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PART ONE

1930–1949

IN THE SUMMER OF 1930, the adventuresome seventeen-year-old John Cage dropped out of his first year at Pomona College in California and began an eighteen-month trip abroad. Much of the time he traveled with Harvard-educated Don Sample, ten years his senior. From Algeria and elsewhere he wrote home with great enthusiasm to his parents: his father, John Milton Cage Sr., a professional inventor, and his mother, Lucretia Harvey Cage, better known as “Crete,” a journalist with the Los Angeles Times. His letters are brimming with excitement and wonder at the people and places he encountered. Paris awakened him to modern music, and while in Spain he did some composing.

Cage’s pursuit of a musical career began in earnest after his return to California late in 1931. Hoping to study with world-renowned Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had settled in Los Angeles after fleeing Nazi Berlin, Cage began taking composition lessons with the pianist Richard Buhlig, who was much praised for his Bach interpretations and who also played contemporary works. Buhlig advised Cage to find a path to Schoenberg through one of his former students, Henry Cowell, with whom Cage then briefly studied. Cowell suggested that Cage get in touch with Adolph Weiss, the first American musician to have studied with Schoenberg. Weiss, then living in New York, agreed to take Cage on as a student, and in April 1934, Cage, with Don Sample, arrived in Manhattan. Cage took a lesson from Weiss every day and attended Cowell’s weekly class in ethnomusicology at the New School for Social Research.

In early 1935, his education well under way, Cage returned to California and began attending Schoenberg’s classes both at the master’s home and at USC and UCLA, studying musical analysis and probably also composition. For a while he also took horn lessons from a local symphonist, Wendell Hoss, but, engrossed in his work with Schoenberg, soon gave up the instrument. Cage was broke more often than not, but also willing to do whatever work came his way. He took on various odd jobs—dishwasher, recreation director for children in schools and hospitals, and, with much enjoyment, scientific researcher for his father. He also went door to door in his neighborhood, selling subscriptions, mostly to housewives, to a lecture series on modern music and art he created ad hoc.

Cage’s youthful relationship with Sample was sexual, but in the midst of his musical studies, he found himself in love with two women, and at the same time: Pauline Schindler, forty-one years old to his twenty-two and separated from her well-known architect-husband, Rudolph Schindler; and Xenia (Andreyevna) Kashevaroff, a far-from-orthodox daughter of the archpriest of the Eastern Orthodox Russian-Greek Church of Alaska. Schindler’s career as a writer, editor, and lecturer on architecture and the visual arts was advanced. She was considered an agent for modernism, as photographer Edward Weston once described her, “the ideal go-between for the artist and the public.” Kashevaroff, a former art student at Reed College who in time would leave her mark as a sculptor of abstract mobiles, bookbinder, and conservator, was reportedly small and feisty, possessing what Cage called a “barb wit.” Weston, Xenia’s erstwhile lover, described her as “most delightfully unmoral, pagan.” Indeed, Weston’s 1931 photographs of Xenia, some involving full frontal nudity, capture something of her wanton spirit. Cage declared his meeting with Xenia love at first sight, and the two were married in Yuma, Arizona, on June 7, 1935.

Few of Cage’s letters survive between 1936 and 1938. It is known, however, that a new stage in his career began in the fall of 1938, when he joined the faculty at the adventurous Cornish School in Seattle. Within a rich academic environment that trained students in the interdependence of the arts, Cage gave courses in experimental music and modern dance composition, and served as an accompanist for modern dance classes. Having developed an intense interest in percussion music—regarding it as the perfect ground to explore the vast universe of sound—he collected and constructed percussion instruments and organized a percussion ensemble. On Dec. 9, 1938, in Seattle, he produced what may be the first concert devoted entirely to percussion music in America. Soon after, he took his musicians to perform at schools around the Northwest, touring as the Cage Percussion Players, sometimes with Bonnie Bird and her Cornish School dancers.

Cage’s letters resume in 1939, and for three summers he taught in the Dance Department of Mills College in Oakland, California. He also entered into what would be enduring relationships with others in his chosen field. The first summer, 1939, he offered a class in percussion jointly with a fellow student of Henry Cowell’s, Lou Harrison. Brought together by Cowell, Harrison and Cage partnered to compose Double Music (1941), working separately without consultation and then putting their parts together. It was also at Mills College that Cage first met the composer and music critic Virgil Thomson, with whom he entered into an equally long if more troubled relationship.

Cage’s music began to be noticed; his 1940 concert at Mills College, with seventeen percussionists, yielded enthusiastic notices in the San Francisco Chronicle and Time magazine. His reach was also widening, and he gained an important champion in Peter Yates, a music critic and writer for the magazine Arts & Architecture. Yates, with his wife, Frances, held concerts featuring avant-garde compositions on the roof of their Los Angeles home, aptly publicized as Evenings on the Roof. Yates explained and supported Cage’s radically new ideas in many published articles, and the two forged a close, important friendship.

Cage’s various musical pursuits came together in his desire to establish a Center for Experimental Music. He worked hard to gather funds and to persuade a variety of institutions to sponsor it, but his overtures were either turned down or ignored. Among those to whom he proposed the center was the émigré painter/photographer László Moholy-Nagy. Formerly an influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, Moholy-Nagy had established a sort of American Bauhaus in Chicago, the School of Design. Accepting an invitation to teach there, the Cages moved to Chicago in the fall of 1941. In addition to delivering his course Sound Experiments at the School of Design, Cage taught and performed elsewhere in and around Chicago, a city not much to his liking. He and Xenia befriended Rue Shaw, president of the distinguished Arts Club of Chicago, where Cage would give an explosive percussion concert in early 1942 involving tin cans, a siren, and shattered bottles that received national attention.

Late in 1941, Cage was commissioned by Columbia Workshop of WBBM and Columbia Broadcasting System to compose a radio play with sound effects on a text by the poet Kenneth Patchen, also resident in Chicago. Poet and composer together created The City Wears a Slouch Hat, which was given its one and only live broadcast over the CBS network on May 31, 1942, a Sunday afternoon. The public response from across the nation was a lively jumble of boos and hurrahs. Emboldened by the experience, Cage and Xenia moved to New York City in the summer of 1942. They lodged for a few weeks at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Hale House,” then in Montclair, New Jersey, with Cage’s parents, who themselves had moved east. He gave his first New York concert at the Museum of Modern Art in association with the League of Composers that was covered extensively in the press, including a pictorial spread in Life (March 15, 1943). And although Cage’s letter dated January 11, 1945, requesting exemption via a III-A classification from the draft hasn’t survived, we know that he avoided military service on the basis of Xenia’s (slightly exaggerated) poor health, as was reported to the Selective Service System (Local Board No. 219, Los Angeles, California) by one Ernest W. Kulka, M.D.

Gradually, Cage was turning away from composing percussion music to writing exclusively for the piano, both prepared and unprepared. Cage had long-standing interest in experimental instruments, as his many references to such composers and inventors as Luigi Russolo, Léon Theremin, and Edgard Varèse attest. His own prepared piano would bring him national attention. Inspired by Cowell’s earlier unorthodox experiments, Cage had devised his new instrument while at the Cornish School, bringing forth unusual timbres from the piano by inserting various objects (rubber washers, screws, bolts, weather stripping) between its strings. Chief among his compositions for the instrument would be his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948); the pianist Maro Ajemian, a devotee of contemporary music, would give the first partial performance of the work on April 16, 1946, at New York’s Town Hall, which was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. As Cage worked to complete the piece, which was ultimately dedicated to Ajemian, his friend Lou Harrison, who had also moved East, suffered a nervous breakdown. To help defray the cost of Harrison’s treatment in a New York sanatorium, Cage sought and secured assistance from a composer whose music Harrison advocated passionately, Charles Ives.

Cage’s letters from the early 1940s tell us much about the onset of his relationship with Merce Cunningham. The two had met in 1938 at the Cornish School, where Cunningham, then nineteen years old to Cage’s twenty-six, was enrolled as a theater student but taking a class in modern dance which Cage sometimes served as accompanist. The two reconnected while the Cages were in Chicago, but their friendship didn’t blossom until both were resident in New York where Cunningham had earlier moved to join the Martha Graham Dance Company. Cunningham began making dances to music by Cage, and, ever more intrigued by each other’s ideas and work, the two soon became lovers. Cage’s letters reveal a stormy start to the relationship, he being by turns ecstatic and bereft. In either case, his work was clearly enlivened by the close proximity of a genuine and promising colleague. Unable to tolerate her husband’s diversion, Xenia left Cage in 1944; despite attempts to reconcile, they divorced in 1946.

Artistically, Cage’s union with Cunningham was an immediate success. Their first recital together, in April 1944, included six prepared piano pieces by Cage with solo dances by Cunningham. The reviews were glowing. Among other acclaimed early collaborations was their May 1947 performance of The Seasons at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater, with scenery and costumes by Isamu Noguchi.

Throughout these years Cage undertook much else. He considered composing a dance score for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” an idea proposed in 1945 by the dancer/choreographer Ruth Page and her husband, Thomas Hart Fisher. In the fall of 1946, Cage met in New York the visiting Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. The two became good friends and met several times a week over five months, exchanging ideas about Indian music and philosophy and the teachings of Arnold Schoenberg that would resonate in Cage’s life and work for decades. Cage also wrote and published articles about contemporary music, including his own, and in the winter of 1947 founded a short-lived art and literary magazine, Possibilities, with the artist Robert Motherwell.

In the summer of 1948, Cage and Cunningham were in residence at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. The director of the small, experimental school was Josef Albers, a German-born artist who had taught in the Bauhaus but fled Nazi Germany and joined the Black Mountain faculty. While Cage’s letters provide little detail, it is known that during his two visits with Cunningham, in 1948 and again in 1952, Cage played his complete Sonatas and Interludes for the first time in public and offered courses, including Structure of Music and Music for Dance. He also produced a festival devoted to the works of Erik Satie, which included an original staging of Satie’s Dada comedy The Ruse of Medusa, starring R. Buckminster Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Elaine de Kooning as his daughter Frisette, and Cunningham as Jonas, a costly mechanical monkey. Cage was enamored with Satie, and revealed his ever-widening knowledge about the French composer when writing about his works to both Yates (in 1948) and Cecil Smith (in 1950), a writer for Musical America.

