John Cage
John Cage is best known outside music circles for 4'33" — four minutes and thirty-three seconds of a performer sitting in deliberate silence. Less widely understood is the method behind decades of his other work: from 1951 onward Cage composed largely by consulting the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, using coin tosses to generate the hexagrams that determined pitch, duration, dynamics and structure — a practice he connected directly to his study of Zen Buddhism under D.T. Suzuki and his deliberate effort to remove personal taste from composition entirely.
Studying With D.T. Suzuki
Cage's decisive turn came in the mid-1940s, when he studied Zen Buddhism with the scholar D.T. Suzuki in New York. Zen gave him a framework for something he had been groping toward independently: a way of making art that did not simply express the artist's own ego, likes and dislikes. Rather than adopt the formal practice of Zen meditation directly, Cage decided his own discipline would be composition itself, conducted with a rigour equivalent to sitting meditation — "the shifting of my responsibility from the making of choices to that of asking questions," as he put it.
In late 1950 or early 1951, the composer Christian Wolff gave Cage a copy of the newly published Wilhelm-Baynes English translation of the I Ching. Cage had already been experimenting with magic squares to introduce chance into his work; he immediately recognised the I Ching's 64-hexagram chart as a better tool, since it offered a larger, more systematic field of possibility than any chart he had built himself.
Coin Tosses as Compositional Method
Cage's method, refined across Music of Changes (1951) and the pieces that followed, involved building detailed charts for musical parameters — tempo, duration, dynamics, density, sound type — with 64 possible values corresponding to the I Ching's 64 hexagrams. He generated each hexagram by tossing three coins six times, exactly as the I Ching's traditional divination method prescribes, then read the resulting number off his charts to determine the next musical event. The intention was total: he was not selecting from chance-generated options according to taste, but accepting the results without override, a discipline he compared directly to Zen's emphasis on acceptance.
I became free by means of the I Ching from the notion of relationship. Or you could say I saw that all things are related. We don't have to bring about relationships — they already exist.
— John CageHe used the I Ching in composing most of his work from the early 1950s until the end of his life, applying it not only to concert music but to visual art, mesostic poetry and his 1969 collaborative multimedia project HPSCHD. His late collaborative work The First Meeting of the Satie Society (1985–1992) — a tribute to Erik Satie assembled with artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — brought his career full circle back to the composer he had revered since youth.
Removing the Ego, Not the Rigour
Cage's chance operations are sometimes mischaracterised as randomness for its own sake, an abdication of compositional responsibility. Cage himself rejected that reading forcefully: the charts he built to feed the I Ching's numbers into required as much painstaking craft as any conventionally composed score, and the discipline of accepting whatever the coins produced — without revising toward a "better" result — was, for Cage, the entire point, a practice of ego-dissolution borrowed directly from Zen and applied to Western art music for the first time at this scale.