John Warthien Struble The History of American Classical Music, Facts On File: NY, 1995.
John Cage (1912 - ) graduated from Los Angeles High in 1928 and attended Pomona College for two years, traveled to Europe and became associated with Duchamp and the Dadaists, and returned to Los Angeles. He heard the 1933 Hollywood Bowl presentation of Varèse's Ionization and took piano lessons from Bühlig in Los Angeles in 1933 who recommended he send some of his compositions to Cowell who was at the New School for Social Research in New York. And then he enrolled in Schoenberg's 1935 class at UCLA. Cage moved to Seattle in 1937 where he met Merce Cunningham. Struble includes David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, LaMonte Young and Pauline Oliveros as Cagians.
". . . Cage's early works from the 1930s explored unconventional applications of the serial technique and extended the principle to rhythm as well as pitch relationships. However, unlike Milton Babbit, who would apply serialism to rhythm fifteen years later by serializing the durations of tones and the time interval between attacks, Cage . . . deployed small rhythmic cells in serialized patterns of repetitions to form a rhythmic counterpoint". . . . (and developed the notion) "that any sound is legitimate material for music."
" . . .
"Cage's music from the late 1930s began to reflect a deep sensitivity to Asian concepts of rhythm as well as linearity and transparency of textures . . . Cage's early and lifelong insistence that each sound is a complete event, in and of itself, without any necessary correlation to sounds that precede it or sounds that follow it. MacDowell had noted this as a feature of Chinese music as early as his Columbia lecture on "Suggestion in Music" (ca 1896). The composer Chou Wen-chung has pointed out as well that this is a very ancient premise of Chinese music . . . This denial of the inherent psychological relationship between sounds (or, if you prefer, Cage's insistence that all such relationships are imposed by the cognition of the listener) is at once a logical extension of Schoenberg's treatment of the twelve chromatic tones and a basis of all Cage's subsequent discoveries and theories."
Struble claims that much of the work of Morton Subotnik at Cal Arts, the former San Francisco Tape Music Center co-director along with Ramon Sender and Pauline Oliveros, was paralleled at the University of California Struble makes the old comparison between the Cagians and the control fanatics, saying ultimately they sounded pretty much the same and no one particularly liked either school.
[ KR: Roger Reynolds graduated from the University of Michigan in the early sixties and was a contem, San Diego's Center for Music Experiment which was founded in 1967 by Oliveros, "principal rivals as a hotbed of cutting-edge experimentation on the West Coast during the '60 & '70s," which must have been when Roger Reynolds was there as a Professor of Music. It should be noted that Oliveros was born in Houston in 1932.
a contemporary of Tom Hayden]