Cage’s correspondence becomes unusually rich after March 23, 1949, when he and Cunningham sailed for Europe. His many letters to friends and family record a lively social, intellectual, and artistic life abroad. Cage visited Giacometti and Brancusi, played for one of Olivier Messiaen’s classes, and at least twice visited Alice B. Toklas. He delighted in knowing Maggie Nogueira, a generous Brazilian woman who provided dinner and theater invitations in Amsterdam as well as the use of her chauffeured car. Nogueira was closely connected to another of Cage’s confidantes of the period, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, an Australian composer and music critic who had acquired American citizenship and lived in New York.

Many of Cage’s friends visited him in Paris, including the composer Merton Brown and the painter Jack Heliker. Gita Sarabhai also arrived, now married and known as Gita Mayer, as did Maro Ajemian (to perform Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes), with her mother in tow; Cage recounts in a letter to his parents dated August 27, 1949, having to assist the Ajemians with all manner of logistics, which was not always appreciated. Amid seemingly constant socializing—including a visit to the home of one of the Baronesses Rothschild—Cage managed to conduct an exhaustive search for compositions by Satie, acquiring published scores and unpublished facsimiles for his own collection and that of Virgil Thomson. Ever stylish, he also managed to have new suits made while in Italy, which, he told his parents, were sorely needed.

While Cage was forging friendships with cutting-edge composers throughout Europe, the center of his musical and social life in Paris was a former student of Messiaen’s, twenty-four-year old Pierre Boulez. Cage considered Boulez’s music the best he heard in Europe, and the two became fast friends. Boulez introduced Cage around Paris and arranged for him to give numerous private concerts. Cage in turn took Boulez, with Cunningham, on a visit to Toklas and introduced him to Aaron Copland, a former student of the legendary French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who was then in Paris.

Toward the end of his travels in late 1949, and despite what he called his “wild, marvelous life” abroad, Cage began longing to return to America. He had experienced and come to disdain Europe’s commitment to the past, and his financial problems had become chronic. While in Paris he learned that he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but he postponed using it until he returned home. He also missed the loft he had recently decorated and rented during his absence to someone who, he was told, mistreated it. Set in lower Manhattan, the large, new place had a view of the Statue of Liberty.

To the Cage Family

[Undated, ca. 1930] | Biskra, Algeria

DEAR DENVER CAGES AND THE OTHER OUTLYING CAGES:

You found it slightly queer to be writing to me in Paris, but you might have thought it still more unusual to be writing a letter to Biskra, Algeria. My letters from America now go through the most fascinating operations in post offices in three or four countries. They finally find me in some town in Northern Africa with all sorts of different color stamps on them, and I have to pay a penny or so of added postage to be given the privilege of receiving them. Sometimes I just sit down and marvel, amazed, at the envelopes so exotically decorated. They often have stamps on them as beautiful and strange as the one that I shall put on this letter. I wish that you could be in my place and receive letters that had been forwarded from France to Italy and different islands in the Mediterranean and different countries in Northern Africa.

I have been traveling with a chap I found in Capri.¹ He comes from Pittsburgh and from Harvard College and a number of other places. He writes poetry which he refuses to have printed. And he likes to visit Europe and Africa in the same manner that I do. That is: We avoid with care the carefully swept tourist roads and we crawl into the natural, average places of the countries. I am interested especially in the people of the cities, all the people. Don is interested most in the country, the hills, lakes, etc. He feels at home at present on a sand dune, riding a camel. I am perfectly happy in a cafe watching the Arabs play dominoes and drink coffee. Or in a post office watching the Arabs send letters or receive money or find witnesses who will identify them if they don’t know how to sign their own names. Vesuvious I saw from a distance. I found Etna far more beautiful, covered with clouds and snow, and not with funiculares sliding up and down it. The best part of Naples was its fish market, which was positively thrilling. The fish were kept brilliant and striking by having water dashed on them every now and then, as though they were clothes which were being dampened before being ironed. And there were all manner of fishes. There were even baby octopuses, which people would come and inspect and approve and buy. I didn’t buy any fish. All of Naples is dirty and happy. People working sing. People sleeping in the sun in December. Across to Capri. It takes an hour and a half on the boat that goes twice a day. Over on Capri there are flowers and bells and paths in the sunlight and walks down to the sand and little boats that you go paddling in, but if you go in these little “sandalinos” you have to wear only short bathing pants, because the “sandolino” is liable to turn over and land you completely in the bay of Naples, or, at any rate, by the mere act of paddling, water will get into the boat. You can go for an hour or two, however, before you sink.

It was very kind of you to send me the money, and kinder of you to write the letters to me. I am always more than happy to hear from you. Please pardon my using my typewriter. But I have such trouble getting it through customs and such things that I feel the necessity to make use of it. I have wanted to send gifts from Europe at Christmas time, but the difficulties of taxes, etc. are apparently great. You will have to wait. My English as you see is getting horrid; I hope it remains slightly understandable. French is used more than English in Africa and I’m getting into bad habits of language.

[handwritten note in left margin] Please write to Poste Restante Seville Spain and say “Hold” on the envelope.

To Adolph Weiss²

[Spring 1933?] | Carmel, California

Dear Mr. Weiss,

The enclosed compositions (Sonata for One Voice; Sonata for Two Voices; Composition for Three Voices) I beg you to consider merely as work which I have finished in the last half-year. I have, in writing them, erected arbitrary rules which have been strictly observed; so that, in defending them, I would be able to analyse all of the relationships which, in writing, I set up.

Richard Buhlig,³ in Los Angeles, is very much interested in my work, and advised me to get in touch with Henry Cowell.⁴ When, recently, I saw Mr. Cowell, I told him of my intention to study with Dr. Schoenberg⁵ and asked him what method to pursue in order to accomplish that intention, by means of a scholarship. Mr. Cowell was rather vague, but definitely stated that you prepare students for Dr. Schoenberg, and advised me to send my compositions to you.

I am writing, then, to ask if you will teach me. And, are there any possibilities of obtaining a scholarship, for I have no money?

I am not ignorant that I will have to work hard; I add this because of the stories I have heard of the disappointments of “modernists” who have wanted to study with Schoenberg, hoping to find in him someone who would “sympathize.”

Of course, I am very anxious to receive a reply from you, as soon as it would be convenient for you to send me one.

References: Richard Buhlig

102 S. Carondolet

Los Angeles, California

Henry Cowell

Menlo Park, California

P.S. I am twenty-one years old, and have worked for the last three years without a teacher.

J.C.

Box 1111, Carmel, Calif

To Henry Cowell

October 26, 1933 | 803 Griffith Park Blvd. Los Angeles

Dear Mr. Cowell,

I am writing in order to let you know that I have moved from the Santa Monica address which I gave you in connection with the Sonata for B-flat Clarinet Alone which I sent you for publication in New Music at Mr. Buhlig’s request. I am, of course, very interested in receiving your criticism.

I am, at present, in extremely straight circumstances. I feel that you must be interested in the economic problems of the composer. If you know of any solution that would give me leisure to study and write, I would be very grateful if you would let me know of it.

I am writing now a Sonata for Two Voices and have finished the first movement. In it I treat each sound as absolutely individual; two different A’s, for example, are absolutely different. It is a way of writing which I have approached with difficulty and yet inevitably. The last movement of the Clarinet Sonata which I sent you is obviously not written from this, my present point of departure. There I have, in writing a crab-canon, exchanged at will one A for another, desiring a change in flow-character.

I have no piano now. But that doesn’t bother me much. What I want is time.

To Pauline Schindler⁶

11 December 1934 | Location not indicated

Dearest Pauline:⁷

I am terribly excited at the prospect of seeing you soon again and I want you to know I am extremely worried that you won’t or will get the flavor of N.Y. via me. I am in a rush of vortex!!! and you must pardon if this arrives to be only a note. Will travel by Santa Fe where Cowell + I are invited for Xmas Holiday. I forget the names of the people. How soon will I see you. You are probably in Ojai + I will (probably) have to stay in L.A. for a dutiful period which I will enjoy however. I will meet Schoenberg (whom you have already) by taking him presents from Mrs. Weiss who is not coming. How is Mark.⁸ Give him my best + Pat.⁹

And Buhlig! I can’t wait. And everybody. There are two more important people in L.A. whom I think you don’t know. Joseph Achron, Jew + Wm. Grant Still,¹⁰ negro (composers). These distinctions are important now. Everything is important. Equalities. Distinctions wiping them out + emphasizing them.

To Adolph Weiss

[Winter, 1934?] | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Weiss:

Please write to me and let me know what your plans are. This is an S.O.S. I count almost entirely on working with you.

I am to be married soon. In May, as far as I know. Xenia is now in Alaska.¹¹ We will want to live near you and Mrs. Weiss.

Please let me know where you will be. Otherwise I will feel that you have cast me aside, which I can’t believe.

I think I am progressing with the horn. My tongue, though, is very sluggish. And people begin to object to my practicing.

And now I reach a point where my respect and affection for you and Mrs. Weiss pass bounds, and I am afraid of seeming not sincere, but believe in my deep respect and friendship.

To Herr Jawlinski¹²

[ca. 1935] | 1207 Miramar, Los Angeles

Herr Jawlinski

Ich kann nicht Deutsch schreiben oder sprechen, aber ich bin sehr freudig, weil ich habe eines Ihnen Bilder gekauft. Jetzt ist es in mir.

Ich schreibe Musik. Sie sind mein Lehrer.

Ich will mehr schreiben aber ich kann nicht geben auf Deutsch alles was ich will.

