5 September: John Cage

Born on this date in 1912 was John Cage, experimental artist, composer, poet and philosopher. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. In one of his best known compositions, 4’33”, the musicians do nothing. It has been described as 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence, but in fact what Cage intended was for the audience to listen to the other sounds all around them. One of the reasons he wrote it was because he hated “muzak”, the tunes piped into elevators and shops, drowning out the natural sounds.
2. Another thing he is famous for is the “prepared piano” in which objects are placed on and between the Piano strings to alter the sound which is made. This arose from a commission he had to write primitive African music for a dance concert.
3. John Milton Cage was born in Los Angeles. His family go back a long way. He once claimed in an interview that one of his ancestors, also called John Cage, helped George Washington survey the Virginia Colony.
4. He learned to play the piano in school and liked music, but as a young man it was writing, rather than music that he was looking at as a future career.
5. He started studying Theology in college but dropped out after deciding a trip to Europe would be more helpful to a budding writer than staying in college. He was there for 18 months and during that time, studied art and architecture and started composing.
6. In 1935 he married Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff, an artist from Alaska who was the daughter of a Russian priest. They’d met while Cage was working in his mother’s arts and crafts shop. The marriage ended in divorce 10 years later and he started a relationship with a choreographer called Merce Cunningham, who was his partner for the rest of his life.
7. One of the tools he used for composing Music was the I Ching, an old Chinese text used for divination. Cage believed that music should reflect life, and life is full of chance and randomness. He started off tossing coins as traditional I Ching readers would do but in the 1950s started using a computer programme to generate random numbers. Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radio receivers, and Music of Changes for piano are examples of Cage’s works produced in this manner.
8. He also believed anything that made a sound could be a musical instrument. He composed pieces for pots and pans, drum brakes, cacti, Bathtubs and even Rubber ducks.
9. He was one of the first musicians to create electronic music on tape.
10. He died of a stroke in 1992, aged 79.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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