John Cage

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John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, music theorist, painter, and scholar.

Cage, a pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical equipment, was one of the leading figures of the postwar avant-garde.

Critics have lauded him as one of the twentieth century's most influential composers.

He was also instrumental in the creation of modern dance, mainly because of the fact that the piece was performed without the presence of deliberate sound; performers who were also Cage's personal partner for the majority of their lives.

The composition is not "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence," as is often believed, but rather the sounds of the room heard during performance.

The work's challenge to preconceived notions of musicianship and musical experience made it a hot and controversial topic both in musicology and wider aesthetics of art and performance.

Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its appearance changed by objects attached to or on the strings of its strings or hammers) for which he wrote numerous dance-related works as well as a few concert pieces.

Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48), both famous for their innovative music, were both responsible for Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), but Cage's key influences were in various East and South Asian cultures.

Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music in the late 1940s, which he began composing in 1951.

The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text decision making device, which uses chance algorithms to suggest answers to questions that one may have asked, became Cage's standard composition device for the remainder of his life.

Experimental Music, a 1957 lecture, referred to music as "an acknowledgement of life" rather than an effort to bring order out of chaos or to recommend changes in technology, but simply a means of returning to the everyday life we live.

Life

Cage was born in 1912 at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown Los Angeles. John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964) was an entrepreneur, and his mother, Lucretia ("Crete") Harvey (1881–1968), worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times intermittently. George Washington was aided by an ancestor named John Cage in 1976, assisting him in surveying the Colony of Virginia. Cage characterized his mother as a "never happy" woman, although his father is perhaps best described by his inventions, including a diesel-fueled submarine that let out exhaust bubbles, some as innovative and against scientific conventions, such as the "electrostatic field theory" of the universe. "If someone says 'can't't' that tells you what to do," John Cage Sr. told his son. Crate and Dad, two small character pieces dedicated to his parents, Cage from 1944–45. The former is a short vibrant piece that comes to an end abruptly, while "Crete" is a marginally longer, mainly melodic contrapuntal work.

Cage's first encounters with music came from private piano instructors in the Greater Los Angeles area and several relatives, including aunt Phoebe James who introduced him to 19th-century piano music. He started piano lessons at kindergarten in fourth grade, but even though he adored music, he expressed more enthusiasm for sight reading than in creating virtuoso piano techniques, and apparently was not concerned with composition. Fannie Charles Dillon, one of his music teachers, was a student at the University of York. Cage was still ardent about wanting to be a writer by 1928, but by 1928, he was determined that he wanted to be a writer. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as a valedictorian, and he gave a prize-winning address at the Hollywood Bowl in the spring, calling for a day of silence for all Americans. "We should have the opportunity to hear what other people think," he said, anticipating 4'33" by more than thirty years.

In 1928, Cage attended Pomona College in Claremont, where he majored in theology. However, he visited Pomona the work of writer Marcel Duchamp, a student of writer James Joyce, via Don Sample, of philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy and Henry Cowell. He dropped out in 1930, after being told that "college was of no use to a writer" after an incident that was not chronicled in the 1991 autobiographical record:

Cage told his parents that a trip to Europe would be more beneficial to a future writer than college study. He then hitchhiked to Galveston and sailed to Le Havre, where he took a train to Paris. Cage spent 18 months in Europe, trying his hand at many styles of art. He investigated Gothic and Greek architecture first but decided he wasn't interested enough in architecture to dedicate his life to it. He then moved to painting, poetry, and music. It was in Europe that he first heard contemporary composers' music (such as Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith) and then became aware of Johann Sebastian Bach's music, which he hadn't heard before.

After several months in Paris, Cage's enthusiasm for America was revived after reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – he wanted to return immediately, but his parents, who exchanged letters on a daily basis, convinced him to stay in Europe for a little longer and explore the continent. Cage began traveling around France, Germany, and Spain, as well as Capri, and, most importantly, Majorca, where he began writing. Cage was dissatisfied with the results and left the finished pieces behind when he left, but he left. Cage's relationship with theatre also began in Europe: "The multiplicity of simultaneous visual and audible performances all coming together in one's experience and producing pleasure" on a walk in Seville, according to his own words.

