John Cage – 100 Years

Hyo-shin Na – written for the Korea Times – 9/28/2012

The composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) owned, when he died, 3 jackets, 3 coats, 10 pairs of trousers, 9 half-coats, 1 hat, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 shirts, 9 handkerchiefs, 13 pairs of socks, a bedsheet, 2 comforters, a mattress, a pillow, a blanket and a few books. He didn’t even own a piano! Beyond a close circle of friends, who revered him and his music, he was mostly unknown, lost in the crowd. Of course, today, everyone knows Schubert’s music.

John Cage, the American composer born in 1912, was a gregarious, openly generous man who loved to talk about his ideas and his latest projects. He was prolific, his output is astoundingly wide-ranging and various and his worldwide travels occupied much of the last decades of his life. The Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya was born a few years after Cage (1919) and couldn’t have lived more differently than he did, disliking talk about her music so much that she frequently declined to do interviews, and writing only a modest number of pieces that all share a similar starkness and intensity. This year, being the centennial of Cage’s birth, is filled with countless concerts and festivals of Cage’s music (including a two-concert celebration of Cage’s art planned by myself and my husband to take place in California in October). Let’s hope there will be many comparable events in honor of Ustvolskaya in 2019…

I’m grateful to Cage and Ustvolskaya for helping me realize that writing music is not necessarily self-expression, nor is the composer’s job primarily to manipulate the listener’s emotions. And I’m also thankful that they wrote music I can listen to during these beautiful autumn days…