Читать книгу The Selected Letters of John Cage - John Cage - Страница 10

PREFACE

The first day I formally met John Cage at his 18th Street loft, in the spring of 1987, he met me at the elevator. I would later learn that he did this with all of his visitors, welcoming them into the home he had shared with Merce Cunningham for nearly a decade. He was amiable but preoccupied, and I soon learned why. It was window-washing day at the loft, and the scores of plants that lined the windowsills of the apartment had to be removed to the floor. Meanwhile, the entire apartment smelled of granola, which was baking merrily in the oven.

Cage and I proceeded to move the plants—blooming cultivars, cacti and succulents, evergreens of many kinds—while getting acquainted. Cage learned that I was near the end of a New York City residency in between two graduate degrees at UCLA, and I learned that Cage was dangerously behind on his Europeras 1 & 2, a commission from the Frankfurt Opera. Cage had taken on a “Wagnerian” role, assuming full charge of every aspect of the work—music, of course, for both orchestra and singers, but also casting, lighting, costumes, stage actions and design, even the program booklet. He and Andrew Culver, his programmer/assistant, were in the thick of designing the lighting program. Invited by Cage to participate, I snagged an area yet untouched, the costumes, and, at Cage’s suggestion, also agreed to help wherever extra hands and eyes were needed.

In the weeks that followed, I created a database of dress drawn from documents held at the Fashion Institute of Technology. This, in time, would be subjected to chance operations for Germany’s final selections. We spent a week photographing encyclopedia images, me, Andy, and Cage, the tips of my fingers captured for all of posterity in the edges of many of the original shots. From the start, Cage and I were perfect for each other. Cage didn’t like telling others what to do and I didn’t like to be told. But he was also deeply committed to seeing that his work became my own. I was free as I could be to populate the database, which was inspired by Cage’s only mandate: that the stage look something like what one might see on any corner of multicultural Manhattan. In the weeks before my return to Los Angeles, we worked together nearly every day, from the moment Merce left for his dance studio, usually by 10 a.m., until Cage would knock off, right around 5 p.m., for a game or two of chess, often with the artist Bill Anastasi. Wine was never poured before “à six heures,” but always soon after and always red. Conversation during this closing time was as it had been throughout the day: almost always about composition and work, rarely about current events. When Cage telephoned me in California later that year to suggest I return to New York for further work together, I said yes.

The last five years of Cage’s life were intense. In 1987, in addition to the Frankfurt premiere of his Europeras 1 & 2, Cage oversaw a lavish production of his Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake at London’s Royal Albert Hall with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He began work with Henning Lohner on his film, One11 (1992), and oversaw the premiere installation of his Henry David Thoreau–inspired Essay at Documenta 8 in Kassel. He also attended a grand Musicircus in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday at the Los Angeles Festival John Cage Celebration, involving hundreds of performers. In 1988 his formal engagement with watercolors began at the Mountain Lake Workshop in Virginia with Ray Kass, where he produced the first of two beautiful bodies of work, New River Watercolors. He traveled to Moscow to teach and to attend the Third International Music Festival, bunking with the Russian-born American lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky as they traveled around the country. Cage recalled upon his return how much he had enjoyed the irregular movements of the trains.

Cage mostly spent the academic year 1988–1989 as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, producing six full-length mesostic poems, published by Harvard University Press as I–VI, which he delivered throughout the year. In time, some of the materials used in this composition would also yield his “Bolivia Mix”: eighty-nine loosely bound transcripts of contemporary newspaper articles—chance-determined collages—which he distributed as a Christmas gift to friends. “Why Bolivia?” I asked. “Because,” he replied, gazing at the rocks and plants placed about, “it is where I hope to retire, since no one there has any interest in modern music.”

In August 1989 Cage attended the Telluride Composer-to-Composer Festival, which reconnected him with many friends, followed by travel to California, where he presented a new collaborative work at the Bay Area Radio Drama conference at the Skywalker Ranch in Nicasio. He then was in Japan to accept the prestigious Kyoto Prize, where he appeared in traditional Japanese dress to present his “Autobiographical Statement” as part of his acceptance speech. The check, amounting to 45 million yen (roughly $380,000), was endorsed to Merce to cover the endless shortfall of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. Cage also served as a resident composer with Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen, both old friends, at the 11th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in the UK. The following year, 1990, found him in Darmstadt, where he received the Schönberg Medal, in Berlin, for the Akademie der Künste’s “John Cage in Östberlin,” and in Glasgow, for the 8th Musica Nova, where he served as composer-in-residence with James MacMillan, Nigel Osborne, and Wolfgang Rihm.