In 1931, Cage returned to the United States. He went to Santa Monica, California, where he made a living off small, private lectures on contemporary art. He got to know several key figures from Southern California's art scene, including Richard Buhlig (who became his first composition instructor) and arts patron Galka Scheyer. Cage's focus, rather than painting, came in 1933. "The people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the ones who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings," Cage later explained. He sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell in 1933; the reply was a "rather vague letter" in which Cowell suggested that Cage investigate with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical interests at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row, somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone approach. Before heading to Schoenberg, Cowell advised that you take some preliminary lessons and recommended Adolph Weiss, a former Schoenberg student.

Following Cowell's advice, Cage travelled to New York City in 1933 and started studying with Weiss, as well as taking lessons from Cowell himself at The New School. He helped himself financially by doing a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA (World Young Women's Christian Association). Cage's diet during that time was apparently exhausting, with only four hours of sleep on most nights and four hours of composition every day beginning at 4 a.m. Cage's composition was so strong in 1933 that he could approach Schoenberg. He could not afford Schoenberg's price, and when he mentioned it, the older composer wondered if Cage would dedicate his life to music. Schoenberg said after Cage said no, he would, and so did he teach him free of charge.

Cage studied in California with Schoenberg: first at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as privately. The elder composer, who "literally revered him," was one of Cage's most influential figures, particularly as an example of how to live one's life as a composer. While Cage "had no desire for it," Cage's promise to dedicate his life to music was obviously still important 40 years ago, as shown by Cage's vow to dedicate his life to music [i.e.]. He started writing songs [written music] because of the promise he gave. Cage himself has extensive information about Schoenberg's behavior and influence on Cage. The discussion in the 1958 lecture Indeterminacy: A particularly well-known is the one discussed in the article.

Cage spent two years with Schoenberg, but although he adored his teacher, he decided to leave after Schoenberg told the assembled students that he was attempting to make it impossible for them to write music. Cage related the incident several years later: "......... I revolted against him, not against him, but against what he had said when he said it. "I was determined then and there, more than ever before," the writer says. Despite Schoenberg's initial reaction that none of his American pupils were particularly interested, he later said in a later interview, "of course he's not a composer, but he's an artist of genius." Cage would later adopt the term "inventor" to deny that he was in fact a composer.

Cage was employed at his mother's arts and crafts store when he met artist Xenia Andevaroff in 1934 to 1935. She was the granddaughter of a Russian priest from Alaska, and her work included fine bookbinding, sculpture, and collage. Although Cage was involved in acquaintances with Don Sample and architect Rudolph Schindler's wife Pauline when he first met Xenia, he fell in love straight away. On June 7, 1935, Cage and Kashevaroff were married in Yuma, Arizona, in the desert.

The newlywed couple met in Pacific Palisades first and then migrated to Hollywood. During 1936-38, Cage moved between many professions, including one that began his lifelong fascination with modern dance: dance accompanist at the University of California, Los Angeles. He produced music for choreographies and taught a course on "Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression" at UCLA with his aunt Phoebe. Cage began to experiment with unorthodox products, like toilet paper, metal sheets, and so on during the period. "Everything in the world has a passion that can be expressed by its sounds," Oskar Fischinger told Cage that "everything in the world has a spirit that can be unleashed by its sounds." Although Cage did not divulge the belief of spirits, these words prompted him to start investigating the sounds created by striking various non-musical objects.

