In John Cage’s most audacious composition, 4’33”, the performer does nothing but sit. The sounds inside and outside the concert hall become the content of the work. ? The audience was outraged at the first performance by pianist David Tudor in 1952, but we’ve all inadvertently performed that piece, even if not for the specified duration. Who hasn’t had a John Cage moment when suddenly we become aware, even fascinated, by the sounds around us? ? Cage dared classify those moments, ultimately “everything we do,” as music. ? “Cage redefined music as the act of perception, not just creation,” said conductor, percussionist and UC San Diego faculty member Steven Schick. “So music comes from the way you listen to it, not just from what is being listened to. That’s hugely important.” ? With Sept. 5 marking the 100th anniversary of Cage’s birth (he died in 1992), there will be many Cage moments as institutions from Berlin to Washington, D.C. (where UC San Diego’s Roger Reynolds, with Karen Reynolds and Steve Antosca, is codirecting an eight-day festival) reexamine the seminal composer’s music, art and writings.

“Cage was a tremendous influence,” said George Lewis, a former UC San Diego music professor now at Columbia University. “You can’t avoid that. It goes beyond influence, it goes into necessity. Whether you know it or not, as they say in some circles, a lot of what we do today is influenced by his ideas.”

Cage not only addressed the way we listen but challenged the essentially European idea that music composition is a matter of will. Not only in his music, but in his art and his numerous books and essays, particularly “Silence,” he advocated the use of “chance” operations and allowing aspects of a performance to develop in an “indeterminate” manner that aspired to be free of intention and the ego.

“I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of will or psychology in music or acoustic ecology,” said Lewis, who is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. “I don’t have a problem with those things. But you start to see they aren’t requirements, somehow. One of the things about Cage is he freed music from the need to depict, particularly American music. So that becomes a pretty big influence on everyone.”

Acceptance, acknowledgment

Margaret Leng Tan is a New York-based pianist who credits Cage with changing her life. Since the 1980s, when she first met Cage, she has championed Cage’s keyboard music (she’s going to be particularly busy during the Cage Centennial). The process of performing his works has been transformational.

“John Cage has helped me understand who I am really — through his music, his writings, his attitude toward life — and to help me get beyond myself,” Tan said. “It’s not only me; Cage has really permeated the fabric of everyone’s life without them even knowing it.”

Tan cites a long list: world music, minimalism, performance art, happenings, Fluxus, conceptual art …

“Even things like heavy metal music today,” she said. “I think it’s all because of Cage’s acceptance of what to him was music, which embraced not only music but noise and silence. That’s made it possible for everything that we hear today to be acceptable.”

Acceptable, of course, is a relative term. During the 1930s and ’40s, when Cage virtually invented the “prepared piano” (a piano that is modified by placing objects on the strings) and was instrumental in the instigation and evolution of a repertoire for percussion, he was celebrated by the wider musical establishment. He received performances in major concert venues like Carnegie Hall and recognition from organizations such as the National Academy of Arts and Letters.

In the late 1940s, however, he began studying Zen Buddhism and became interested in the “I Ching,” the Chinese “Book of Changes.” Just as someone using the “I Ching” accesses it by asking questions and tossing coins (which determines which of the book’s 64 hexagrams might inform the answer), Cage began basing his compositions on similar “chance” procedures.

When 4’33” (whose duration was determined by chance) followed in 1952, the establishment that had once embraced him seemed bewildered, if not hostile. Other serious, experimental composers — including Boulez, Stockhausen and Xenakis — disavowed him, and performers openly scorned his work (in a notorious 1964 program with Cage’s “Atlas Eclipticalis,” the New York Philharmonic musicians openly sabotaged the performance).

Still, he found continued support in choreographer Merce Cunningham, his lifelong partner, as well as from visual artists, including Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were intrigued by the idea of giving up absolute control of the creative process.

“Cage complemented and contrasted very critically and successfully abstract expressionism, those types of heroic motivations in art,” said artist and writer Ray Kass, who worked with Cage in executing a series of watercolors. “He seems to have offered many communities of people — whether it’s poetry, philosophy, visual art or music — an alternative, a kind of way out of very directed, hyper-rationalist thinking.”

No retreat

Cage kept exploring and pushing the edges. His 1967 “Musicircus” was essentially an invitation for different groups to perform simultaneously in the same space, whatever they wanted, when they wanted.

A U.S. bicentennial commission from the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia orchestras resulted in “Apartment House 1776,” which included, among other things, four vocalists from different religions singing songs at the same time — songs they selected from their respective traditions.

“It should be fairly clear that even though he’s receiving a lot of very positive recognition, there’s another side to all of this,” said composer David Felder, who earned his doctorate at UC San Diego (and was there when Cage was in residence in the early ’80s). “Many people have responded to Cage by saying this is a complete dead end and we need to return to more of what Copland was doing. …

“They are not interested and in fact say now we can return to where we should have been all along had we not been led astray by all those nasty serial composers and people like Cage who were interested in exploring other sound resources.”

But no matter what your compositional bent, you can’t ignore Cage.

“He’s kind of a textbook element at this point,” said composer Tamzin Ferre Elliott, an undergraduate at Bard College (who studied with Reynolds while growing up in Cardiff-by-the-Sea). “He’s reached a level of historical importance where he’s accepted along with these people like Stravinsky as a force to reckon with.”

And once Cage let that “everything is music” genie out of the bottle, there was no going back.

“John Cage told us we could do anything,” said Lewis, paraphrasing composer Rhys Chatham. “So now what do you want to do?”

One suggestion: Find the music in the sounds around you.