In 1991, Cage received the Frederick R. Weisman Art Award for Lifetime Achievement—$10,000 and a beautiful cast sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein—at a candlelit ceremony in the gardens of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I will never forget walking up the steps to the entrance that night. Cage, in need of a haircut, dressed in traditional blue jeans, and carrying his pajamas and toothbrush in a D’Agostino’s grocery bag for an overnight stay in Beverly Hills, was momentarily turned away by the guard. “A private affair,” he muttered, blocking our way. I was horrified, but Cage was suddenly cheerful, suggesting we quickly go somewhere and have a drink before the guard changed his mind.

The year 1991 also saw Cage attending “James Joyce/John Cage,” at the Zurich Junifestwochen, as well as the “Cagefest” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. In January 1992, he presented his “Overpopulation and Art” at an interdisciplinary conference at Stanford University, Here Comes Everybody: The Music, Poetry, and Art of John Cage. At the close of Cage’s reading he was admonished by someone in the audience for not tackling the “larger” problems of our global life. Another asked whether he would consider a nomination for president. He left the stage to resounding applause. That same month, an annual residency at Crown Point Press in San Francisco spent making visual art works resulted in two new series: Without Horizon and HV2. He was in San Francisco again in May, this time for the Herbst Theatre’s anticipatory John Cage 80th Birthday Celebration. We embarked together on what would be his final tour shortly after, fulfilling obligations throughout much of May and June in Halle, Bratislava, Florence, and Perugia. Before traveling home, we would stop for several days in Villiers-sous-Grez outside of Paris, where Cage enjoyed quiet time (and a lot of chess) with his dear friend, Teeny Duchamp.

Upon his return to New York, Cage attended a series of weekend concerts of his music at MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, arranged by his colleague, the conductor Paul Zukofsky. He also worked hard, though without much enthusiasm, to complete all that was being asked of him in preparation for the John Cage Anarchic Harmony Festival ’92, slated for Frankfurt. In the midst of it all, he said that his schedule read “like fantasy” or, at the very least, “like someone else’s.” The plan was to spend an extended period of time in Germany in celebration of his eightieth birthday, with concerts and events taking place not only in Frankfurt, but in Cologne, Wiesbaden, and Groningen. Cage was dreading the time away from home, and, as we later learned, his scheduled appearances were not to be.

John Cage was born in the second decade of the twentieth century and died in its last, living through one of the most dramatic and rapidly changing centuries in world history. He had spent his early childhood in the milieu of the First World War, and entered adulthood on the eve of the Great Depression. The dissolution of his marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff, which lasted a decade, was nearly contemporaneous with the onset of World War II. He lived out his middle years at the height of the Cold War, which grew hot in Korea and Vietnam. Shocking assassinations of three American leaders occurred in the 1960s—John F. Kennedy (1963), Martin Luther King (1968), and Robert Kennedy (1968)—and on July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon.

The 1970s were years of both sorrow and hope in America: the birth of the EPA, Earth Day, and PBS, but also the horrific Kent and Jackson State University shootings. With the ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971, eighteen-year-olds gained the right to vote, and with the landmark decision reached in Roe v. Wade in 1973, women the right to abort. In 1972, President Richard Nixon was in China and then reelected; in 1974, facing impeachment for his role in the Watergate scandal (which Cage archly called “America’s theater”), he resigned. And Cage’s last decade was nearly synchronous with escalating unrest in the Middle East, which led to the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1990–1991), also known as Operation Desert Shield. By the time of his death in 1992, at just shy of eighty, Cage had lived under fifteen presidents, ranging from William Howard Taft to George H. W. Bush. He had also lived to see momentous progress made on behalf of the human condition with the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, the antiwar movement, and the counterculture revolution.

Very few of these tumultuous events are to be found in Cage’s letters. Lest we conclude that his was a politically unconscious life, however, they are amply reflected in his eight-part, sixteen-year-long project titled Diary: How to Improve the World (You’ll Only Make Matters Worse), published for the first time in 2015 in its entirety by Siglio Press. Cage’s Diary is a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories, all speaking to world improvement and all drawn from three of his earlier Wesleyan University Press publications: A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (1967), M: Writings ’67–’72 (1973), and X: Writings ’79–’82 (1983). Cage recorded all eight parts June 22–24, 1991, at Powerplay Recording Studios in Maur, Switzerland, leaving an unfinished part nine behind. This recording would be released in a CD box set by Wergo in 1992.

