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The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.

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.
Facts
Composing
Listening
Fact

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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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All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
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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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Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
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There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
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Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
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The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
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The world is no longer a romantic place some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.
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As McLuhan says, everything happens at once.
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The world is teeming anything can happen.
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Each moment presents what happens.
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Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
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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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The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
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Some people take music too seriously, and some don't take it seriously enough, others take it just right.
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In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
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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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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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There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
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There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
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