When John Cage died in 1992, some scholars turned their attention to understanding his completed body of work. But while Cage’s completed compositions certainly show a roadmap of his interests and artistic concerns, his career and its reception called the very acts of organization and evaluation into question. The extreme heterogeneity of the oeuvre complicated matters still further. In this essay, I consider three important identities for Cage the composer between his first works in 1933 and 1969: Cage as traditional composer (1933 to 1948); Cage as radical composer (1950 to 1958); and Cage as “ultra-radical” composer (1960 to 1969); this investigation allows me to develop the idea that one can better understand his music (including the works from 1969 to his death in 1992) as existing along a continuum with respect to the degree of indeterminacy or control exhibited within any given work.
