ABSTRACT
John Cage was born in 1912 in Los Angeles, California. Cage met the Buddhist philosopher D. T Suzuki at Colombia University in the late 1940s, and Zen influenced his work and his thinking about ecological issues profoundly. Originally Cage threw coins in the traditional manner prescribed by the I Ching to determine the formal features of a composition. Cage's most sustained engagements with the language of nature occur in his various intertextual rewritings of nineteenth-century American philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau, whose work on the relationship between social conditions and nature anticipated many contemporary environmentalist concerns. Ultimately, Cage may not have presented a well-constructed blueprint for an alternative to the social order and the related environmental degradation of the late twentieth century. Cage lived with his partner and frequent collaborator, the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, until his death in New York in 1992.
