Postmodernism and Music
John Cage: The Composer Who Will Make You Ask, “Why?” “If everything is more or less of equal value, as the Postmodernists say, why not just leave art to chance?” - Craig Wright John Cage was a postmodernist composer who took this idea to heart. John Cage’s father was John Milton Cage Sr, an inventor. John Cage Jr took after his father, although instead of inventing machines and other things, he invented music. John Cage not only composed music but he composed in an extremely different style of music than anyone else had ever heard before. Cage challenged the very foundations of music itself in a very modern way. John Cage challenged these fundamentals of music and argued that common noises could be music too, by inventing what we now call “chance music.” Craig Wright describes chance music as music where, “musical events are not carefully predetermined by the composer, but come instead in an unpredictable sequence as the result of non-musical decisions such as following astr...