At first glance, Cage’s letters appear to contrast sharply with his Diary, but the two are more complementary than different. Taken together they form something akin to autobiography. This because in both Cage reveals two overriding concerns, albeit cast in different forms and with their emphases reversed: in his Diary, Cage is a world citizen, his focus on world improvement, while in his letters, Cage is a composer, his focus on music’s role in improving the world. We see language in both regards over and over again in his communications with others: in his constant drive to originality and invention, his unwavering attention to people and place, his avoidance of political engagement, and his belief in the efficacious use of technology, this last fueled by the ideas and work of Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller. He appears almost tireless in his mission. What he often referred to as his innately sunny disposition is almost always evident, as he presents the world as a place of possibility, humor, and hope.

Cage’s abrupt death on August 12, 1992, changed the lives of many. I found myself in the position of knowing the most about many aspects of his life—his recent work, to be sure, but also where his money was stashed, what the cat was fed, where extra keys could be found, and Cunningham’s daily routine. I became, by default, the caretaker of all things John Cage. After a year of making biweekly commutes across the country, however, living out of a suitcase from week to week, I began to flag. I suggested to Merce over dinner one night that we create a structure—an entity of some sort, an organization, an institute—something that would better support our efforts in stewarding his partner’s life’s work. He was supportive, and with a call to Allan Sperling, a friend and lawyer long in service on the Cunningham Dance Foundation board, this was quickly done.

So began the John Cage Trust, which in 1993 took up residence in the restored postal archives building at 666 Greenwich Street in New York City’s West Village. Its founding board of directors consisted of me, Cunningham, Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and David Vaughan, long-time archivist of the Cunningham Dance Foundation. We began with $10,000 and copyright to Cage’s intellectual property, our initial archives comprised of all that Cage himself had amassed. A permanent collection of his visual art works was created from pieces hanging on the walls of what was now Cunningham’s loft and others that Cage had consigned to Margarete Roeder, his long-time friend and gallerist. His music manuscripts, numbering some twenty-eight thousand pages, was organized by a team of international Cage scholars—James Pritchett and me from the United States, Martin Erdmann from Germany, Paul van Emmerik from the Netherlands, and András Wilheim from Hungary. After being catalogued and reproduced in triplicate, the John Cage Music Manuscript Collection was placed in perpetuity at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

In 2002, with the loss of rent stabilization in our West Village building and with alternative affordable real estate in short supply in Manhattan, the John Cage Trust became nomadic. In 2007, it joined the ranks of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, under the wing of its honored president, Leon Botstein. This has been its home since. The John Cage Trust has evolved over its twenty-plus years of existence, peripatetic but in one way constant: that it always be responsive to the world at its door, guided at every step not so much by what Cage had done but, rather, by what Cage is doing now.

From the onset of work on the present collection, I knew my efforts would be of use. Inquiries are frequent at the John Cage Trust about whether Cage wrote to a particular individual or addressed a particular topic or composition in his correspondence. Work began with the research that had been conducted into the John Cage Correspondence Collection at Northwestern University by Kenneth Silverman, author of Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2010). Our initial criteria for inclusion held fast as we sought other collections: that the letters collectively reflect Cage’s wide and egalitarian reach; that they reveal Cage’s preoccupation with particularly complex compositions and ideas; that the various periods of Cage’s life be covered; and that the whole reflect the incredible range of Cage’s activities over some six decades. There was no shortage of letters to choose from, and possibilities came from all points on the globe. This was particularly true in Cage’s later years, when he received a remarkable number of unsolicited letters from perfect strangers: inquiries about his music, accounts of dreams about him, requests for his opinion on artistic endeavors, challenges to his philosophy, and requests for autographs, endorsements, and recommendations. It is our good fortune that Cage felt duty bound to reply to them all.