Es war #116

To Mrs. Adolph Weiss

January 3, 1935 | 1207 Miramar, Los Angeles

My dear Mrs. Weiss:

I wish that you were here enjoying the very beautiful weather that we are having. The hills are all intensely green, and from my window I awake to look at snow-capped mountains. The air is very gentle and the sunlight is brilliant and warm. I hope that you are not angry with me for telling you about these things, because I don’t mean to be boasting of them; I only wish that you were enjoying them.

It has taken me a few days to get back into the swing of working, but I’m there now and enjoying writing exercises and working on my song. Mother says that I may buy a flute, but I am going to wait until Mr. Weiss arrives; he may have something to say about what kind, etc.

Mr. Buhlig is giving several concerts which I’m going to hear. A modern one with Copland, Scriabin, Busoni, Schoenberg, Chavez and Bartok; then a Bach program (two toccatas and the Goldberg Variations); three Beethoven Sonatas, 106, 110, 111, I think; and the last will be the Art of the Fugue. He is much better, and says, in fact, that he hasn’t felt better in at least ten years.

Don is staying with relatives in San Fernando, California. Henry left a few days ago for Menlo Park. We had an excellent trip across country. I was sorry that Don changed his mind about Santa Fe.

I am wishing with all my heart that this letter finds you well and not too burdened with the illness in Mr. Weiss’ family. And that the coming year will be an excellent one for you and Mr. Weiss.

Did you know that Bertha Knisely,¹³ the music critic who mentioned the Santa Barbara idea to Mr. Weiss, has given up her position and eloped with a painter to Spain?

Mother’s being on the newspaper makes it possible for her to get tickets for anything she wants to go to,¹⁴ so that I will be able to attend any concerts there are that I want to. I am going to go to the Philharmonic whether I like the programs or not, because I think it is very necessary to hear as much music as I can.

I am also enjoying the records Henry gave me. We have a phonograph, not a very good one, but it goes around. I find Mr. Weiss’s songs more and more beautiful.¹⁵

I know that you are probably very busy, but I should like to hear from you.

I have not tried to get in touch with the Schoenbergs but shall wait, as you asked me to, until Mr. Weiss arrives, unless, he is, by accident, at one of the concerts in Buhlig’s home.

To Pauline Schindler

January 11, 1935 | Los Angeles

Dearest Pauline:

Your letter came—your parenthesis—and I love it because I shall steer clear of all directions except a bee-line for you.

Life has been hectic and the sky beautifully cloud-filled, sunlight and then beautiful shower-baths. Palm-trees and acacias in bloom and all sorts of things I took for granted for too long. I feel bristling with spontaneity: I love you.

At last I heard some of the Kunst der Fuge. What can I say but that listening receives one into a new broad heaven, awakening and including, I feel where you have been. Nothing I have ever heard is at all similar. Oh, for a blindness to all else!

Buhlig is giving three recitals in his home Sundays: Jan. 20, 27 and Feb. 3. Beethoven, Bach, Modern (respectively). Subscriptions $2.50 or single admission $1.00. 8:30 p.m. He wanted me to tell you so that if people in Ojai coming down were interested they would know about it through you if you knew and told them. That keeps me from taking Weiss to Santa B. but I am coming to see you next week. The car has become a problem and I lose all spontaneity about asking for it, because it has to do with mother who needs it in her work.

I have been phoning people right and left and finally we have the returns of the concerts definitely up to $137.50. The idea was Calista’s in order to pay Buhlig’s railway fare.¹⁶ We won’t stop till we get to $240. It is exciting and I enjoy it because it is for Buhlig.

It is, of course, conclusively shown that I know nothing about modulation, but so much the better, because then I can go on working till I do. I hope very much that my work is not so bad that Weiss will give me up as a bad job.

I met Schoenberg and he is simplicity and genuineness itself. There was analysis of the Dance Suite hanging up on the wall like a mural.

Did I tell you that I met another teacher-to-be of mine tonight: Wendell Hoss,¹⁷ a friend of Weiss, who will teach me to play the French horn. I think it will be better than the flute. And I will stop smoking and join an orchestra.

I feel all the friction you have in reading this letter. What is an orchestra, you ask, or a French horn, or harmony, or collecting money for tickets? Nothing at all but a series of essential farces. Do they touch you? I think not.

To Pauline Schindler

January 18, 1935 | Location not indicated

Dearest,

There was a little open space the other day: I was walking and thinking of you in Ojai, an open space of country, and suddenly I knew what wildness was. I hissed and grunted and felt myself expanding with a big heart ’til for a moment I was out of my mind and only tremendously alive.

I did not know you were wild and intoxicating. And now I have only very present memories. Life has been short, has only begun. And I can see in the corner your eyes, never turned away. And your hair is some kind of a promise, I don’t know of what, perhaps that it will reach your shoulders and that I may bury myself in it.

Perhaps I am satisfied that you, whom I know are a fragment, you are entirely another’s. And yet, these days you are always with me.

It is late and I am tired and I love you and want to be with you.

I am sure there is something unexplainably and mysteriously sacred about the Valley, something including evil.

To Henry Cowell

[ca. 1935] | Location not indicated

Dear Henry,

Your card and you are too good to me. I cannot describe how much I feel towards you of warmth and love. I can feel myself losing all definition in sentimentality.

I have since writing to you before heard from Adolph and am in touch with him. I will be with him again as soon as he is settled.

I have a job now in scientific research which gives me $25.00 a week and takes my afternoons.¹⁸ It is very interesting work. I enjoy it. I have my horn lessons to pay for and a horn to buy.

I will also have a little money to begin operations and I shall begin more immediately the work for the Society.¹⁹ I am anxious to see Schönberg and get what cooperation he will give. Pro Musica is giving his III Quartett (Abas Quartett).²⁰ Oh, Henry, my intentions are the best. I use all the time, there never is enough. I accomplish very little.

I will send you exercises soon and also will send you my subscription to the music and records.

I want to be married soon. I don’t know why I tell you but it’s very important to me.

To Pauline Schindler

February 22, 1935 | Los Angeles

Dearest Pauline:

STRAVINSKI! … The evening was pure joy—and I think that this music is natural. There are no “ideas” in it. It is, you know it, pagan, physical. It is seeing life close and loving it so. There are no whirring magical mystifications. It is all clear and precisely a dance. It is not “frozen architecture.”

I heard one person say afterward: “Henceforth I shall not take music seriously but shall enjoy it twice as much.” I was furious and turned to him and said, Take it twice as seriously and enjoy it four times as much!

Throughout the “Eight Pieces” the audience had an ostinato of ecstatic laughter. And irrepressible applause, which was not in the least unacceptable.

I spoke with Kurt Reher afterwards, a fine cellist in the orchestra. He brought me back to the “Germans.” He said, It’s nothing but The Firebird. That is real.

The Firebird, yes, and I had forgotten that it existed. It is the beautiful born from the evil. It is as though one decided to have wings and fly, and nothing else had power but that. Infernal demands are nothing to deter.

This is now music which we have and which is accepted, which does not provoke anger, hysteria or any vulgar objection. And it is a static music which is itself and which does not prophecy or go forward in an adventure. It is not a speculation. It is the worship of the Golden Calf. Moses and God are far away. And we say yes to cutting them off!

I love you. Oh that I were with you.

To Adolph Weiss

[March 30, 1935?] | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Weiss:

You are probably now not touring any longer. Do you have definite plans for the future? I want very much to fit into them, if I may.

It seems to me like a maelstrom, here in Los Angeles. I am kept very busy, so that there is no rest. I have work for you to see. And I am anxious to go forward. The horn I love. I enjoy studying with Mr. Hoss very much. I fear that I am very slow but I am sure that he is teaching me excellently. It is the flexibility of the instrument that pleases me most.

Schoenberg is giving a class in analysis, the fee for which is quite small; and since I have a job now in scientific research for a company my father has started, I am able to attend this class. We are analyzing the 4th Symphony of Brahms, the Art of the Fugue, some of the Well-Tempered Clavichord, and the III String Quartet of Schoenberg. Although I am not really prepared for this class, I manage to keep my ears open and absorb what I can. There are about 40 people in the class, mostly teachers of music.

A great deal of Schoenberg’s music has recently been played: the Verklaerte Nacht, the III String Quartet (several times) and songs from the Book of the Hanging Gardens, also op. II. A large reception was given him by the Mailamm Society,²¹ a Jewish organization, last night. And it was a very sincere ovation. He gave a racial talk. He is beginning to be very much loved. His conducting, however, was mercilessly criticized. People found his tempos dull and uninteresting.

I would be able to send you some money now, since I have a job. I don’t know how long I will have it. But whatever I have is yours.

Henry has asked me to arrange a concert for him here of Japanese Shakuhachi playing by a friend of his, K. Tamada;²² I am doing this.

I feel isolated and cut-off, not having heard from you. I want very much to be with you again.

Please give my best regards to Mrs. Weiss. How is everyone? And believe me always,

Your devoted pupil

To Adolph Weiss

[May 1935] | Location not indicated

My dear Mr. Weiss:

Perhaps you are wondering why I have not answered your letter. I have certainly wanted to. But, following the suggestion you gave in your letter immediately before, I did my best to get “closer” to Schoenberg. He had, in between your two letters, asked me to come and see him. After making an appointment with him, I decided, since you considered it best, to ask him point blank if I might in my way continue my studies with him. He asked me many questions,—about my work with you and before studying with you. My answers showed him how very little I know,—particularly with regard to the literature of string quartets, symphonies, etc. He finally decided, however, to accept me in a class in counterpoint which had already started, suggesting that, with the aid of a George Tremblay,²³ who is studying composition with him, I might “make up” what I had missed. He felt that what I already know of harmony, through you, would be sufficient for the time being. His last words on this first occasion were: Now you must think of nothing but music: and must work from six to eight hours a day.

