Can someone please settle once and for all whether Schoenberg actually taught John Cage twelve tone? I keep reading contradictory points about this.

 

He did not. Cage picked up a variant of 12-tone technique from snippets he heard elsewhere, but Schoenberg insisted on teaching all of his beginner students traditional methods so that they would have a grounding to take up the 12-tone method or not according to their own tastes.

Cage claimed that his belief in change and variation were inspired by Schoenberg's ideas, but his sound and idea-based music is very much opposed to the traditional development and pitch-focused music of the Second Viennese School.

 

To quote you : Who cares, pure and simple .

 

Cage's use of indeterminacy in composing Music of Changes seems to me a conscious attempt to come up with something as rigorous as the 12 tone system as represented Schoenberg, Webern, and early Boulez (I think Cage has Boulez slightly beat here, chronologically, in "organizing" elements besides pitch; Structures 1a, as far as I know, was written later in the same year), in the same way as the 12 tone system, without being the 12 tone system.

That aside, though, when investigating where John Cage came from, the first stop should not be Schoenberg, still less East Asian music, but rather Henry Cowell.

 

^ Agree about Cowell as the first stop, more than anyone else. (I am generally less interested in Cage's music but am more interested in what inspired his creativity and his creative process and learning, which I find more interesting a topic as far as Cage is concerned for me).