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Cage was born in Los Angeles. His father was a somewhat eccentric inventor of largely useless devices who told him "that if someone says 'can't' that shows you what to do". Cage described his mother as a woman with "a sense of society" who was "never happy." It was not obvious from his early life that he would become a composer; he was born into a Episcopalian family, and his paternal grandfather regarded the violin as the "instrument of the devil". Cage himself planned to become a minister at an early age and later a writer.
Although music was not clearly to be his chosen path, he said later that he had unfocused desire to create, and his subsequent anti-establishment stance may be seen to have its roots in an incident while he was attending Pomona College. Shocked to find a large number of students in the library reading the same set text, he rebelled and "went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly." He dropped out in his second year and sailed to Europe, where he stayed for 18 months. It was there that he wrote his first pieces of music, but upon hearing them he found he didn't like them; he left them behind on his return to America.
He returned to California in 1931, his enthusiasm for America revived, he said, by reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There he took lessons in composition from Richard Buhlig , Henry Cowell, Adolph Weiss , and, famously, Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg (the anglicized form of Schonberg Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he became a U. citizen) ( September 13, 1874 July 13, 1951) was a composer, born in Vienna, Austria. He is particularly remembered as one of the first comp whom he "literally worshipped". Schoenberg told Cage he would tutor him for free on the condition he "devoted his life to music". Cage readily agreed, but stopped lessons after two years. Cage later wrote in his lecture Indeterminacy: "After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, 'In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.' I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, 'In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall'."
Cage began to experiment with percussion instruments and non-instruments and gradually came to replace harmony as the basis of his music with rhythmRhythm is the variation of the duration of sounds over time. When governed by rule, it is called meter. It is inherent in any time-dependent medium, but it is most associated with music, dance, and most poetry. The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in sp. More generally, he structured pieces according to the duration of sections. He saw a precedent in this in the music of Anton WebernAnton Webern ( December 3, 1883 September 15, 1945) was a composer of classical music and a member of the so called Second Viennese School. He was born Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern but never used his middle names, and dropped the von in 1918. Biogra to some extent, but especially in the music of Erik SatieEric Alfred Leslie Satie (born Honfleur, 17 May 1866 died Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer, performing pianist and publicist. He also described himself as a "gymnopedist" (in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnoped, one of his favourite composers.