John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. He attended Pomona College, but left to live in Paris, where he studied painting and music composition. In the early 1930s, he returned to California, where he worked as a musical accompanist for dance performances and studied with Arnold Shoenberg, an influential modernist music theorist and composer who was based at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1942, Cage moved to New York where he remained for the rest of his life. There, he began collaborating with dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who became his life partner.