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There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.

John Cage

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John Cage
Age: 79 †
Born: 1912
Born: September 5
Died: 1992
Died: August 2
Composer
Illustrator
Music Theorist
Musician
Musicologist
Painter
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
LA
California
John Milton Cage Jr.
John Milton Cage
Jr.
John Milton
Jr. Cage
J. C.
Bent
Destruction
Whole
Good
People
Equivalent
Gang
Orchestra

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When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.
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All great art is a form of complaint
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One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.
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Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
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Guy Nearing told us it's a good idea when hunting mushrooms to have a pleasant goal, a waterfall for instance, and, having reached it, to return another way. When, however, we're obliged to go and come back by the same path, returning we notice mushrooms we hadn't noticed going out.
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The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.
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Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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Out of the work comes the work.
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I don't need sound to talk to me.
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In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
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Music is a means of rapid transportation.
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If this word music is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
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Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.
John Cage