John Cage was an Avant-Garde classical composer. This type of composer ignored the old masters and Schoenberg's twelve-tone theory, incorporating non-traditional structures, instruments and approaches into the classical tradition. Composer John Cage used chance operations to determine the structure of his compositions, while Harry Partch designed his own instruments. Many Avant-Garde composers included electronic instrumentation in their music. Cage's music often is similar to hearing the soundtrack of a movie with no plot. This style of music is known as "musique concrete." This became Cage's particular style of music. He would make music out of non-traditional instruments.
John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. Cage briefly attended college and then traveled in Europe. Returning to the United States in 1931, he studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss, and Arnold Schoenberg. While teaching in Seattle, he began organizing percussion ensembles to perform his compositions, and he began experimenting with works for dance in collaboration with his longtime friend, the choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham. Cage's early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg, but by 1939 he had begun to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the "prepared piano". This was a piano modified by objects placed between its strings in order to produce percussive and otherworldly sound effects. Cage also experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound. He moved to San Francisco in 1939, to Chicago in 1941 and back to New York in 1942, all the time writing music for dance companies, nearly always for prepared piano or percussion ensemble. At age 26, Cage composed the first prepared piano piece, Bacchanale, for a dance by Syvilla Fort.
