Learning about John Cage, his life story, and the impact he made on music as a whole has been fascinating.
In the modern era of music, new sounds evolve at breakneck speed. Genres split into ten subgenres, and then ten more split off of those first ten. The Internet, globalization, and the ability to make any sound imaginable with something as simple as an app on your phone has turned the way we perceive music upside-down. Today, teenagers are getting famous because of songs they composed in their bedrooms after school, electronic acts headline for major music festivals, and you would be hard-pressed to find a song on the Billboard hot 200 that wasn't aided by a computer somewhere in the production process.
John Cage (and probably all of the computer geniuses in between 1912 and now) is directly responsible for this. Not only the variety of music we hear today, but the widespread acceptance of different sounds now classified as "music". He pushed all the boundaries of music well past their breaking point, ushering in a new era of acceptance, creativity, and innovation in the world of sound.
Today, the classical rules that Cage broke in the middle of the 20th century no longer exist. Musicians and composers constantly push their creative limits with new technology, collaborations, and live performances. Thanks to John Cage, this has become the new norm. Now we wait for the next John Cage to come along and reset the industry all over again.
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