John Cage, inventor por necesidad

Abstract

On September 5th, 2012, John Cage would have turned one century. The iconoclasm of this US-American composer has influenced generations of musicians, has redefined the concept itself of what is music. This paper centers itself on researching a type of creativity came up necessity that has led to the invention of the prepared piano ("it must sound African"), to the piece Cheap Imitation ("it must have the same rhythmical structure as a certain other piece") and to the compositional device of the Time Brackets ("the piece must be rapidly composed"). Through these three inventions one can easily get an insight on Cage's pragmatic universe. One aspect of efficient creativity based upon necessity consists on putting only the mental frames that are really needed, without adding extra tacit barriers.