Music and Time Annotation << Back Sabine M. Feisst John Cage and Improvisation – An Unresolved Relationship A.N. Lipov Improvisation, a neglected phenomenon in Western art music in the early twentieth century, has been revisited by many composers since the 1950s. John Cage, a key fi gure and catalyst of the avant-garde movement, was one of the fi rst to embrace the uncertain and unpredictable elements of the musical process characteristic of improvisation. Nevertheless, for much of his career, Cage displayed an ambivalence and aversion to improvisation and warned performers against improvising his own scores, challenging his society's hackneyed notions of free musicmaking and improvisation. Cage's views on improvisation changed many times over the course of his career. In the early 1930s he took an improvisational approach to composition, choosing "an entirely different way of composing, which was to improvise and improvise in relation to the texts." Cage's skepticism toward improvisation was characteristic of avant-garde composers and sheds light on the complexity of improvisation, especially in the context of new music. The translation of the scholarly article examines Cage's reasons for his defi nitions and dislike of improvisation and how Cage circumvented improvisation, played with it, or used it in his work. Keywords: improvisation in music, John Cage, random operations and experimentation, uncertainty of music performance DOI: 10.25791/music.12.2023.1264 Pp. 03-09.