Pedagogy, modernism, and medium specificity: The Bauhaus and John Cage

In this dissertation, I bring the relationship between the Bauhaus and composer John Cage to the fore. The pedagogic examples of Bauhaus masters Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers contributed significantly to Cage's work and to the lectures and courses he offered at the School of Design, Black Mountain College, and at the New School for Social Research. In rendering this relationship visible, I establish a new trajectory for understanding the proliferation and evolution of the design school in America and draw attention to correspondences among seemingly disparate creative practices.;By mapping the dynamics of the Bauhaus-Cage relationship, I challenge the ways in which the school and composer have been cast as independent historical entities. Modernist assumptions regarding design, the medium, and function serve as counterpoints throughout this dissertation insofar as these critical structures---and responses to them---have precluded scholars from fully understanding affinities between the Bauhaus and Cage. I assert that the Bauhaus-Cage relationship runs counter to perceptions of the design school as representative of an over-determined ideology and overwrought aesthetic of modernist reduction. At the same time, my assessment of this relationship complicates a casting of the composer as prophet for a neo-avant-garde. In this regard, I show how Bauhaus pedagogic methods and practices were flexible enough to be applied to both visual and aural media. When refracted through Cage's unique creative lens it becomes evident that the Bauhaus was influential in performance-based and often ephemeral artistic activity well-beyond the temporal bounds of the school's original manifestation in Germany, and in a radically new context.