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

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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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People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
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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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Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
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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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A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
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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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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
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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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Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
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The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo changes according to advances in the sciences.
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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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There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
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My work became an exploration of non-intention.
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All great art is a form of complaint
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Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?
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