He is definitely classical. Trying to break away from classical tradition is in no way difficult. Blues-based music did that all along. To me it seemed more as if Cage wanted to transform the classical world. He didn't move away from it - as most of the audience did... - but tried to change it.

Blues is closer to the classical he was trying to transform than his biggest contribution 'Chance' was. Blues is still precomposed chord based music off of a ruleset, as is Classical. Blues may be more raw, and simple, but you can still fit it on regular note paper. Where as Chance isn't composed at all.

SOME John Cage might be considered 'classical'. However, due to the vast experimentation of his work, and having him present things like people wandering around in a building randomly tuning radios as music, makes it difficult to classify him in any category but Avant-Garde.

Anything which mainly uses classical instruments I tend to think of as classical. I can understand how some may see it as experimental, but some modern classical music perhaps can be more experimental.

Having studied a lot of his music for school, I'd say that it most of it is avant-garde.

Obviously on a forum like this people will feel the need to decide what genre something is in, and I suppose that can be a bit limiting with some things. Flexibility would be a virtue in this I think, certainly I like to make connections between different things.

That's why avant-garde was invented, though. Music which defies current genre standards entirely, and follows a ruleset of it's own. A concept that Cage's work personifies.

Avant-garde though goes into other genres like rock/electronica/jazz/classical as well. Most experimental music does draw on ideas from other genres.

Which is exactly what John Cage did.

Ridiculous... You've just moved John Cage to the same sub-forum as Gang Gang Dance, Battles and Arthur Russel... I can see why someone would put a thread devoted to John Cage in the avant-garde subsection to begin with, but moving him away from the realm of classical is just stupid.

You know, lot's of classical music was avantgarde to begin with. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Boulez. They are practically the original avant-gardists. And yet, today we group them with 'classical' 'cause they were avantgardists in the classical tradition. The 'garde' they were marching in front of was a 'garde' of classical composers. As with John Cage. Once again: This is completely ridiculous.