Yoko Ono & John Cage, Mind Music
John Cage and Yoko Ono exploded ideas about what music and art could be, and blew open the boundary between popular music and the avant-garde. They were friends and collaborators who inspired one another. They also had a life-long debate about the boundaries of these new freedoms—in both art and life. This theatrical program celebrates their transformational art-making and dives into a debate that still resonates today.
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Highlights
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Notable Performances
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago IL
February 18, 2026
Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble
February 18, 2026
Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble
From The Director
When I was in high school, John Cage visited Northwestern University to coach a performance of his recent work, Europera 5. Alone in my parents’ car, I made the trek up to Evanston to see it, and left befuddled: what had I just seen? Was it music? Did I like it? Afterwards, I awkwardly shook the composer’s hand and congratulated him on a performance I had no clue what to make of.
My first encounter with Yoko was similarly discombobulating: the founding horn player of Alarm Will Sound, Matt Marks, was a total Beatles fiend, and when he heard that I didn’t know Revolution 9, he insisted on playing it for me. This, Matt said, was ground zero of the avant-garde’s infection into pop music. And Yoko had made it happen.
The landscape we create work in now has been utterly transformed by these two artists: the sense of the breadth of possibilities, the ever-increasing theatricalization of music-making, the so-permeable boundaries between avant-garde and popular spheres …. All of this goes back to John and Yoko.
Their relationship is a complicated one. They loved and influenced each other. They also had deep divisions. At the heart of their debates was a question that has concerned the arts ever since: “Freedom, yes, but … and for what? from what? and how much?” While Cage’s work had opened up seemingly infinite possibilities for what music could be, his artistic and personal ethos was one of restraint: “Permission granted, but not to do whatever you want,” he wrote. Heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage was distrustful of ego, taste, and any inclination for an artist to impose his own emotions on his listeners. These, he thought, led to predictable art and to a broken culture. He pursued a Zen-inspired disinterestedness: creating processes to insulate his art from his own personal tastes, resulting in sounds that were unexpected, and that were given space to “be themselves” rather than “vehicles for…expression of human sentiments.”
Cage embraced a cool detachment in his personal life as well. He was almost always heard in a soft, gentle, understated voice. Into the 1960s, he almost always wore a tie. (In one performance, Nam June Paik famously jumped off the stage into the audience, grabbed Cage's tie, and cut it off with scissors.) And despite his well-known partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage was never public about his homsexuality. When composer Julius Eastman performed a realization of a solo from Song Books that involved stripping a man naked on stage as part of a lecture about sex, Cage was outraged: “you can’t do what you want,” he ranted, punctuating the pronouncement by banging his fist on a piano.
In contrast to Cage, the Zen that Ono practiced was one of liberated emotions and expression. Works like the Pieces for Orchestra — which give the performers only a single-word instruction for each movement — are meant to liberate performers’ imaginations, not restrain them. And while Cage tended to compose for disciplined professionals, Yoko wanted to create art that anyone could participate in: "Art is not a special thing. Anyone can do it." These ideas were developed in Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series, which Cage was a frequent guest at. And through work like Revolution 9 (and later on her own releases with the Plastic Ono Band and others) Ono brought that liberation across to popular music. “All the doors are just ready to open now,” Ono said.
Eventually, Ono appropriated the “Jesus Christ” epitaph for herself: creating in 1965 her Sky Piece for Jesus Christ in honor of Cage, the Jesus Christ of the avant-garde, who even shared his initials. In the piece, musicians are wrapped in gauze bandages while playing (whatever music they choose), until they can no longer play their instruments. But what’s the nature of Sky Piece’s homage to Cage? Is Cage the visionary who opens up to artists the freedom of the sky? Or is he the gauze, straightjacketing musicians until they can no longer make their art?
Either way: it is all of us musicians working today who live in the sky that Yoko envisioned. The great gift that Yoko and John have left us with is a vastly expanded sense of what a musician can do, and of what it means to be one. The students performing today all grew up in this wide-open art world that Yoko and John created. Where will they take us next?
My first encounter with Yoko was similarly discombobulating: the founding horn player of Alarm Will Sound, Matt Marks, was a total Beatles fiend, and when he heard that I didn’t know Revolution 9, he insisted on playing it for me. This, Matt said, was ground zero of the avant-garde’s infection into pop music. And Yoko had made it happen.
The landscape we create work in now has been utterly transformed by these two artists: the sense of the breadth of possibilities, the ever-increasing theatricalization of music-making, the so-permeable boundaries between avant-garde and popular spheres …. All of this goes back to John and Yoko.
Their relationship is a complicated one. They loved and influenced each other. They also had deep divisions. At the heart of their debates was a question that has concerned the arts ever since: “Freedom, yes, but … and for what? from what? and how much?” While Cage’s work had opened up seemingly infinite possibilities for what music could be, his artistic and personal ethos was one of restraint: “Permission granted, but not to do whatever you want,” he wrote. Heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism, Cage was distrustful of ego, taste, and any inclination for an artist to impose his own emotions on his listeners. These, he thought, led to predictable art and to a broken culture. He pursued a Zen-inspired disinterestedness: creating processes to insulate his art from his own personal tastes, resulting in sounds that were unexpected, and that were given space to “be themselves” rather than “vehicles for…expression of human sentiments.”
Cage embraced a cool detachment in his personal life as well. He was almost always heard in a soft, gentle, understated voice. Into the 1960s, he almost always wore a tie. (In one performance, Nam June Paik famously jumped off the stage into the audience, grabbed Cage's tie, and cut it off with scissors.) And despite his well-known partnership with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage was never public about his homsexuality. When composer Julius Eastman performed a realization of a solo from Song Books that involved stripping a man naked on stage as part of a lecture about sex, Cage was outraged: “you can’t do what you want,” he ranted, punctuating the pronouncement by banging his fist on a piano.
In contrast to Cage, the Zen that Ono practiced was one of liberated emotions and expression. Works like the Pieces for Orchestra — which give the performers only a single-word instruction for each movement — are meant to liberate performers’ imaginations, not restrain them. And while Cage tended to compose for disciplined professionals, Yoko wanted to create art that anyone could participate in: "Art is not a special thing. Anyone can do it." These ideas were developed in Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series, which Cage was a frequent guest at. And through work like Revolution 9 (and later on her own releases with the Plastic Ono Band and others) Ono brought that liberation across to popular music. “All the doors are just ready to open now,” Ono said.
Eventually, Ono appropriated the “Jesus Christ” epitaph for herself: creating in 1965 her Sky Piece for Jesus Christ in honor of Cage, the Jesus Christ of the avant-garde, who even shared his initials. In the piece, musicians are wrapped in gauze bandages while playing (whatever music they choose), until they can no longer play their instruments. But what’s the nature of Sky Piece’s homage to Cage? Is Cage the visionary who opens up to artists the freedom of the sky? Or is he the gauze, straightjacketing musicians until they can no longer make their art?
Either way: it is all of us musicians working today who live in the sky that Yoko envisioned. The great gift that Yoko and John have left us with is a vastly expanded sense of what a musician can do, and of what it means to be one. The students performing today all grew up in this wide-open art world that Yoko and John created. Where will they take us next?