John Cage, 79, A Bold Innovator Of `Soundless' Music Composition

John Cage, the highly inventive, often perplexing avant-garde composer who theorized that music doesn't have to have sound but can be anything that fills a space in time, died yesterday of a stroke.

He died at St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan after he was stricken at his New York City home.

Mr. Cage was a former music instructor at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and this spring did a week-long residency there.

"What John Cage did at Cornish in experimentation in music has over all these years continued to influence all of our programs," said Robert Funk, the current president of Cornish.

Described by the Encyclopaedia Brittanica as "a composer whose work and revolutionary ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music," the 79-year-old guru of modern sound made voluminous and complicated tracks across the world of music as he challenged its conventional wisdom.

He wrote 12-tone music in 1934, organized a percussion orchestra in 1938, composed for prepared piano (where objects are inserted between some of the piano's strings) in 1940 and used electrically produced sounds in 1942.

"I like ambient sound," he told the Los Angeles Times last year when he received the first Frederick R. Weisman Art Award. "I don't object to burglar alarms or hums from refrigerators."

In 1951, he scored a piece that included the noise from 12 radios. His first piece on magnetic tape came in 1952.

In 1962, Mr. Cage performed "O'O," in which he sliced vegetables, put them in a blender and drank the juice. In the 1970s he was turning astronomical charts into orchestral scores and computerized the "I Ching" into his first opera, "Europera," in the 1980s.

He also wrote poetry, essays and lectures, painted and etched, played chess with masters and was considered an expert on mushrooms.

Mr. Cage's most popular work probably was "Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano," which he wrote in the mid-'40s. In it, he had metallic objects placed among many of the instrument's strings to make it, in his words, "a percussion ensemble under the control of a single player."

His signature opus, "4'33," was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence in which a pianist simply stepped onstage, sat at the piano in silence and then walked off to applause.

John Milton Cage Jr. studied piano and composition in Los Angeles and Paris, returning in the late 1930s to the United States, where he worked as a dance accompanist.

In 1940, he settled in San Francisco and gave concerts of percussion music and then taught contemporary composition at the Chicago Institute of Design. Two years later he settled in New York, which was to be his base for the remainder of his life.