The result is that I work all the time. I am proud to say that I am already doing work which surpasses that of the two other pupils. This is merely because I examine the possibilities as completely as I can. It is amazing what can be done with a single cantus firmus. When I write harmony exercises again, they will, I hope, be much better than before. We have had, so far, four lessons with Schoenberg: 3-part counterpoint, first species, second species (a) with one moving voice and (b) with two moving voices, and third species (syncopation—which, by the way, is fourth species in most textbooks) with one voice only in syncopes. And with Tremblay I have completed the five species of 2-part writing, and am now working on mixed species.

Xenia is staying until the end of this month (May) in Alaska; it is her father’s wish. He is quite elderly and does not expect to see her again.²⁴

Mother tells me that the secret of her vitality is in not drinking and not smoking. The funny thing is that she does drink. I am the one who has decided not to drink. I decided that I am “drunk” all of the time, and that to add to it is not intelligent. Of course, since making this decision I drank a glass of beer, because I was thirsty, a second glass of beer, because I was eating some corned beef and cabbage and knew that beer would be just the thing. Another time I drank some blackberry wine because it tastes so good.

But Mother’s vitality is certainly amazing. For example: after spending a strenuous week in Del Monte, California (where a club convention recently took place), she returned home and worked the next night until five in the morning, slept three hours until eight, went to the office and stayed until six, and after all of that was looking as fresh and “raring to go” as a pampered racehorse. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate the analogy.

I was very much interested in your remarks about the violin sonata which you had just completed. I should like very much to see it. I would also like to have a copy of your piano sonata. How much would that cost? Couldn’t a copy be printed from that black and white one you have? If so, I would get someone here to work on it, with your permission. Also, could the songs be obtained in a similar manner? Please let me know about these things. We have, for instance, Calista Rogers who sings, very well, modern songs. She sings several songs from Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. We have an excellent string quartet, the Abas String Quartett; and they would certainly be willing to work on either the songs or a quartet. I know them all. They are the ones who performed Schoenberg’s 3rd S[tring]Q[uartet]. Schoenberg’s Suite in Old Style was played by the orchestra under Klemperer last week. It is very beautiful and does not sound “old” at all,—which, of course, it isn’t.

We are having now such beautiful weather that my inclination is to do nothing at all. If I were not so busy, I should just go outdoors and live like an animal. I shall be moving as soon as Xenia comes and we shall live where there is sunlight. At present I use electricity during the day just as though I were in New York.

Which reminds me that Schoenberg’s plans, at present, are, as far as I know, indefinite. Perhaps New York next fall.

Then I should have the great pleasure of seeing you soon again. Perhaps Xenia + I would come to Chatauqua. I hope she plays bridge. We could all play bridge together.

My father’s work is coming excellently. Both he and Mother often speak of you.

I shall write soon again because this is an incomplete letter and doesn’t have any “rumination” in it.

P.S. Very best regards to Mrs. Weiss. I get very lonely not seeing you both.

To Pauline Schindler

May 24, 1935 | Los Angeles

Pauline, dearest,

I love you always; it was in many ways puzzling to me that although you were in Los Angeles, we didn’t see each other. I have not before now had the time, literally, to write; so that you may infer that you were right, if you stayed away because of some feeling that I was “too occupied.” Buhlig said you said something of the sort. I had dinner with him the evening following your dinner; and it seemed strangely unnatural that we shouldn’t have been together.

Possibly I have not told you that Schoenberg teaches me counterpoint now. And I am very happy because my work seems to please him. Today he turned to the two other pupils and said: You see, I don’t even have to look at it (my exercises), I know they’re right. He is a teacher of great kindness and understanding and it is a rich comfort that he gives.

His recent Suite in Old Style was played Saturday and is a marvel. There is nothing old about it. Although it begins with an Overture (Prelude and Fugue) the whole “idea” is basically a new concept of Fugue. There are, i.e., no two relationships of subject and answer identical. His feeling for the variation of idea did not allow of the opposite nor of another “old” idea—that of vagueness. So that the episodes (which are usually built of the latter) are here the development of the prelude. It is fascinating because the prelude is largo and is forever interrupting the fugue allegro.

The work is convincing in every way and proves in a manner understandable to the most sluggish of ears the profundity of the prelude.

And now,—Xenia. All I know is that she will be here early in June; that there was a formal announcement (her sister’s idea) in order that “showers” might follow; and that I am, according to mother, as unprepared as though I were living on the streets (Xenia knows this and says she will accept even starvation with me “gracefully”).

I had a letter from Mr. Poland in which I was offered a position without pay which, unfortunately, I could not accept.

I saw the family doctor today, and he tells me spontaneously that he is amazed at my health which he has never known to be better. He means mentally. No frustrations, etc. He says, if it contines, I will get even fatter.

I ran into a lady who has a daughter in much the same condition as Mark. And she claims that although the injections are necessary that they alone will not do the thing, that diet is of supreme importance. She has taken the whole matter very scientifically. Vitamins. Would you like to get in touch with her? Yeast. A vegetable juicer.

To Adolph Weiss

[early summer, 1935] | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Weiss:

Your letter just arrived; it was very good of you to write. Somehow I am very sad that you are staying in New York. It is rarely that fine things come out of immense cities. Rather, it seems to me, reality is sucked in there and becomes unreal, meaningless.

In our association, although it was a short time, I came to feel very close to you. It is difficult to imagine a future for me which does not concern you.

With Schoenberg I have remained apart. Although in each one of the class sessions I have “gleaned” something extremely valuable, I have felt disturbed fundamentally by the mediocrity induced by the class members. Including myself, for it seems to me that I am dull at present. Last week Schoenberg asked me after the class if I would come to see him. Perhaps this would lead to working with him privately. But I hesitate to think so.

My direction is towards you. You have been so good to me that I cannot forget.

You have probably received another letter I wrote to you recently. I hereby state again that I will soon be married. This will mean a great deal.

Mr. Hoss is always the same, excellent. I just phoned him and he returns, or rather sends you best regards and good wishes from himself and Mrs. Hoss. John Cave,²⁵ a horn player, was visiting him. He is very much amused because of the near-identity of our names.

He says that he is very enthusiastic over my progress with the instrument. I have taken the beginnings slowly and I hope thoroughly. Now I must begin to “leap” forward.

Henry was down recently and said that he had written to you but had had no response.

I have not seen Dorothy and Grant. My friends who know them too, also do not see them. People seem to like Grant and his former wife, who is now dead, but nobody likes Dorothy. They criticize her inability to work with the dance; and, furthermore, criticize her as being a snob. This added to the distance to Redondo has deterred me from visiting them. Although when I met them with you I felt that Dorothy was fine. Generally I trust to first impressions.

My parents love you very much. My father has hopes of becoming wealthy and instituting every sort of thing for you that you would want. You would have only to whisper a wish and it would be amplified materially.

Have I made clear my position? I want to be with you working. You write to me that I should stick to Schoenberg. (I do not, by the way, consider myself a Schoenberg pupil; that designation is so cheap now that I am not interested in it; it is being bandied about by all those whose ears are vacant passageways for his words.) Synchronously, Schoenberg begins to show an interest in me. Whereas I feel that my study with you is unfinished. It obviously is. It is only the consciousness of a personal relationship which I am expressing.

I do feel that I must stay here until I am something of a horn player. That will be sooner, perhaps, than I had imagined. Within the year, Mr. Hoss says, I might be able to play in the Pasadena Orchestra.

I was building up a good discipline in New York, which in this climate has fallen somewhat to pieces. I accomplish a great deal, I think; but not as much as I could accomplish if I concentrated more. So far today I have accomplished my practising of the horn, about 2 hours; my scientific research work about 4 hours; and one undeveloped musical idea. I am often guilty of not thinking through to the end. I wish you would impart to me the secret of thinking completely; mother will then return a recipe for “tremendous vitality.”

A year’s longing, and this has taken time, has resulted in a favorable answer from Xenia. She is a marvelous creature. Her world is almost without limitation: for she includes, from her mother (an Eskimo), an animal, pre-historic, primitiveness; and from her father (a Russian priest), the rich and organic mysticism and instinctiveness of Russians; and of herself she has found our own American insistence upon being contemporary and intensely speculative of the future.

You will excuse my taking the liberty of writing such a long letter.

It will not be luck or hope when I see you again; it will be necessity. And I am looking forward to it!

To Mr. and Mrs. Adolph Weiss

[early August 1935] | 1207 Miramar, Los Angeles

My dear Mr. and Mrs. Weiss:

It was very fine, receiving your card from Chatauqua,²⁶ because I know that you are enjoying the country and the escape from the city. With regard, however, to the program announced on the card:—I had, the day before, been at the Hollywood Bowl and sat through a very uninteresting performance of the Tschaikowsky Sixth Symphony in order to hear Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Heifetz playing superbly. And these continual complaints that we, if I may include myself among musicians, are making, I was forced to make again. After hearing the Tschaikowsky once, which I believe everyone who has entered a symphony hall has, I see no necessity for hearing it again, since, by virtue of sequence upon sequence and repetition upon repetition, one is forced hearing it once to hear it scores of times. And when it is unenthusiastically given, one can only be, in counting up the number of sequences and multiplying that by the number of times he has been forced to hear the whole thing, arriving at a huge number. And the programs here at the Bowl are generally bad: I shall be startled if there is something I want to hear very much. In place of the Tschaikowsky, which was played, the Sibelius Fifth Symphony had been announced. I have not heard it, and should have enjoyed hearing it. But it was not played. I received your card too late to listen to the radio; but I should have turned it off after the Beethoven. Am I doing something wrong? I find, however, that sometimes my whole attitude changes, and anything that has been written as music brings from me love and respect that a human being was able to have that idea and to express it in music. The attitude of joyful acceptance of everything, drawing no lines, never thinking of comparisons, so that everything has its own stature. The least has a beauty, just as has the most. And then I can forget criticism and listen singly, which is the happiest way of listening. To show you what a muddle I am conscious of getting into:—This “happiest of listening” that I have just mentioned cannot, perhaps, compare with the happiness of critical listening. Not the aesthetic criticism, but the listening to relationships, etc. (no matter what they are, for they necessarily exist in everything, no matter how apparently chaotic), and then making a judgement as to how valuable such relationships are.

