What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

1960s: Fame
Cage was affiliated with Wesleyan University and collaborated with members of its Music Department from the 1950s until his death in 1992. He supported himself financially by taking up a job washing walls at a Brooklyn YWCA. In 1933 he sent some of his compositions to Henry Cowell; the reply was a "rather vague letter" in which Cowell suggested that Cage study with Arnold Schoenberg—Cage's musical ideas at the time included composition based on a 25-tone row somewhat similar to Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.

John Milton Cage Jr. Cage was also a pioneer of the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by objects placed between or on its strings or hammers) for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces.