John Cage “I’m what you would call an amateur mushroom hunter, and so far I haven’t killed myself or killed any other person,” the avant-garde artist and composeronce joked in an interview with filmmaker Henning Lohner. However, those close to the artist would know that he was being modest, if not a bit dishonest. Cage’s fascination with fungi was anything but amateurish. And he once poisoned himself, along with six of his friends, with a dish of hellabore (a scavenged flower, not a mushroom per se), mistaken for skunk cabbage.

Cage’s lifelong obsession with mushrooms began during the Great Depression. Without sufficient money for food, the artist picked the mushrooms growing around his home in Carmel, California, and took one to the public library for further research. He discovered the fungi were edible, and ate them exclusively for about a week. In the early 1950s, Cage began foraging for mushrooms once again while living on an artist commune in rural New York State. Fascinated by their haphazard growth, the artist went on mushroom hunts, studied fungi identification, and even collected them. (The composer’s extensive fungi collection is now housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)

“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom,” Cage explained in “Music Lovers’ Field Companion” (1954). For Cage, the experience of finding mushrooms, often hidden under grass or mulch, was similar to the experience of hearing quiet sounds that are typically eclipsed by the noise of crying babies or fire engines.

Cage famously sought to expose this silent symphony through his seminal work 4’33”, staged in Woodstock, New York, in 1952. The performance consisted of the musician David Tudor sitting at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, without playing a single note. Instead, he opened and closed the keyboard lid three times to mark distinct periods of silence. The performance drew attention to the ambient noises in the room—the rustling of the programs, the sneezes and coughs, the raindrops on the roof—and framed these accidental sounds as the music itself.