“You know, you can always begin anywhere.”

John Cage was an incredibly influential figure in music, art, and really, in all social mediums. He pushes ideas of sound, time, and space and it is no wonder that he is featured in McLuhans book, The Medium is the Massage. Perhaps it is unclear whether McLuhan's ideas about time and space being fluid influenced Cage, or Cage's ideas about sound influenced McLuhan more. Perhaps it doesn't mattet, but we do know that both had an impact on the other. 

In one of his most famous pieces, 4'33", (performed below,) Cage creates a musical masterpiece that depends on the sounds that happen all around the performer, whether it be the nervous laugh of an audience member or the scuttle of a mouse in the wall. Everything in the performance hall is music and this piece forces everyone to engage with the stories that unfold around them. 

Heck, he mentioned in one interview that he was a camp counselor at one point and made his campers go out into the wilderness to collect sounds for an art piece. I wish I had gone to THAT camp. 

John Cage also played with representations of time and space in his pieces, whether it be physical spaces in his poems to represent thought, or long silences in his compositions. He was very influenced by Marcel Duchamp's readymades, and furiously believed that art should not be separated from the greater world.

 "Arnold Schoenberg, once remarked that Cage was 'not a composer, but an inventor—of genius." (The Creators Project)

So then...

“Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or

 a truck passing by a music school?

Are the people inside the school musical and the ones 

outside unmusical?