John Cage

It's not easy to say what minimalism actually meant for 20th-century music: a kind of fascism, a violent imposition, a pointless reduction to forms stripped of meaning both technically and historically, even an intellectual crime, to use composer Luciano Berio's words, or a great innovative school that moves beyond tradition to explore new musical grammars. What is certain is that minimalism is an extremely varied and long-lasting artistic movement. Minimalist architecture, painting and theatre exist in every corner of the world. Some go so far as to argue that minimalism has, in effect, always existed, in every art form that has reduced its own means of expression. Architect John Pawson, for instance, claims that the Theatre of Epidaurus is the first example of minimalist art, which would push the clock back as far as the fourth century BC.

But coming back to the present day and focusing on music, there's no denying that the American school was the mother of the movement, despite all the differences among its protagonists: the Californians La Monte Young and Terry Riley, or the New Yorkers Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Reduction and repetition were the movement's basic building blocks, sometimes used separately, sometimes together. But like everything else in the world, this movement didn't spring up out of nowhere: darwinianly speaking, it represents an evolution with a handful of recognisable forerunners. Working backwards through a painstaking process of listening back to compositions from earlier decades, one could argue that this primacy should be attributed, at least in part (in part, because it's clear that such complex, long-lived movements can only have multiple causes), to at least two 20th-century composers: John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Of the two, the one who seems to have left the more decisive mark is John Cage, who on closer inspection can be considered among the most influential composers contemporary music has ever known, to the point of being regarded as the father of the most modern avant-gardes, which owe much if not everything to him (above all, the pursuit of absolute freedom). Cage's legacy survives unbroken to this day. From the compositions for prepared piano fitted with screws, bolts and forks ("Sonatas And Interludes"), to the countless early works ("Imaginary Landscapes", "The Seasons", "Metamorphosis"), to the pioneering electronic and tape music experiments ("WBAI", "Fontana Mix With Aria"), all the way to his later "discovery" of silence ("4.33"), where not playing becomes on one hand a meditative act, and on the other shifts attention to the sounds produced by the surrounding environment, leading Cage to say: "Everything we do is music, or can become so through the use of microphones."

Silence's new role and Cage's long string of insights are fundamental milestones for the later development of minimalism, but also of ambient music, and even more so for the entire modern-classical scene. As early as 1962, he began using amplification to make audible, and thus transform into music, those imperceptible sounds that are created, whether intentionally or not, in spaces, be they empty or crowded. That emblematic experiment - "0'00"" or "4'33" part 2" - makes audible, and consequently grants the dignity of music to, the background noises and sounds of any given place (in Cage's case, an auditorium or concert hall) simply by amplifying to the maximum the "notes" created by the environment itself. One can sense how subtle the difference in intent is between someone like Brian Eno, who in the Seventies created music for environments, a new kind of music that fills a soundless space in order to "furnish" it ("Music For Airports"), and someone like Cage, who instead captures and makes audible a music that is already present within environments themselves, which therefore have no need to be "furnished" at all. If Eno adds notes to the environment, merging inseparably with it, almost as if to enrich it and make it more welcoming, Cage "steals" sounds from the environment, believing that it is itself a producer of music.

Cage's pioneering genius is immediately evident, but listening to one of his best-known early works, "In A Landscape" from 1948, makes it far clearer how some of his insights represent a clear seed that would allow a much broader movement to later explode into being. The composition's absolute simplicity marks a sharp break from every classical piano tradition of the previous century; if a link exists (and it probably does), it is with Erik Satie's "Gymnopédies".

"In A Landscape" consists of an extremely slow succession of simple notes, always single, all played at the same tempo. It's precisely this fixed distance between the notes that feels anomalous and gives the sense of being in a world running parallel to traditional classical music. The instrument is always the piano, but this constant repetition of different notes, always spaced the same distance apart, creates a kind of false pianistic loop made of identical, repetitive note-fragments. As in the future minimalist compositions to come, the music changes slightly over time, but to notice that change one has to follow the piece step by step, without distraction; one has to get inside it, one has to "inhabit" it.

Cage creates music that must be inhabited, listened to by immersing oneself within it, in the same way one finds oneself standing in a landscape. Hence the title, which evokes precisely the musician's wish to carry the listener into a landscape. Music becomes not only something to be listened to (as usual) or inhabited (as Cage tries to force upon us), but also something to be observed, in the same way one might observe a landscape in a painting. It's an extraordinary blending of different worlds that Cage tries to merge into a new total art form, where "inhabiting" music means approaching it with a new mind (a third ear, as the Third Ear Band would put it), capable of grasping the importance of silence and of breaking with tradition.

These are all elements that would go on to define the American minimalism scene, and although Cage was never himself a minimalist, he certainly opened up a new path that others would go on to follow.

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04/04/2026