I have many things to tell you, and must tell them. My father will soon be in Pittsburgh. He will stay at the William Penn Hotel. It seems a very short distance from there to Chautauqua. He would be very glad to see you and Mrs. Weiss. I hope that if you remain at Chautauqua that all of you will get in touch. I think Dad should have some sort of a vacation and visiting you at Chautauqua would be excellent. He is making some arrangements with Westinghouse with regard to his new inventions. I have been doing extensive research work for his new company; and that is what has given me the financial possibility of being married (which latter, by the way, is marvelous²⁷). I will give Dad your address, before he leaves, which he is doing in an airplane this week. I have given you his. I certainly hope he sees you.

My study with Schoenberg is progressing steadily. We have reached four-part counterpoint, second species. He is very good to us, and takes great pains teaching us. His English has become very good. He is even able to be witty with the use of words, which represents a certain level of mastery. He is moving, I believe, into another house. And I understand that he has been engaged by the University here for the entire year. They promise to present many of his works.

What with the work I have been doing in counterpoint, and the research work in science, I have been very busy. Too busy to do justice to the horn and Mr. Hoss. This was the case before I was married, so that I feel being married has not accomplished what was already true. So that, as you will be sorry to hear, I am not studying the horn any longer. I learned a great deal about the instrument, for which I am grateful; and I have become a friend of Mr. Hoss, who is excellent. But doing things, I should like to do them well; and I had not the time. I had to make a choice: and the choice was obvious: to continue with Schoenberg and to support myself financially with the research work, which is not only money-making but fascinating, and often presents the same employment of mind that is presented in the study of music.

Xenia is an angel. We have been married now almost two months. It is always very beautiful. I look forward to her knowing you. For she will love you as I do and you will love her. Schoenberg mentioned the other day the necessity of constantly reviewing the work you have done. So that I think I shall begin teaching Xenia counterpoint, in that way making a review and also bringing us very close together.

I am going to write to you again shortly, ordering, if I may, one of your compositions. I have not decided which. Which would you want me to have? I can afford it, I think, now.

Mme. Scheyer²⁸ often speaks of you; I have loaned to her my copy of the recording of your songs.

August third we have a meeting of young composers, modern, of Los Angeles. I don’t know exactly what will happen. Wm. Grant Still will be there, and some other negro composers. They have asked me to play something, but I refused, for I am a student too much now.

This is what is bothering me most now: Xenia and I may be sent to Pittsburgh to continue this research work. This will be the case if the arrangements with Westinghouse are successful. I will then be separated from Schoenberg. I do not know what to do. Fortunately it would not be for long. If it did occur, however, there would be the possibility of seeing you and Mrs. Weiss.

I think of you very often,—and write so little because and only because I am never knowing where to find time enough to do even my “work.” Never am I able to just go to sleep and think not at all about waking up. I always have to make some artificial arrangement about getting up. But I am exceedingly happy.

To Virgil Thomson²⁹

March 15, 1939 | The Cornish School, Seattle

Dear Mr. Thomson,

Henry Cowell just gave me your address.

I remember in New York hearing some “Songs of Solomon”³⁰ for voice and percussion you had written. This letter is to ask whether you have any scores for percussion alone, and, if not, whether you would be interested in writing something for a percussion concert which we will give May 19th here in Seattle.³¹ We gave such a concert last December (it was very well-received), including works of Ray Green, Gerald Strang, William Russell and myself. For this next concert Johanna Beyer has written 3 movements for percussion.³² Henry Cowell has written a new work, Lou Harrison has completed his 5th Simfony.³³ We would like very much to present some work of yours. Rehearsals begin April 10th. We have 5 good players, and three not so good (they could play easy parts). We have 7 gongs, 3 cymbals, 4 tom-toms, two timpani without pedals, many wood blocks, and can improvise instruments from junk yards or construct things, given specifications of sorts, etc.

Please let me know about this as soon as convenient for you.

To Henry Cowell

[ca. July 1939] | Location not indicated

Dear Henry:

Thanks for the card telling about playing the records at the N[ew] S[chool].³⁴ I’m anxious to know whether you have the two little records of the First Construction with Roldan’s Ritmica on one side. I sent them with two scores to the Guggenheim and never received any word from them about receiving them. I deduced from one of your letters that you had this record of the Construction; but I can’t tell for sure. I’d appreciate your letting me know about this, because I wanted to be certain that the scores and records reached Moe.³⁵

Thank you for playing the record at the ns. I imagine from Johanna’s card that you played the three pieces for woodblocks and drums and bamboo sticks. I’m glad she liked them.

I’m enjoying my work on the Recreation Project.³⁶ The first few days weren’t so good because I didn’t have very much to do. But now I’m getting very busy organizing groups of children writing articles for recreation publications, giving demonstrations making instruments, etc. Made a Chinese woodblock of which I’m very proud and intend to make some Teponatzles (spelling?)³⁷ out of bakelite. This was Lou’s suggestion which I think is excellent. Will also make marimbula, and claves as soon as they have lathe. I work with Italian children at Telegraph Hill. Children in the S.F. Hospital. Negro children out on Divisadero and Chinese children in a Catholic Mission. The Negroes are astounding, and all I do is give them instruments and they play the most amazing rhythms, complex and marvelous. I never can believe my ears. And they leave the instruments and begin dancing just spontaneously. The only teaching I did was to suggest first a 4-measure phrase and then an 8-measure phrase within which they improvised. They were able to play cross rhythms and accents off the beat, grupettos across the bar, etc., and still stop cleanly at the end of either phrase length. They played on everything they could see in the room and asked me to bring new instruments next time.

The Mills class is going well now.³⁸

The Chinese children in the Catholic Mission don’t seem very imaginative, but they follow directions well. I’m hoping to get things around to the point of their having ideas of their own. The work they did before with percussion was a rhythm band that was directed by Sister —— who played the piano and the children just played bang bang over and over again. I was surprised to find something so unholy.

Please let me know, if you do know, whether my score + records reached the Gugg[enheim].

To Mr. and Mrs. John H. Ballinger

September 14, 1939 | Cornish School, Seattle

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Ballinger:

During the past year I presented, in Seattle (at the Cornish School), two concerts of modern American percussion music. The group of players which I direct is the only group of the kind in the country. The concerts here were of such importance musically that, while I was teaching at Berkeley this summer, I was invited to give a concert at Mills College, which I did. Since the establishing of this work, the number of composers writing percussion music has doubled; the scores are sent directly to me for performance with my group.

A few weeks ago I received a letter (from Miss Cornish) to the effect that many of the instruments which I had used last year would not be available this coming year. These instruments were Chinese gongs, cymbals, tomtoms and woodblocks belonging to Lora Deja (the German dancer who was formerly on the Cornish faculty). She has requested that the instruments be sent to New York.

In order to have the proper materials I have, heretofore, borrowed, constructed and invented instruments to supplement Miss Deja’s collection. It is not, however, possible to replace her instruments in any other way than buying them. So that, although I have invariably in the past acquired instruments at my own expense, it now becomes necessary, in continuing this work, to ask for sponsorship.

I can refer you to Charles Paige Wood and George McKay of the University’s Music School, to Dr. Richard Fuller of the Art Museum, who has kindly assisted me, as has Mrs. Thomas Stimson, and to Mr. Alfred Frankenstein, music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Among the composers who would be immediately indebted to you for performances are Jose Ardevol, Johanna Beyer, Franziska Boas, Henry Cowell, Ray Green, Lou Harrison, Amadeo Roldan, William Russell, Gerald Strang, Edgar Varese, and myself.

Since this work is new and experimental I may take the liberty of describing it as an exploration of sound and rhythm. It will, I believe, be thought of in the future as a transition from the restricted music of the past to the unlimited electronic music of the future.

In replacing the instruments taken by Miss Deja, the initial expense would be $150.00, toward which Dr. Fuller and Mrs. Stimson have each contributed $25.00. In order to avoid any further interruption of this work, it has been agreed upon by the Cornish School that these instruments when acquired shall belong to me, as I am the only one in the country active in this field. For this reason, if you see fit to sponsor this work, please make checks payable to me, care of the Cornish School, Roy at Harvard North, as I am on the School’s faculty.

In these uncertain days I feel it is exceedingly important to make music wherever it is yet possible. We shall, this coming year, present as many concerts as possible, and shall also take the group on tour to the University of Idaho, Reed College in Portland, and other cultural centers.

To Charles Ives³⁹

[1939] | The Cornish School, Seattle

I am enclosing some programs of percussion music which we have given. Do you have any scores which use mostly percussion? Or would you be interested in writing a score for percussion? I have at present 11 players; our next program will include works by Roldan, Cowell, Harrison, Russell (his Fugue) and Beyer. Also Couper. It would be very fine indeed if could we perform some of your work here.

To Archie N. Jones

November 20, 1939 | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Jones:

I have your letter of last spring telling of your interest in presenting one of our percussion concerts in Moscow.⁴⁰ I am at present planning a tour to take place in January. We are to be in Walla Walla, Whitman College, Thursday, January 11th, and in Portland, Reed College, Saturday, January 13th. Because of the fact that I am arranging to take the group on one tour, it is possible to offer a reduced fee of $75.00 for each concert. If the University could arrange to have the concert anytime Friday the 12th between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., it would be possible for us to offer the same reduced fee.

This summer I gave a very successful concert at Mills College, under the auspices of the Bennington School of the Dance. The program we are offering now would be similar to the one given there. It would use 4 players and about 70 instruments. The players, with the exception of my wife, are all members of the Cornish Faculty. We would present a varied program of works by Gerald Strang, William Russell, Henry Cowell, Franziska Boas, J. M. Beyer, Mildred Couper, Lou Harrison and myself.

