Grigorenko O. John Cage and the USA music culture of the twentieth century

The dissertation offers a comprehensive view of creative personality and output of John Cage (1912-1992) as a phenomenon of the American music culture of the twentieth century. The paper employs integral approach that includes analytical studies of music compositions, overview of composer’s esthetical concepts revealed through his writings, biographical facts. Short historical and cultural discourses construct the background for those studies and help to understand Cage’s phenomenon as part of the complex and rich American music culture of the last century. The paper is divided into six chapters with accordance to the offered periodization of Cage’s creative life. Brief overview of the works is combined with more detailed analysis of certain style-defining compositions. Such analysis reveals wild spectrum of Cage’s compositional procedures and how they were applied in each particular work. They include analytical summaries of the methods used.