John Cage
composer [1912-1992]

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John Cage is without doubt among the most creative and most inventive composers of the 20th century. He widened the notion of music like hardly anybody else and profoundly influenced numerous composers. Setting off from anarchist and zen-Buddhist ideas, Cage again and again broke the rules and limits of traditional music and created a new and anarchist theory and practice of music. The idea of leaving one's own preferences and aversions behind and to regard all individuals, life forms, stones and sounds as individual centers with their own right of existence, this idea lead to the notion of "omnipresent music"; all sounds and actions are indiscriminately part of every musical event. Therefore he created his concept of "indeterminacy", bringing chance into the process of composition, leaving manyfold traces not only within music. His literary works, his sculptures and his trenchantly phrased philosophical and anarchist thinking also earned great merit.