I look forward to your reply, and hope that it will be possible for the University to schedule our group.

To Peter Yates⁴¹

January 13, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Peter:

You are very good not to be angry about this article business; I appreciate it very much. I also appreciate it that your interest in the work is still alive. I have been doing some research now and then to make the article as authoritative as I can, exact in details, etc. But every time I write it or rather start to write it I know that I’m not a writer. In other words, I’m having great trouble trying to put what I want to say into words. How soon must you have it? Naturally I’ll get it out as fast as I can, but when is the deadline? Maybe I am disconcerted by all the trouble I’m seeing trying to get established with an income. Looks now as though I may get a job in recreation work making an application of the percussion work to that field. Gebrauchsmusik. Pretty near to what you want me to write. True? If so, that is if I get the job, there will be a flood of easy percussion music written for things that exist in the everyday world all around us.

To Peter Yates

Thursday [1940] | Location not indicated

Dear Peter:

Just to let you know that I am busy on some music for you. So far it has the title Living Room Music.⁴² Requires 4 players who play on whatever is around and who speak in some movements. Speaking sections would be better if 8 people double up on parts. I have finished first 2 movements and there are to be 3 more. I have taken the liberty of inviting Lou Harrison to write some music of this type too.⁴³ Also Henry Cowell. I am testing the pieces out with my group here and will therefore be able to give rather detailed advice about performance.

To Henry Cowell

August 8, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Henry:

Thanx for the card. I am sorry that I didn’t let you know about using the quotation for the program. I had used it on a program in Seattle also. It comes from one of your letters to me, and I am glad that you seem to agree with it. It is very quotable and straight-forward. I am glad to hear that Grainger would like to send some scores for percussion.⁴⁴ The address above would be the correct one.

And now for the story about the “center of experimental music.” The first thing I spoke about to Dr. Cassidy, early this summer, was to present the idea as you had suggested it to me. Then began the trouble with the strike, getting players, rehearsals, etc. In the midst of this I presented the idea to Marian Van Tuyl.⁴⁵ Both were interested. But busy. I had also before the summer session spoken to Russell and to Lou about it.⁴⁶ Russell is very worried about his future, and said that he would like to be in the “center,” but because of the necessity to get a job would apply everywhere for jobs, which he is doing. Lou said that he wanted to leave Mills, since he does not get on well with Marian Van Tuyl, and since he wanted very much to work with Lester Horton.⁴⁷ However, when I told Lou that I had brought the matter up with Dr. Cassidy, he said that he might stay on at Mills, providing they raised his salary. I made it clear throughout that I was not asking for Lou’s position, that should he remain at Mills as his presence would strengthen the work of the “center” rather make it troublesome. This was the state of affairs when work descended on everybody and made other things remote. In the course of the percussion rehearsals and dance rehearsals, I found it somewhat difficult to work with Lou and with Russell for different reasons: nothing that caused great troubles, but a general lack of efficiency which arises from a democratic set-up. Russell is not a very good player which makes rehearsals with him difficult. I also feel that his present preoccupation with hot jazz disconnected from his own composition has not been good for him as a composer. I know that these personal difficulties will seem silly to you, but in dealing with a group of people, the compatibility of the entire group is very important in order to get things accomplished quickly and easily. For this reason I believe that in establishing a “center” there should be one director rather than three, that there should be as many “centers” as there are directors.

The actual concert was made more difficult and yet more interesting to rehearse through the experiments in moving lights and varieties of levels which Gordon Webber of the School of Design made.⁴⁸

The concert was well-received, and the publicity we received welcome and I think good. I was particularly glad to have been able to present the Ardevol Suite. In the performance the first two movements were played excellently. Unfortunately the third, the Fugue, went completely wrong. I was very sorry, but one cannot change that. The rest of the concert was played well, and three encores were given.

Then came the composing for the dance concerts and the rehearsals.

Finally, when I had a chance to breathe I brought the matter of the “center” up again with Dr. Cassidy. She arranged an interview with Marian (who is very anxious that I should stay at Mills) and with Dr. Reinhardt⁴⁹ and the dean of the faculty, Dr. Rusk. At that meeting I presented an outline of the project, which I am enclosing, a list of the achievements in the field so far plus scores and a portfolio of letters. Dr. Reinhardt was very interested in the project and particularly in the development of electronic music. She has written letters to RCA, Bell, and General Electric. And suggested letters to Guggenheim and Carnegie Corp. which I wrote. She arranged a second meeting with Luther Marchand in order to get his OK to the project, which he gave. So this is how it stands now.

Mills wants the “center” of experimental music but cannot pay for it. They say, for instance, that even though they gave only board and room to six people, that that has to be paid for by someone. Dr. Reinhardt has given me a letter stating their interest in the work to be done, their desire to have it at Mills, and their lack of funds. We are hoping that one of the companies above or corporations or some individuals will support the project.

Have you any suggestions? If support for the project is obtained, would it be possible for me to use the Rhythmicon⁵⁰ which you mentioned is at Stanford? I would continue to arrange percussion concerts with the gradual introduction of whatever is practical and possible in the field of electronic music. I would like to have a laboratory donated by one of the big companies mentioned above. I would need the cooperation of a scientist. In the neighborhood of Mills there is an experimentally minded radio technician, who helped in the last concert with the amplification of the marimbula.

Moholy-Nagy also wants the project in Chicago in connection with the School of Design,⁵¹ also has no funds. Xenia is busy translating Russolo’s Art of Noise, published by the Italian Futurists in Italy in 1916. Their instruments were apparently mechanical, rotating bodies, having sliding ranges of about two octaves. I am at present making a library research of what has been accomplished in the field of electronic music.

I would deeply appreciate any suggestions that you may have about any aspect of this work.

I am glad that, as you say, things are opening up. Please write to me soon, and let me know what your ideas are.

To Henry Cowell

August 16, 1940 | Location not indicated

Dear Henry:

Thanks for your letter and all the fine suggestions. Things are going ahead. I am to have an interview with an executive engineer of the research dept. of General Electric. My father has invented a new instrument which may be capable of marvels. An engineer in the Federal Radio Co. here was so interested that he has gone ahead on its construction at his own expense so that he can tell his grandchildren about it. The Federal Radio is a subsidiary of the Conn Instruments, and this engineer believes that the Conn Instr. Co. might be interested in supporting the project at Mills. I cannot wait to hear the instrument. The first one will be simple, but should be capable of varying the wave-form, frequency, amplitude and to do some very interesting things with durations from my father’s description of it. I shall write to Lucille Rosen right away.⁵² I hope that she will loan us the theremin instruments. Varese is very interested and hopes the project goes through.⁵³ He would like to be at Mills say two months out of each year, which I shall attempt to make a part of the plans. I shall send you scores for consideration for N.M. as soon as I return to S.F. where they are. I shall see Bender at that time too.

Reply from Carnegie Corp. not promising. Keppel says that they are faced with a decreased budget.

Guggenheim sent me ordinary blanks for fellowship application which doesn’t seem to me to apply in this situation where several people will be involved.

I have also written to Rockefeller Foundation, Whitney Found[ation]. Am making as many contacts with individuals as I can.

Conversations with Varese were very exciting.

As soon as the thing becomes settled, shall write possibilities of instruments to you. One of the most important things will be to have music to play on these new instruments. Concerts will also present percussion music. Am enclosing list of percussion instruments.*

I am going to try to get G.E. to donate amplifiers, microphones, loudspeakers, etc. in abundance. I am certain that this project will take place, because the idea is so good and so necessary.

JOHN CAGE

JULY 8, 1940

LIST OF PERCUSSION INSTRUMENTS

1 snare drum	8 pr. snare sticks
8 bass drums	5 misc. snare sticks
5 Chinese tom toms (black)	1 bass drum beater
5 Chinese tom toms (small painted)	2 pr. tymp. sticks (good)
1 Japanese Noh drum	1 pr. tymp. sticks (bamboo)
8 wood blocks	3 odd tymp. sticks
6 dragons’ mouths	8 pr. hard felt beaters
1 tortoise shell	3 wire brushes
1 pr. bones	1 pr. cymbal beaters
	3 pr. metal beaters
1 pr. bongos	3 gong beaters
1 quijadas	3 Chinese cloth beaters
1 guiro	1 odd hard felt beater (bamboo)
1 marimbula	1 reg. triangle beater
4 pr. claves	3 metal sticks
	1 leather beater
4 pr. maracas	1 pr. hard rubber beaters (black)
1 Indo-Chinese rattle	1 " " " " (gray-green)
1 Indian rattle	2 " " " " (red)
1 sistrum	2 odd " " "
1 tambourine	1 tam tam beater
	7 misc. wooden beaters
2 pr. finger cymbals	3 leather beaters (temple gongs)
1 pr. crash cymbals	3 small beaters (cup gongs)
1 Zildjian cymbal (Turkish)	9 chopsticks (not marked)
4 Chinese cymbals	1 saw blade
1 pr. jazz cymbals	1 hand saw
	3 metal cylinders
5 gongs	2 forks
1 tam tam	1 slap stick
1 Chinese painted gong	1 bass drum foot pedal
	1 metronome
3 Temple gongs with stands	1 snare stand (2 pieces)
5 Japanese cup gongs with stands	1 jazz cymbal holder
4 rice bowls	3 standards
1 wind bell	1 keyboard-length board (felt)
	6 curtains
1 string of oxen bells (13 bells)	°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
1 set orchestral bells	4 triangles
8 cowbells (Sargent)	3 brake drums
4 cowbells (old)	8 strap irons
1 dinner bell	1 metal pipe
5 Mexican clay bells	3 metal discs
1 trolling bell	10 thunder sheets
1 small turkey bell	1 wash tub
1 small Chinese bell (bronze)	1 lion’s roar
4 slide whistles	1 xylophone
3 penny whistles	misc. bottles + toy instr.
3 peedle pipes
1 conch shell
1 Polish whistle
Resin + cloth
3 metal ash trays	1 egg beater

To Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge⁵⁴

September 6, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Mrs. Coolidge:

I am writing to you against the expressed wish of Dr. Reinhardt of Mills College. She believes that it would be untactful for me to approach you with regard to my desire to establish a center of experimental music, because she has already mentioned my desire to you, and has been unable to awaken your interest in it. However, I believe so deeply in the importance of the work which I hope to do, that I am making every attempt towards its realization; therefore, I trust you will understand my reason for writing to you.