What I didn’t foresee is the kind of story Cage’s letters would tell: a quiet, steady saga of near epic proportion about the singular life of a twentieth-century experimental American composer. Cage’s earliest letters to family, friends, and teachers reflect an earnest search for identity, direction, and place. He early on waffled in his choice of profession, by turns aspiring to become a minister, a writer, an artist, a poet, a composer. Settling on modern music composition, Cage set a steady if meandering course to the “head of the company,” the celebrated Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had settled in Los Angeles. His confidence was buoyed by his studies, and then by his teaching, performing, and composing activities at the Cornish School in Seattle. By his late thirties, Cage is writing with ease and fluency to his intellectual peers: Pierre Boulez and David Tudor, especially, on technical matters of composition and performance, and Peter Yates, on matters of aesthetics, music history, and style.

While the selected letters reveal in the main Cage’s concerns as a composer, they do so in the context of a remarkable breadth of subject matter—composition and performance, to be sure, but also mycology, travel, philosophy, chess, food, religion, and art. And while they inform us about the remarkable range of Cage’s activities, they also reveal something of his inner life. This in spite of the fact that with the exception of Cage’s letters to Merce Cunningham throughout the early 1940s, chronicling a rather rocky start to their personal relationship, few letters to his most intimate colleagues exist: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for example, largely are absent. Likewise, Cage is mostly mute on the subjects of desire and love, with but three notable exceptions: his letters to Pauline Schindler (with Xenia, one of the two objects of his ardor in the 1930s), his aforementioned letters to Cunningham (overlapping with the last years of his marriage to Xenia, in the 1940s), and his letters to David Tudor (who captured his attention and heart in the 1950s). His relationship with Schindler clearly was consummated, his relationship with Tudor likely not. His relationship with Cunningham, both personal and professional, would endure for some fifty years.

The introductions to the five parts of this collection were originally written jointly with Silverman, although they’ve since gone through countless revisions. Taken as a whole, they do not suggest a biography; rather, placed singly at the start of what are roughly decades of Cage’s life, they serve as guides to the letters that follow, identifying correspondents and providing context for and editorial comment upon matters discussed. If one gleans a biographical arc, it appears without a single, overriding descriptor: Cage is by turns enthusiastic, intelligent, consistent, and caring, as well as unwavering, repetitious, and dogmatic. A single creative idea might occupy him for years, through many compositions. One thing that does become clear is that John Cage began life as John Cage and finished life as John Cage. In the end, with his midlife adoption of Zen philosophy and his adaptation of the I Ching to chance operations, his feet, as Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki might have put it, were a little bit off the ground.

Reproducing the letters as Cage wrote them, I have opted to regularize his paragraphing, which in reality varies from letter to letter, and is often inconsistent within a single letter. I have not distinguished between letters that are written by hand or typewritten, or between those composed on simple bond paper or on “Note-O-Grams,” those quirky carriers of communication in carbon copy triplicate that Cage favored in the last decades of his life. More often than not, a late date, brevity, and the absence of an opening salutation imply the latter. I have corrected evident typos and erratic punctuation, but preserved his sometimes eccentric spelling and grammar, such as his habitual use of “therefor” and “correspondance,” and his frequent use of the word “which,” when, at least for the American reader, he really means “that.” Erratic capitalizations have been removed. I have noted his occasional misspellings of correspondents’ names, and when I have been unable to determine a correspondent’s identity, I have simply provided detail drawn from the letter that prompted Cage’s response. Date and place of each letter is provided when known, an approximate date suggested when not. Titles of works have been made complete and italicized for easy recognition, and Cage’s largely unremarkable closings to letters have been omitted. An appendix to the volume identifies the various sources of the selected letters, both public and private.

The Selected Letters of John Cage is made possible through the diligence and generosity of many, and gratitude is in order. We thank first John Cage, who religiously cared for and finally placed his extensive accumulated correspondence at the Northwestern University Library, from 1969 under the care and guidance of Don Roberts and, later, Deborah Campana, who became the point person for researchers around the world. Northwestern’s present staff—D. J. Hoek at the helm, with able assistance from Gregory MacAyeal and Alan Akers—supported the present editor’s frequent and sustained visits; they also conducted long-distance research and fact checking on her behalf, often at the drop of a hat. Thanks is also extended to Kenneth Silverman, whose initial research provided a strong start to our work, and to the innumerable individuals who have guarded their correspondence with Cage like gold.

Lastly, we thank Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief at Wesleyan University Press, John Cage’s principal publisher. It was she in 2012, Cage’s centennial year, who shepherded the Press’s worldwide celebration of fifty years of engagement with his literary works. She also brought us the estimable Bronwyn Becker, a project editor from the University Press of New England, who tackled an almost impossible job.

Much, much applause to all!

Laura Kuhn

New York, 2015