John Cage: Quotes about people

John Cage was American avant-garde composer. Explore interesting quotes on people.

John Cage: 86 quotes27 likes

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

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

“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

“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

“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 <br class="br">1990s

“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 <br class="br">1990s

“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