The proposed center of experimental music would be principally concerned with the composition and performance of percussion, electrical and synthetic music. The history of this music includes the work of Luigi Russolo,⁵⁵ Edgar Varese, and the many composers, including myself, whose works have been presented on the nine programs of percussion music which I have already given. Luigi Russolo, as you probably know, developed approximately twenty “noise-tuners”; these instruments were of a mechanical nature. He came to the conclusion that his work would be best continued with electrical instruments, which, through lack of funds, he was unable to obtain. According to Varese, Russolo is at present in Italy, poor and discouraged. Edgar Varese has told me that he himself has tried, during the past twenty years, to obtain cooperation in the development of electrical music to no avail.

In order to make my percussion concerts possible, I assembled some 150 instruments of great variety and unusual character. I collected about thirty scores from such composers as Amadeo Roldan, Jose Ardevol, Lou Harrison, J. M. Beyer, William Russell, and Henry Cowell. The majority of these scores have been copied for inclusion in the Edwin Fleischer Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. I have become convinced that only through the use of electrical means, or like means, may important advances in the exploration of sound be made. I therefor proposed to Dr. Reinhardt the establishing of a center of experimental music at Mills College. I also proposed this center to L. Moholy-Nagy of the School of Design in Chicago. Both realize the worth of this project, but in each case it is necessary to find outside support. In obtaining the sympathy of Mills College and of the School of Design, I have met with more cooperation than has been accorded any like endeavors in the past.

The establishing of this project would constitute a two-fold stimulus: first, to inventors and acousticians; second, to composers and musicians. The former could contribute instruments for which there is no commercial demand today. The latter would be presented with an ever-unfolding field of sound. Ultimately the entire field of sound would be available for musical purposes. And the instruments which bring about this availability will have a commercial value in that they will make possible not only the performance of any music of the past but also any music of the future.

The beginnings would be modest. I would have the use of my large collection of percussion instruments, Henry Cowell’s “Rhythmicon,” a collection of instruments invented by Leon Theremin, a thunderscreen developed by Harold Burris-Meyer of the Stevens Institute of Technology,⁵⁶ instruments which my father has recently designed for the variation of the overtone structure of a tone, and any others which might be available. Composers throughout the country would be notified of the possibilities of this new orchestra and invited to present scores for performance. Performances would be given immediately. I am fortunate in having a nucleus of four players, all of whom are devoted to these new possibilities in music.

This letter is already long and inadequate. I hope that it will serve to interest you in the work which I hope to do.

To George Antheil⁵⁷

September 17, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Mr. Antheil:

Following the percussion concert at Mills College last July, I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Antheil. I shall be in Los Angeles during October and should like to see you then. I would appreciate your writing to me and letting me know how to get in touch with you.

In the meantime I am doing everything I can to establish a “center of experimental music.” The purpose of this center will be to do research, composition and performance in the field of sounds and rhythms not used in the symphony orchestra; the ultimate purpose will be the use of electrical instruments which will make available the entire desirable field of sound. Recently my father, who is an inventor, designed an instrument which should give rich possibilities in the variation of the overtone structure of a tone. This instrument will be constructed soon. I also have recordings of two of the percussion concerts; I think you would enjoy hearing them.

Both Mills College and the School of Design in Chicago hope that I can find support for the center so that it may be established either at Mills or in Chicago. If you have any suggestions that might lead to its support, I would appreciate your letting me know about them.

To Henry Cowell

October 3, 1940 | 1207 Miramar Street, Los Angeles

Dear Henry:

I am back in Los Angeles now, making further attempts to get the center established. My address will be the one above now. In San Francisco I saw Diego Rivera,⁵⁸ who heard the records of the percussion and was very enthusiastic. He is seeing people and has referred me to [Charlie] Chaplin and to Edsel Ford and Stokowski.⁵⁹ He believes that a letter from Stokowski to Ford and a letter from me mentioning Rivera’s interest would do the trick. I saw Bender who was very kind but very involved in refugees. Mrs. Henry Swift is a well-to-do artist in the Bauhaus way and should be a member of the N.M.S. She doesn’t like old music. I also saw an executive engineer of the General Electric who was interested but on account of an agreement made between Bell, GE and RCA, RCA is the only one who could be active in the field of music. Their letter to me states that they do not believe the development I want to make is practical. Frankenstein says for me to keep on trying to get the work established even though this is a bad time. He is very enthusiastic too. Ashley Pettis was no help. Mrs. Charles Felton (who should also be a member of NMS) ## 3311 Pacific, S[an] F[ranscisco], was very interested but said that I could get no help from San Francisco women because they are too conservative; she is a friend of Varese and tried successfully to raise 150 dollars for a performance of Offrandes, but only because there were other numbers on the program which everybody knew. Mrs. Henry Swift’s address is 148 Tunnel Road, Berkeley. Down here I have many new people to see. I had a letter from Carl E. Seashore at the University of Iowa, which is very good.⁶⁰ It practically invites me to come to Iowa, but is a little vague about whether or not they would support the work. I am replying to that letter today and hope very much that it works out because they have a good laboratory and sound engineers and the atmosphere is definitely one of research.

Arthur Cohn wrote and wants more scores for the Fleischer Collection in Philadelphia,⁶¹ because a supplement of their catalogue is coming out and they want to include more works for percussion. Unfortunately, the only scores which I have prepared for sending to them are among those that I sent to you. Therefor I am writing to him to let him know that you have them; he will write to you if he wants them and I will leave the matter in your hands. When sending, if you do, scores to him, they are to be sent collect at his expense and insured. The particular ones that he now already has are the following:

HARRISON	5th Simfony Canticle
RUSSELL	Studies in Cuban Rhythms
CAGE	Second Construction

Thank you for taking care of this for me; by the way, do you think any of the scores may be published in New Music? I have never had a reply from Lucie Rosen; I wrote to her a long time ago. Do you know anything further about her—where she is? I have also not heard from the Columbia Broadcasting which you mentioned I might hear from. How are you getting along? I saw Lou. He has a fine new studio in SF and is writing continuously. Have you seen Varese? I hope something fine happens for him in New York.

To Bland L. Stradley⁶²

December 14, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Dr. Stradley:

I am writing to propose the establishing of a center of experimental music at Ohio State University.

As a composer and member of the faculties of the Cornish School of Music in Seattle and of the summer session, Mills College, 1940, I have for some time been active in the field of experimental music. I have presented nine concerts of percussion music, using over 150 percussion instruments which I have collected. The last concert, given at Mills College, was reviewed in the weekly news magazine Time, July 29, 1940.

Before I began the presentation of complete percussion concerts, there had been sporadic performances of Edgar Varese’s Ionization and of William Russell’s Fugue for eight percussion instruments and the latter’s Three Dance Movements. However, at the time (December 1938) that I gave my first percussion concert, I advised many composers throughout the country of the presence at the Cornish School in Seattle of players, instruments and interest in this new musical field. The response was very encouraging, and the number of scores for percussion has grown from about three in 1934 to about fifty in 1940. I have at present thirty scores from which to choose for performances. This number is increasing continually. The majority of the scores have been copied for inclusion in the Edwin Fleischer Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. I now propose to establish a center of experimental music, the purpose of which would be to continue the work with percussion instruments and to do further research, composition and performance in those fields of sound and rhythm not yet explored. The ultimate goal of such a project would be the use of electrical, mechanical, film and like means for the production of any desired frequency in any desired duration, aplitude and overtone structure. I would regularly advise composers throughout the country of the new materials available and invite them to contribute scores for performance.

American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the cooperation of scientists with a real appreciation of music, and composers with an understanding and appreciation of sience. That is the combination I am endeavoring to bring about.

In the event that this work might be established at Ohio State University, I shall be glad to provide you with many references, my qualifications, and details concerning my plans for work.

To Peter Yates

December 14, 1940 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Peter:

[following paragraph crossed out] I appreciate your interest in my work and the trouble you have taken to write the enclosed article. For many reasons, however, I am certain the publishing of this article would not serve either your or my best interests. People are accustomed to saying that anything printed about anything is “good publicity”; such a point of view doesn’t interest me. I am anxious that the article you publish be accurate as to facts and present some true and sensible critical evaluation of the work in percussion and its objectives. I have not really delayed answering your note; I have instead written several letters to you, each of which attempted to point out the errors in your article. I have decided, instead, that it would be better for you to write a new article entirely; and that I could best help you by giving a brief statement about facts and objectives.

Luigi Russolo between 1913 and 1925 gave concerts, constructed 23 “noise-tuners,” published The Art of Noise. (See Slonimsky’s Music Since 1900 for the first chapter in his book.⁶³) Varese introduced Russolo at the latter’s concert in Paris in the ’20’s. Varese criticized his work as being too concerned with the imitation of natural and city sounds. Russolo was a painter, not a composer. His three compositions were called “Spirals of Noise.” **Dining on the Hotel Terrace; Awakening of a City; Assembling of Automobiles and Aeroplanes.

Gradually more and more importance is given to the percussion section in so-called modern symphonic works, e.g., works by Stravinsky and others, finally resulting in such works as Milhaud’s Oresteia⁶⁴ with one entire section for choric speech and percussion, and his opera, Cristophe Colomb, which contains many sections for speech and percussion. Not until 1931 did the logical outcome of this activity take place: Varese’s Ionization, for percussion alone, which differs in intent from Russolo’s work, being in no way an imitation of natural or city sounds, but being instead an expressive organization of sound as opposed to tone. With this work Varese announced the new disagreement: between sound and tone. Musical disagreement had previously been between consonance and dissonance.

