John Cage's Writings

Most of John Cage's prose is cast in the form of lecture, diary and criticism, three genres particularly favored in American literature. Cage began an uninterrupted and successful lecturing career in 1927 with the earliest of his substantial pieces of writing, Other People Think, an address imbued with Pan-American ideals which the fifteen-year-old Cage, representing Los Angeles High School, delivered at the Hollywood Bowl to win the Southern Oratorical Contest. The following year he graduated class valedictorian. In 1931, after his first trip to Europe, he returned to California and for while supported himself by lecturing on modern painting and music to local housewives. In doing so, he was practicing typically American genre, dating from the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson expressed the belief that all men are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Lecturing was given literary authority by Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson; such eminent statesmen as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were masters of the art. American culture never suffered as did Europen culture from Jacob Burckhardt's indictment of rhetoric as monstrous aberration. This view remained current in Europe until the 1930s, when two factors effected change: (1) logical positivism, which drew attention to the importance of studying how language is used, and (2) I.A. Richards's Philosophy of Rhetoric, which emphasized the need for new art of discourse. Since then, considerable efforts were made in the United States towards teaching the art of lecturing in schools and universities. In 1949, John Cage received an award of one thousand dollars from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and wrote his Lecture on Nothing and Lecture on Something, both reprinted in Silence (1961). In the foreword to this book John Cage explains how in writing those two fundamental lectures he made use of methods similar to those he used as composer. Lecture on Nothing, written in 1950 and published in Incontri Musicali only in August 1959, was actually an application of the musical techniques of the time to lecture writing. Its content was musical as much as philosophical, and expressed the idea that a discussion is nothing more than entertainment. With this in mind, Cage prepared six answers for the question-answer period to follow the lecture regardless of the questions