Cage moved to San Francisco in 1938 on Cowell's recommendation that he seek out fellow Cowell students and composer Lou Harrison. According to Cowell, the two composers had a common interest in percussion and dance and would likely clash if introduced to one another. In fact, the two people immediately formed a strong bond on meeting and began a long-term working relationship. Harrison soon helped Cage acquire a faculty member position at Mills College, teaching the same curriculum as UCLA and working with choreographer Marian van Tuyl. Several well-known dance companies were on hand, and Cage's fascination with modern dance soared even more. After many months, he migrated to Seattle, Washington, where he found work as a composer and accompanist for choreographer Bonnie Bird at the Cornish College of the Arts. The Cornish School years proved to be a pivotal time in Cage's history. Cage developed a percussion group that toured the West Coast and gave the composer his first fame, aside from teaching and working as an accompanist. In 1940, his reputation was boosted even more by the introduction of the prepared piano, a piano whose tone has been changed by objects placed on, under, or between the strings. This idea was originally intended for a performance staged in a room too small to accommodate a complete percussion ensemble. Cage met some people who became lifelong friends, such as painter Mark Tobey and dancer Merce Cunningham, at the Cornish School. The former was to become Cage's lifelong romantic partner and artistic collaborator.

After the painter László Moholy-Nagy invited him to teach at the Chicago School of Design (which later became the IIT Institute of Design), Cage left Seattle in the summer of 1941. The composer accepted partially because he wanted to find opportunities in Chicago that were otherwise unobtainable in Seattle to establish a center for experimental music. These opportunities didn't materialize. Cage studied at the Chicago School of Design and spent time as an accompanist and composer at the University of Chicago. At one time, Kenneth Patchen's reputation as a percussionist earned him a contract with Columbia Broadcasting System to produce a soundtrack for a radio play. The result, The City Wears a Slouch Hat, was well-received, and Cage predicted that more significant commissions would follow. He left Chicago for New York City in 1942 in the hopes of finding these.

The Cages began with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim in New York. Cage met influential artists, including Piet Mondrian, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, and Marcel Duchamp, to name a few others, among other things. Guggenheim was very generous: the Cages could remain with her and Ernst for as long as they desired, and she promised to produce a concert of Cage's music at the opening of her gallery, which included paying for transportation of Cage's percussion instruments from Chicago. After Guggenheim discovered that Cage had another concert at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), she had no encouragement, and even after the extremely successful MoMA concert, Cage was left homeless, unemployed, and penniless. He hoped for those commissions, but it didn't happen. Jean Erdman, a dancer, and her husband Joseph Campbell spent the summer of 1942 with him and Xenia. Cage went back to prepared piano for performances by several choreographers, including Merce Cunningham, who had lived in New York City many years ago. Cage and Cunningham eventually became romantically involved, and Cage's marriage, which had already begun in the 1950s, resulted in divorce in 1945. Cunningham was Cage's partner for the remainder of his life. Cage also combated the shortage of percussion instruments by writing, on one occasion, for voice and closed piano: the resulting piece, The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942), quickly became popular and was performed by the legendary pair of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. In 1944, he appeared in At Land, a 15-minute silent experimental film directed by Maya Deren.

Cage's artistic life was also affected by a depression in the mid-1940s, as well as his personal life. The composer's dissatisfaction with the idea of music as a means of communication was on the decline: the public rarely accepted his art, and Cage himself had trouble comprehending his colleagues' music. Gita Sarabhai, an Indian musician who came to the United States to study Western music, was given by Cage in early 1946. He begged her to teach him about Indian music and philosophy in return. Cage attended D. T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhism lectures in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as the Coomaraswamy's later work. The first results of these studies were inspired by Indian concepts: Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, String Quartet in Four Parts, and others. Cage accepted the point of music as Sarabhai told him: "To sober and quiet the mind, making it susceptible to divine influences."

Early in 1946, Richard Buhlig, his former teacher, arranged for Cage to meet Berlin-born pianist Grete Sultan, who had fled from Nazi persecution to New York in 1941. They became close, lifelong friends, and Cage later dedicated a portion of his Music for Piano and his monumental piano cycle Etudes Australes to her.

Cage, who was born in 1949, received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, which enabled him to travel to Europe, where he met composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. Cage's chance meeting Morton Feldman in New York City in early 1950 was all the more significant. Both composers appeared at a New York Philharmonic concert, where the orchestra performed Anton Webern's Symphony. op. Sergei Rachmaninoff's piece was first published on the 21st, followed by a piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff. Cage was so overwhelmed by Webern's work that he left before the Rachmaninoff; and in the lobby, he encountered Feldman, who was leaving for the same reason. The two composers soon became colleagues, and Cage, Feldman, Earl Brown, David Tudor, and Cage's student Christian Wolff were all introduced as "the New York school" shortly thereafter.

