John Cage survived swallowing strychnine tablets as a toddler, then stood at the Hollywood Bowl as a high school valedictorian proposing a national day of quiet. This episode traces how an inventor father who built a submarine that gave off exhaust bubbles, a protest walkout from Pomona College, and free lessons with Arnold Schoenberg shaped a composer who admitted he had no feeling for harmony and vowed to spend his life beating his head against that wall.

From the prepared piano invented for a cramped Seattle dance stage to the I Ching coin tosses behind Music of Changes and the misunderstood 1952 premiere of 4’33” in Woodstock, the conversation follows Cage’s break with Western emotional expression, his study of Indian philosophy and Zen, and the excommunication he faced from Pierre Boulez and the European avant-garde. It closes with the first American happening at Black Mountain College, the sensory overload of HPSCHD, his mushroom foraging, the late number pieces written as his hands failed, and his fingerprints on Brian Eno, Sonic Youth, and Radiohead.

• How screws, bolts, and rubber between piano strings turned a melodic instrument into a one-man drum kit
• The concert-lobby meeting with Morton Feldman that seeded the New York School and connected Cage with pianist David Tudor
• Why traffic on Sixth Avenue sounded better to Cage than Beethoven, and how Gita Sarabhai and D.T. Suzuki reshaped his thinking
• What 4’33” actually asks of an audience and why the classical press stopped covering him
• Europeras, flexible time brackets in the number pieces, and the New York Mycological Society he co-founded