada' after attending one of my concerts or hearing one of my lectures. Others bemoan my interest in w:Zen. One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard was given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was called Zen Buddhism and Dada. It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action. What was Dada in the 1920's is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art. What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen... I doubt whether I would have done what I have done... I often point out that Dada nowadays has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked. What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?”

John Cage

Quote in 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, x/SILENCE
1960s

“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.”

John Cage

1955, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812
1950s

“The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM”

John Cage

1930s
Source: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, 4/SILENCE

“David Tudor and I went to Hilversum in Holland to make a recording for the Dutch radio. We arrived at the studio early and there was some delay. To pass the time, we chatted with the engineer who was to work with us. He asked me what kind of music he was about to record. Since he was a Dutchman I said, 'It may remind you of the work of Mondrian.' When the session was finished and the three of us were leaving the studio, I asked the engineer what he thought of the music we had played. He said, 'It reminded me of the work of Mondrian.”

John Cage

Quote from 'Lecture on Nothing', (c. 1949), in 'Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage; Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, p. 127
this lecture had been prepared some years earlier, but was not printed until 1959, when it appeared in 'It Is', ed. Philip Pavia
1950s

“So it was that I gave about 1949 my 'Lecture on Nothing' at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City (started by Robert Motherwell), which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al. ). This 'Lecture on Nothing' was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.). One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, 'If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.' Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, 'John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute.' She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.”

John Cage

Quote in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage'; publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, Foreword/ix
1960s

John Cage Quotes

“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.”

John Cage

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

John Cage

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

John Cage

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)
1940s

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

John Cage

Quote from an interview by John Corbett (1989)
1980s
Source: Silence

“The world is teeming; anything can happen.”

John Cage book Silence: Lectures and Writings

Source: Silence: Lectures and Writings

World

“All great art is a form of complaint”

John Cage

Art

“The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.”

John Cage book Silence: Lectures and Writings

Source: Silence: Lectures and Writings

Love , Fear , Anger

“It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.”

John Cage

Thinking

“College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.”

John Cage

Source: M: Writings '67-'72

People , Books , Reading

“There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change... It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it 'presents itself'; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.”

John Cage

Quote in 'John Cage, For the Birds: John Cage In Conversation with Daniel Charles', London/New York: Marion Boyars, 1981; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC ), p. 17, note 10
1980s

World , Imagination , Problem , Reality

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

John Cage

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)
1940s

Love , Music

“When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic — here on Sixth Avenue, for instance — I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don't need sound to talk to me.”

John Cage

Quote of Cage, in an interview with Miroslav Sebestik, 1991; in Listen, documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. ARTE France Développement, 2003; as quoted on Wikipedia, note 54
1990s

Love , Music , Feeling , Idea

“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.”

John Cage

1952, quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812
1950s

Music , Way , Imagination , Idea

“A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage from Forerunners of Modern Music (1949), first published in the New York journal A Tiger's Eye, later collected in Silence.
1940s

“I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); SILENCE 3-4
1930s

Music

“…WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); SILENCE; lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, CREDO/3
1930s

Music , Past , Future

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

John Cage

Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz (1988) Conversing with Cage
1980s

Business

“They say, 'you mean it's just sounds?' thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.”

John Cage

Interview in documentary "Listen" (1992)
1990s

Love , Thinking

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

John Cage

1982, quoted in John Cage Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind, ISBN 1891300164
1980s

Art

“I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, 'You have to invent it.' When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.”

John Cage

Quote of John Cage: the first lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html
1990s

Life , People , History , Personality

“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.”

John Cage

as quoted in "Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music", January, 1996; ISBN 0819563110
1990s

People

“I can't speak or write German, but I'am overjoyed because I have bought one of your pictures. Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher.”

John Cage

Quote from his letter to Jawlensky, early Februari 1935; as cited in 'The shape of the Future 3: Art' in Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists, by Kay Larson, Penguin 2012, p. unknown
Cage bought one of the small 'Head' paintings of Jawlensky, via his art-agent Galka E. Scheyer who showed Cage some paintings of Jawlensky early 1935, and sold his choice very cheap for 25 dollars; Cage was then 25 years old and strongly inspired by images, as he told Scheyer and wrote Jawlensky
1930s

Music , Teachers

“At Black Mountain College in 1952, I organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of w:Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my 'Juilliard lecture', which ends: 'A piece of string, a sunset, each acts.' The audience was seated in the center of all this activity. Later that summer, vacationing in New England, I visited America's first synagogue, to discover that the congregation was there seated precisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain.”

John Cage

Quote in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage'; publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, Foreword/ix
1960s

Way , Mountain , Dance , Summer

“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.' I said, 'Well then, I'll beat my head against that wall.' I quite literally began hitting things, and developed a music of percussion that involved noises.”

John Cage

Quote from an interview in Observer magazine (1982), repeated on several occasions
1980s

Music , Feeling

“We need not destroy the past. It is gone.”

John Cage

"Lecture on Nothing" (1949)
1940s