Wolff presented Cage with a copy of the I Ching, a Chinese classic text that identifies a symbol system used to determine order in chance events in early 1951. This version of the I Ching was the first complete English translation and had been published by Wolff's father, Kurt Wolff of Pantheon Books in 1950. The I Ching is often used for divination, but for Cage, it became a tool to build using chance. Cage would arrive at a point of music to ask the I Ching, and the book would then be used in much the same way as divination. "Imitating nature in its way of operation" for Cage. His lifelong interest in sound culminated in a strategy that resulted in works in which the composer's will was unveiled:

Although Cage had played chance on a few occasions before, most notably in the third movement of Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950-51), the I Ching opened new possibilities for him in this field. Imaginary Landscape No. 1: The first results of the new approach were published. Changes for Piano 4 is a product of the Radio Amateur Radio Showcase, and Music of Changes for Pianos is a spin on the radio. David Tudor, whom Cage encountered through Feldman, was also a part of a previous friendship that didn't last until Cage's death. Tudor premiered the majority of Cage's works until the early 1960s, when he stopped playing on the piano and concentrated on creating music. The I Ching became Cage's staple composition device, and he used it in almost every piece of work produced after 1951 until he finally settled on a computer program that calculated numbers in a manner similar to throwing coins for the I Ching.

Despite the fame and reputation that Sonatas and Interludes earned him, Cage maintained his links with American and European composers and musicians. Despite the fact that he had an apartment on 326 Monroe Street (which he had lived in since about 1946), his financial situation in 1951 was so bad that he wrote down a series of instructions for Tudor as to how to complete the work if he died. Nevertheless, Cage managed to live and maintained an active artistic life, giving lectures and performances, etc.

He completed another mammoth project, the Williams Mix, a piece of tape music that Earle Brown and Morton Feldman helped put together in 1952–53. Cage produced the work that became his best-known and most controversial creation, 4′33′′, in 1952. The score asks the player not to play the instrument during the entire length of the piece—four minutes, thirty-three seconds—and is meant to be viewed as consisting of the sounds of the environment in which it is performed. Cage created "a silent piece" years earlier but was hesitant to write it down; in fact, the premiere (given by Tudor on August 29, 1952 at Woodstock, New York) sparked a lot of outrage in the audience. The reaction to 4′33′′ was just part of the larger picture: it was the introduction of chance procedures that had disastrous effects on Cage's image. His new books were dismissed by the press, who used to respond favorably to earlier percussion and poised piano music, and many important friendships and friendships were lost. Pierre Boulez, who used to advertise Cage's work in Europe, was opposed to Cage's chance use, as well as other composers who rose to fame in the 1950s, e.g. Joe Dove. Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.

During this time, Cage was also teaching at the avant-garde Black Mountain College just outside Asheville, North Carolina. Cage served at the college in 1948- 1952 and 1953 and was on leave the summer of 1953. He conceived what has been described as the first "happening" in the United States while attending Black Mountain College in 1952 (see discussion below), which later became Theatre Piece No. 58. A multi-layered, multi-media performance performance exhibition held the same day as Cage's inception that "that will greatly influence 1950s and 60s artistic practices." Cunningham and Tudor were among the participants in addition to Cage.

Cage's associates were busy creating music for modern dance, particularly Cunningham's dances (Cage's partner took advantage of the human body's movement), as well as inventing new ways of using chance in a series of works he referred to as The Ten Thousand Things from 1953 to present. In the summer of 1954, he moved out of New York and settled in Gate Hill Cooperative, a neighborhood in Stony Point, New York, where his neighbors included David Tudor, M. C. Richards, Karen Karnes, Stan VanDerBeek, and Sari Dienes. The composer's financial situation gradually improved: in late 1954, he and Tudor were able to embark on a European tour. Cage taught experimental composition at The New School from 1956 to 1958, and he also worked as an art director and designer of typography. Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–58), a seminal work in the history of graphic notation, and Variations I (1958).

