Quote

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.

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.
Environment
Sound
Experience
Music
Need
Avenue
Enough
Avenues
Needs
Sounds
Really
Listen

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What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
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In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
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When we separate music from life we get is art.
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If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
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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.
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
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Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.
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What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
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The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
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Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
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To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
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When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.
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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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