John Cage, 79; Avant-Garde Composer Created Music With Sound and Silence

John Cage, the highly inventive, often perplexing avant-garde composer, who theorized that music does not have to have sound but can be anything that fills a space in time, died Wednesday of a stroke.

Valerie Gundersen, a spokeswoman for St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, said he died there after suffering a stroke at his home in New York City.

Called by the Encyclopaedia Britannica “a composer whose work and revolutionary ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-Century music,” the 79-year-old guru of modern sound made numerous and complicated tracks across the world of music as he defined and then redefined his challenges to conventional musical wisdom.

He wrote 12-tone music in 1934, organized a percussion orchestra in 1938, composed for prepared piano (in which objects are inserted between some of the instrument’s strings) in 1940 and used electrically produced sounds in 1942.

“I like ambient sound,” he told The Times last year when he was the recipient of the first Frederick R. Weisman Art Award. “I don’t object to burglar alarms or hums from refrigerators.”

In 1951, he scored a piece that included the noise from 12 radios. His first piece on magnetic tape came in 1952. At the end of that decade he began writing scores that left choices of sounds to the performers.

In 1962, Cage performed “O’O,” in which he sliced vegetables, put them in a blender and drank the juice.

In the 1970s he was turning astronomical charts into orchestral scores and computerized the “I Ching” into his first opera, “Europera,” in the 1980s.

The Los Angeles-born musician liked to make each composition different.

“My father was an inventor (his mother a reporter for the Los Angeles Times). If I can, with each piece I make something like a discovery,” he said.

He also wrote poetry, essays and lectures, painted and etched, played chess with masters and was considered an expert on mushrooms.

Cage’s most popular work probably is “Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano,” which he wrote in the mid-1940s. It was in this composition that he had metallic objects placed among many of the instrument’s strings to make it, in his words, “a percussion ensemble under the control of a single player.”

“First Construction (in Metal),” a percussion composition, featured an assortment of Western and non-Western items and found objects. Like the later works of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, it was composed, according to Cage’s notes, “with the single objective of making the rhythmic structure clear.”

His 1939 “The Imaginary Landscape No. 1” is considered by some to be the first electronic composition. The sounds were provided by test recordings of constant frequencies, the kind used by radio stations and in acoustical research. Two performers varied the frequencies by manipulating variable-speed turntables, switching stations and fluctuating the volume.

“Concert for Piano and Orchestra” (1957-1958) employed as many unusual sounds and sound effects as he could draw from the instruments of a conventional orchestra.

He became as well or better known for his persona than for his music.

His signature opus, “4’33,” is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in which a pianist simply steps onstage, sits at the piano in silence and then walks off.

John Milton Cage Jr. studied piano and composition in Los Angeles and then Paris, returning to the United States in the late 1930s, when he worked as a dance accompanist.

About that time he developed a piano technique using tone clusters and playing directly on the strings. He also wrote poetry and painted when he returned to California, where he had been a student at Pomona College. He studied counterpoint with Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, and Schoenberg told him he had no feeling for harmony.

His compositions from that period were based on a schematic organization of the 12 pitches of the chromatic scale.

In 1939 he wrote “First Construction (in Metal)” using bells, brake drums, temple gongs, cymbals, anvils and other metallic objects coupled with electrically produced noises he had explored at a radio station.

In 1940 he settled in San Francisco, where he gave concerts of percussion music. From there he went on to teach contemporary composition at the Chicago Institute of Design, and he eventually settled in New York, which was his base for the remainder of his life.

In 1949 gave a concert at Carnegie Hall of his works for prepared piano.

He also was moving from structures based on pitch to those built on rhythmic patterns and attracting both intense scorn and high acclaim from critics and fellow composers.

As he studied Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism he began introducing elements of random chance into his works so the compositions could vary from performance to performance. One 16-page work, for example, could be performed continuously or broken into pieces.

“In my works that employ chance I have an awareness of the whole piece, the various things that might happen,” Cage said last year. “But I am not aware of any of the details. Those things happen in a way that makes me a tourist--someone who sees everything for the first time--in my own composition.”

Next year, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art will stage “Rolywholyover A Circus,” a massive, dynamic exhibition of Cageian materials already three years in preparation by the composer and MOCA curator Julie Lazar.

When Cage was given the Weisman award for lifetime achievement last year, singer Joan La Barbara, who sang “Eight Whiskus,” a work he composed for her in 1985, said:

“He asked us to consider all things as music and caused us to listen to the world in a different way.”

There was no immediate information on survivors.