Cage was a member of Wesleyan University and worked with colleagues of the University's Music Department from the 1950s to the present day in 1992. Norman O. Bruton, a scholar, poet, and scholar of classics, is a professor of Classics at the University. Brown befriended Cage, a relationship that has been incredibly fruitful to both of them. In 1960, the composer was named a Fellow on the faculty of the Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for Humanities) in Wesleyan's Liberal Arts and Sciences, where he began teaching experimental music. Wesleyan University Press published Silence, a collection of Cage's lectures and writings on a variety of topics, including the popular Lecture on Nothing that was composed using a complicated time length scheme, much like some of Cage's music. Silence was Cage's first book of six, but it is still his most widely read and influential. Cage began his lifelong friendship with C.F. in the early 1960s. Peters Corporation was founded in Peters, Florida. Walter Hinrichsen, the corporation's president, gave Cage an exclusive deal and ordered the publication of a map of Cage's works, which first appeared in 1962.

Edition Peters soon published a large number of Cage scores, and this, along with the release of Silence, contributed to much more fame for the composer than ever before—one of the positive results of this was that in 1965 Betty Freeman established an annual award for living expenses for Cage. Cage was already receiving so many commissions and calls for appearances by the mid-1960s that he was unable to fulfill them. This was accompanied by a packed touring schedule, and Cage's compositional output from the decade was scant. Cage gradually transitioned to "music (not composition)" after the orchestral Atlas Economy (1961–62), a work based on star charts that was completely notated. In the first performance, Cage writing the sentence was suspended, a score of 0'005", which was originally written as a single sentence: "In a situation where maximum amplification is possible, take a disciplined action." Variations III (1962)'s score abounds in instructions to the actors, but there are no references to music, musical instruments, or sounds in the program.

Many of the Variations and other 1960s works were really "happenings," an art form that was created by Cage and his students in the late 1950s. The "Experimental Composition" classes at The New School of Cage have become renowned as an American source of Fluxus, an international network of artists, composers, and designers. The bulk of his students had no or no interest in music. Artists dominated the majority of the cases. They included Jackson Mac Low, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, George Brecht, Ben Patterson, and Dick Higgins, as well as several others Cage invited unofficially. George Brecht's Time Table Music and Alice Denham of 48 Seconds are two of the classes' most popular works. Cage's performance was an example of dramatic performance that defy the common sense of audience recognition and occurred without the presence of a time frame. Rather, they're left to chance. They have a minimal script with no plot. In fact, a "happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, aiming to defy the notion of passing time. According to Cage, theater was the nearest route to integrating art and real life. Allan Kaprow, one of his students, coined the phrase "happenings" as a late fifties term. When on a mushroom hunt with George Segal, Cage met Kaprow and invited him to join his class. Following these events, Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud's seminal treatise The Theatre and Its Double, and the events of this period can be considered a precursor to the forthcoming Fluxus movement. Mary Bauermeister's Cologne studio hosted a joint concert by Cage and video artist Nam June Paik, who interrupted Cage's tie and poured a bottle of shampoo over the heads of Cage and Tudor in October 1960.

Wesleyan University Press' book A Year from Monday was first published in 1967. Cage's parents died in the 1980s: his father died in 1964, and his mother in 1969. After his burial, the Cage had his ashes scattered in Ramapo Mountains near Stony Point, and had requested that the same be done to him.

Cage's work from the sixties includes some of his best and most innovative pieces, not to mention socially utopian ones, reflecting the mood of the time yet also his embrace of modern media's writings, as well as R. Buckminster Fuller's on the use of technology to spark social change. HPSCHD (1969), a gargantuan and long-running multimedia project created in collaboration with Lejaren Hiller, included the mass reimposition of seven harpsichords with chance-determined excerpts from Cage, Hiller's career, and a potent history of canonical classics, featuring sixty-four slide projectors in a series of motion-picture films. In 1969, the piece was first performed in a five-hour performance at the University of Illinois, where the audience arrived after the piece had started and ended before it ended, wandering about the auditorium in the time for which they were present.

