SOURCE: Herwitz, Daniel. “John Cage's Approach to the Global.” In John Cage: Composed in America, edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman, pp. 188-205. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Herwitz views Cage's works as anarchic studies of humanity, politics, and language.

It was almost inevitable that John Cage would move from composing in music to composing in words. For Cage, music was never just music, it was always the occasion for reformation. When Cage set out in the early 1950s to reform music, to silence what he saw as its constricted practices, he was really aiming to free constricted human beings by freeing their ears. For Cage, music was to be an exemplar of how human beings relate to the world and to one another. Cage set out, in redefining our relation to sounds, in opening the ear to the full panoply of the...