Benny Sluchin studied music at the Tel-Aviv Conservatory and the Jerusalem Music Academy while also earning a degree in mathematics and philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. He began his career with the Israel Philharmonic and the Jerusalem Radio Symphony Orchestra before moving to Germany to study under Vinko Globokar at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, graduating with honors. Since 1976, he has been a member of the Ensemble intercontemporain, premiering works by major composers like Carter, Berio, and Xenakis. He has recorded significant pieces such as Keren by Xenakis and Sequenza V by Berio, as well as other 19th and 20th-century works.
Sluchin holds a doctorate in mathematics and is involved in acoustic research at IRCAM. He teaches computer-assisted music notation at the Paris Conservatory and is dedicated to music pedagogy. He edited Brass Urtext and co-authored Le trombone à travers les âges. Two of his educational books received the Sacem Prize. His research on brass mutes and computer-assisted interpretation is widely recognized. Sluchin has recorded several works by John Cage and produced a film on Xenakis titled Iannis Xenakis, Le dépassement de soi (2015), released by Mode Records.
Cage’s teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various East and South Asian cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951.[7] The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text and decision-making tool, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life.[8] In a 1957 lecture, “Experimental Music”, he described music as “a purposeless play” which 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”.
Cage’s best known work is the 1952 composition 4′33″, a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound; musicians who perform the work do nothing but be present for the duration specified by the title. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.[10][11] The work’s challenge to assumed definitions about musicianship and musical experience made it a popular and controversial topic both in musicology and the broader aesthetics of art and performance. 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. These include Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