Also in 1969, Cage produced the first fully notated work in years: Cheap Imitation for piano. The piece is a chance-controlled reworking of Erik Satie's Socrate, and it is, according to both listeners and Cage himself, openly sympathetic to the source. Although Cage's admiration for Satie's music was well-known, it was extremely unusual for him to produce a personal work in which the composer is present. When asked about this apparent contradiction, Cage replied: "Obviously, Cheap Imitation is outside of what may appear to be normal in my career in general," Cage said. I'm the first one to be affected by it." Cage's fondness for the piece resulted in a recording, which was a rare occurrence, since Cage's disliked making recordings of his music—made in 1976. Cheap Imitation made a major leap in Cage's music, as he moved to writing fully researched works for classical instruments and tried out some new styles, such as improvisation, which he had previously discouraged, but was able to use in 1970s works such as Child of Tree (1975).

Cheap Imitation became Cage's last act in public. Arthritis had plagued Cage since 1960, and by the 1970s, his hands were swollen and rendered him unable to function. Nonetheless, he appeared on Cheap Imitation in the 1970s before being forced to give up performing. Preparing manuscripts became more difficult: before, published versions of work by Cage's calligraphic script were released; now, manuscripts for publication were required to be completed by assistants; manuscripts for publication were also difficult: David Tudor's departure from performing, which occurred in the early 1970s, escalated the situation. Instead, Tudor decided to concentrate on composition rather than composition, and so Cage, for the first time in two decades, was forced to start relying on commissions from other artists and their respective abilities. Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, and several others appeared on stage, including Grete Sultan, Paul Zukofsky, Margaret Leng Tan, among other things. Cage continued to write prose and poetry books outside of music (mesostics). In 1973, Wesleyan University Press first published M. Cage was invited by Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press to print in printmaking in January 1978, and the artist would continue to produce a series of prints every year until his death; together with some late watercolors, he created the majority of his extant visual art. Wesleyan University Press' Empty Words first appeared in 1979.

Cage created Two, for flute and piano, in 1987, dedicated to singers Roberto Fabbriciani and Carlo Neri. The number indicated refers to the number of performers; the music consisted of short notated fragments and could be played at any speed within the specified time limits. Cage continued to produce some forty such Number Pieces as they became known, one of the last being Eighty (1992), premiered in Munich on October 28, 2011), mainly employing a version of the same process. The composition process in several of the later Number Pieces was based on simple selection of pitch range and pitches from that range, using chance procedures; the music has been traced to Cage's anarchic leanings. One11 (i.e.) The eleventh piece for a single performer (Cage's first and only work to film) was completed in early 1992 and was the first piece for a single performer.

Opera was Cage's fifth opera performance, which also took place in 1987: Europera. The two continents, I and II, require more power than III, IV, and V, which are on a chamber scale.

Cage's health gradually deteriorated in the 1980s. He suffered not only from arthritis, but also from sciatica and arteriosclerosis. He had a stroke that restricted the movement of his left leg, and, in 1985, he broke an arm. Cage maintained a macrobiotic diet during this period. Nonetheless, the composer was aware of his age, and "the fire he started using in his artistic career in 1985 was not only the fire he had set aside for so long," he said, but also fire as transitorability and fragility." Cage died of another stroke on August 11, 1992 while making evening tea for himself and Cunningham. He was admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, where he died on the morning of August 12. He was 79.

According to Cage's wishes, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Ramapo Mountains, near Stony Point, New York, where he had scattered the ashes of his parents. The composer's death occurred just weeks before a set of his 80th birthday was held in Frankfurt by composer Walter Zimmermann and musicologist Stefan Schaedler. The concert went off as expected, with David Tudor and Ensemble Modern performing the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. Merce Cunningham died of natural causes in July 2009.

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