was a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It was led by a desire to support artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art. This website serves as an archive of Yale Union’s programming from 2011 through 2021.

Yale Union acknowledges that it occupies the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Chinook, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Indigenous peoples.

JOHN CAGE

EV

100 YEARS 
Performance by FearNoMusic
Friday, February 17, 8pm

John Cage is an old instrument. Sensitive, unpredictable, and belovedly dead, but hoping the instrument might make new utterance, we celebrate its 100th birthday. Please join us February 17, 8pm as we present ten live Cage compositions throughout our overly large building.

Cage is a titan of avant-garde music, and in some ways this can be the kiss of death because it becomes easy to regard him as yet another sepia-tinted, canonical musician. He’s an adjective—“Cageian”—and now, we’re stuck with a kind of cool problem: How do you modify someone’s work when it’s become a modifier for other work? John Milton Cage Jr., the normal, up-and-walking-around guy, was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He died in 1992.

For more information on Cage, please see the composer’s own book, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1961), John Cage (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Picador, 2007).

John Cage. Photo by James Klosty, 1972

Jenny Lindner, Principal Harpist for the Portland Opera Orchestra and FearNoMusic collaborator, tunes her instrument prior to the performance. Photo by YU, 2012