The school, located near the Tokyo Imperial Palace, had not been damaged by the war, and Ono found herself a classmate of Prince Akihito, the future emperor of Japan. At 14 years old, she took up vocal training in lieder-singing. College and downtown beginnings Ono graduated from Gakushūin in 1951, and was accepted into the philosophy program of Gakushuin University as the first woman to enter the department. However, she left the school after two semesters. Ono joined her family in New York in September 1952, and enrolled at nearby Sarah Lawrence College. Ono's parents approved of her college choice, but disapproved of her lifestyle and chastised her for befriending people whom they felt were beneath her. In 1956, Ono left college to elope with Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, a star in Tokyo's experimental community, then studying at Juilliard. At Sarah Lawrence, she studied poetry with Alastair Reid, English literature with Kathryn Mansell, and music composition with the Viennese-trained André Singer. Ono has said that her heroes at this time were the twelve-tone composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. She said, "I was just fascinated with what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, then my music went into [an] area that my teacher felt was really a bit off track, and... he said, 'Well, look, there are people who are doing things like what you do, and they're called avant-garde. Singer introduced her to the work of Edgar Varèse, John Cage, and Henry Cowell. Ono left college and moved to New York in 1957, supporting herself through secretarial work and lessons in the traditional Japanese arts at the Japan Society. Ono has often been associated with the Fluxus group, a loose association of Dada-inspired avant-garde artists which was founded in the early 1960s by Lithuanian-American artist George Maciunas. Maciunas admired and enthusiastically promoted her work, and gave Ono her first solo exhibition at his AG Gallery in New York in 1961. He formally invited Ono to join Fluxus, but she declined because she wanted to remain independent. However, she did collaborate with Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, George Brecht, and the poet Jackson Mac Low, among others associated with the group. Ono first met John Cage through his student Ichiyanagi Toshi, in Cage's experimental composition class at the New School for Social Research: She was introduced to more of Cage's unconventional neo-Dadaism first hand, and via his New York City