Marcel duchamp et john cage biography

  • Principal players were John Cage, who conceived (but did not actually.
  • The book is a photographic documentation of a chess match played between the artist Marcel Duchamp and composer John Cage at Ryerson University in Toronto.
  • Marcel Duchamp & John Cage Play Musical Chess.

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    In the first part of this two-part blog post, I described how John Cage, pupil of the chess-playing composer Arnold Schoenberg and friend of the chess-paying artist Marcel Duchamp, came to produce his work Chess Pieces, both a work of visual art and a composition for (in my opinion) his hallmark instrument, the prepared piano.

    But before inom begin…

    In the time between publishing Part One and Part Two of this post, I was delighted to hear a kontur on the BBC World Service of one of the musicians I mentioned in Part One: Margaret Leng Tan, who transcribed, edited, and published the score of Chess Pieces from John Cage’s picture for the ‘Imagery of Chess’ exhibition of 1944.

    Leng Tan trained as a concert pianist at New York’s Juilliard School of music, but her encounter and friendship with John Cage led her to the unusual career path of becoming a professional soloist on toy pianos, after playing Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano (1948) at h

  • marcel duchamp et john cage biography

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    John Cage first met Marcel Duchamp in the 1940s. Duchamp asked Cage to write music for his part in Hans Richter’s film Dreams that Money Can Buy (1946). But it took twenty more years before the two actually became close. Cage didn’t want to bother Duchamp with his friendship until he realized that Duchamp’s health was failing. Then he decided to actively seek his company. He knew that Duchamp was taking chess very seriously, and it was easy for Cage to use this pretext, so he simply asked him to teach him the game. And for the last three years of Duchamp’s life the two dock and Teeny Duchamp, the bachelor’s bride, met at least once a week and played chess.

    “John Cage on Marcel Duchamp: An Interview, ” by Moira Roth and William Roth, Art in America (November-December, 1973), p. 151 - 161.

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    Here is a film excerpt of their collaboration,

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    Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

    In this elegiac work, Kubota explores the relationship between two of the most influential figures in twentieth century art and music. The core images are Kubota’s own photographs of the famous 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, in which the board, wired for sound, functioned as a musical instrument. Recordings of Cage’s compositions accompany the stills and video footage, which Kubota electronically processes to abstraction.

    Co-presented with the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation as the February 2024 edition of e-flux Film’s Staff Picks.

    For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

    Shigeko Kubota was born in 1937 in Niigata, Japan and died in 2015. She received a B.A. in sculpture from Tokyo University of Education, and studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research. In 1964, she moved to New York; in the same year she became the Vice Chairman of the Fluxus Or