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Originally Posted by atsonicpark
As far as his personality, he seems like a dickhead.
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How so?
He was a really brilliant guy with an almost oracular vision of where music would go (he's the first composer to state outright that all music would be electric by the end of the 20th century). Plus he was very supportive of other artists and from all I've read a kind and gentle soul. Aside from taking his own music seriously, which is something that I don't think reflects poorly on an artist at all, he was incredibly unpretentious. Not that there isn't humor in a lot of his music either, just subtle humor.
It is true that he has been very propped up by some uptight academics (I once caused quite a fracas on the John Cage mailing list by suggesting that you could easily play 4'33" with a whoopie cushion rather than a piano), but that is no more of a reason to judge him harshly than it would be to judge Nirvana harshly because a lot of mainstream pop music idiots like their most famous hit songs.
I swear a lot of people just want to reject Cage off hand because he is so well known, and that the bias that being intelligent and sincere at the same time isn't cool is prevalent.
I would agree he's not a "noise musician" because he has much more breadth to his music than just noise, some of it being rather straight forward piano pieces. However, he is a very important figure in the development of noise as a part of the palette in modern music.
To see how he fits into the broad scope of noisy music, I highly recommend the Sub Rosa compilation
An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music Vol. 1 which has his "Rozart mix" alongside the likes of Sonic Youth, Einsturzende Neubauten, Gordon Mumma, and Survival Research Laboratories. That whole series of comps. is incredible and puts the best 20th Century composers right next to everyone from Throbbing Gristle to Merzbow, doing an incredible job of breaking down the context that makes people judge a given artist as "academic" vs. "street music".