Neither Varese’s work nor Russolo’s work had been concerned with a revival of primitive instruments. Russolo was a definite result of an interest in the machine. He desired to carry his work forward with the aid of electrical means. This required financial support which he was unable to obtain. An interest in the possibilities the machine offers was shown by other composers such as George Antheil who wrote for many player-pianos [margin note added: “direct stamping on the perforated rolls”], and by Ernst Toch,⁶⁵ who wrote for speech to be recorded nine times as fast as spoken. [Nikolai] Lopatnikoff, a pupil of Toch, also made experiments with music for records. [margin note added: “Also Hindemith.”] My Imaginary Landscape written for percussion and records of constant and variable frequency lies in this class of music dependent on the machine for performance.

Some composers, interested in folk and primitive and oriental music, also used percussion instruments. These were Bartok, Chavez and perhaps others. [Henry] Eichheim. Maybe Cowell. This getting back to the earth business is quite different from either Varese’s work or Russolo’s work.

[margin note added: “And is not so much ‘getting back to the earth’ as it is ‘getting into the books’—musicology.”]

As Russolo had already suggested, there were many possibilities offered by the use of electricity. Inventors had been inventing electrical musical instruments: Theremin, Trautwein. Hindemith wrote music for the Trautonium,⁶⁶ which could as well have been played on regular symphonic instruments. Thereminists, although theoretically interested in new music for the Theremin, showed a preference for displaying their virtuosity and presented programs made up from classic music ending with the modern French school. [margin note added: “They are quite pleased with the mysterious, sensational way of playing the instrument (Look, Mama, no hands!), and thus have little time [illegible] what they’re playing.”] However, composers and critics soon saw that the new electrical instruments had one thing in common with the percussion and mechanical work and that was a common interest in exploring the field of sound and rhythm, bringing into availability new musical materials. An example of this realization is Stokowski’s article in the journal of the Acoustical Society.⁶⁷ The goal began to be clear: an instrument which would make the entire field of sound available for musical purposes: any desirable frequency, amplitude, overtone structure and duration.

It can be seen that radio and film work to produce sound effects is a commercial exploitation of the field that interested Russolo. Only difference is that radio and film companies use the materials representatively, and Russolo wanted to organize them for “Futurist Noise.” Mills in his book, A Fugue in Cycles and Bels,⁶⁸ suggests that through the acquisition of a library of templates, i.e., film library, the most practical exploration of sound may be made. Douglas Schearer, MGM Sound Engineer, agrees. I believe that film will make noise available for musical purposes.

Russolo’s work is perhaps the only example of what you call in your article “a revolutionary reaction on the part of Art against itself.” He had, however, a more positive side too. That was his awareness of the importance of the machine and of electricity.

Do I make it clear that none of these workers were concerned with either prettiness or ugliness? Neither were they concerned with the Science of Harmony. Some of them were concerned with deeper meaning. Varese surely was. There’s a lot of deeper meaning in just plain experimentation. None of them considered the raw materials they used as music; they did consider what they made out of the materials music, however. Lots of people, hearing this music, liked it, even considered some of it pretty. See articles in Modern Music,⁶⁹ or letters I’ve received. None of the workers “proudly declared it had no meaning at all.” Compositions reheard gather meaning like stones gather moss. None of the workers moved out into the sunshine or got out on limbs. All of them worked hard, against almost overwhelming odds, worked honestly. I don’t know of any examples of dishonest work in this field.

I was unaware of the background I have outlined when I began my work in this field. I did not know about any of the above accomplishments except those of Varese in his Ionization. I had studied harmony with Weiss without liking it or feeling any natural inclination to use it. I had written a lot of dissonant linear music. I then studied counterpoint, form and analysis with Schoenberg. I saw the New Music publication of Percussion Music, heard Schoenberg call it nonsense, doubted whether it was nonsense. I saw some abstract films made by Oscar Fischinger,⁷⁰ talked with him, and began the writing of my first Quartet for Percussion. I organized the composition on a rhythmic basis, indicating no instruments. Friends helped me perform it on kitchen utensils, pieces of wood, tire rims, brake drums, etc. I was unaware at the time that I was doing what many negro street musicians in New Orleans had done. I was sharing points of view of Schoenberg and hot jazz combined. I gave private performances of the results and everyone encouraged going ahead. People said, Wonderful, etc. I rationalized the whole thing with reference to the overtone series, that is, I said our ears are in one of the high octaves where we are able to compose + hear music without reference to a fundamental tone underlying the entire composition. We are no longer pedestrian, but can fly piloted by other means of control than the old harmonic ones. I defined music for myself as Organized Sound. And I still define it that way.

In order to make a living I worked with dancers, made accompaniments for their choreography. I also made experiments, both in Los Angeles and Seattle later in the amplification of small sounds, found that delicate differences of amplitude were brought about through the use of electrical amplification, and that marvelous experiences in the field of new timbres existed all about us: cellophane crumpled in front of a microphone and unlimited other possibilities.

I found in Seattle, and have ever since, that dancers want to avoid any oriental references that they think percussion brings with it. Most of them are afraid of rhythmic complexities, or even unusual simple rhythmic combinations. It was therefor necessary to leave the field of dance accompaniment for the presentation of serious work in the field of experimental music. I presented on December 9, 1938, a concert of percussion music in Seattle, the first complete concert of this kind in America. It presented my own compositions and some of those printed in the New Music Edition. It was received with great enthusiasm and lots of people asked for another concert and many volunteered to play. I wrote to composers, told them about our having instruments, players, interest, invited the contribution of scores. In this way the literature of percussion music grew from three or four compositions in 1934 to about 50 at the present time. It became clear to me that although all of the compositions I received were different that they had one thing in common: the desire to explore sound and rhythm, and to organize the results of the exploration. One composer sent compositions which were superficial; I returned them unhesitatingly. For the others and for myself, notation was never the problem you make it in your article. We were definitely able to notate what we wanted played. I changed in my own work to a very clear indication of instruments, for now I had instruments and wrote for particular ones. Russell’s work was never hot jazz, because hot jazz is improvised and Russell’s work was composed. His ideas were always musical and exciting. I continued giving concerts and the interest continued to grow. I gave a concert at Mills in the summer of 1939 under the auspices of the Bennington School.⁷¹ For this reason, in their first letter to me, Mills College asked for a second percussion concert. In no sense did they “let me show what I could do.” They knew what I could do and liked it. I found myself last summer in an excellent environment with the Bauhaus people. New materials, cooperation with technological advances. I had meanwhile become aware of the background of my work and had made two compositions using mechanical possibilities, and was interested to establish a center of experimental music which would continue the work done with percussion instruments and add the use of mechanical and electrical means for further exploration of the field of sound and rhythm. Function: research, composition, performance. Mills College did not put me off when I suggested this center to them. Dr. Reinhardt on the contrary gave me assurance of the College’s readiness to cooperate with me providing I found the necessary support. This is usual in the case of new departments in a college. Moholy-Nagy begged me to come to Chicago. Funds also necessary. In looking for support, I made many new contacts, learned a lot. For one thing became acquainted with new technological advances, including the possibilities of film. Began to think of synthetic music, that is, music made through the use of film and film editing, enabling a composer to compose directly without the use of any musical instruments. This field is only one of the fields which interests me, and could be used in combination with other mechanical and electrical means.

I would prefer to omit the sob-stuff from the article. It has no place. If you want to make people cry, talk about Russolo who is poor and discouraged in Italy. Varese is pretty sad too.

The trouble with the big companies is not that they are making things hard for me, but that in many instances they exploit new materials for commercial purposes. Solovox.⁷² But after all they want to play too, and this is a free country.

Burton Perry is a sound engineer who didn’t put me off. He just doesn’t have funds either.

Please try a new article. Perhaps this letter should go on to something else, but it’s getting awfully Xmassy around here and I can’t concentrate any longer.

P.S. This letter gives you an historical background and emphasizes the only point all percussion composers have in common: desire to organize results of an exploration of sound and rhythm made through the use of percussion, mechanical, electrical, and film means. That’s the only thing they have in common. Their aesthetic points of view differ.

To Edgard Varèse

January 3, 1941 | 228 17th Avenue, San Francisco

Dear Mr. Varese,

I’ve read your article, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,”⁷³ which was published in the Commonweal. I think it’s the best and most exciting article about music that I’ve ever read. I hope that your work is established in some laboratory. It certainly should be. The general lack of audacity, desire to explore, on the part of heads of companies having laboratories is increasingly ununderstandable.

I have not yet had any actual success in my attempts to establish a center of experimental music. Several institutions are interested but don’t seem to have any funds. They complain too of having no background for something so new, which is silly, because they are surrounded by this background.

I spoke with John Steinbeck about your working with him.⁷⁴ It seems that there was some misunderstanding between you. He was asked to plan some radio program, and had the idea of your making a sound-background for a reading of the Bill of Rights. However, I doubt very much whether he has a real appreciation of music of contemporary spirit. At any rate, I gave him your present address.

I am to write “music” for an educational film, 16 m.m., concerning the modern dance. I would like to do it directly with film, without instruments; so far, the expense of such work seems to be prohibitive. I hope I can find some way to avoid excessive expense and really do it.

I hope that you have a good new year and my regards to Mrs. Varese.

To Doris Dennison and Margaret [Jansen]⁷⁵

September 8 [1941] | 323 E. Cermak Road, Chicago ⁷⁶

Dear Doris and Margaret:

We have been very busy “nesting” and still have a good deal to do: painting, making furniture, etc. Gretchen and Alex are helping us remodel a large room which is in their building. We rent it for $5.00 a month, but when we finish it will be one of the most beautiful places in the world. The walls and ceiling are covered with burlap. Bamboo mats around the bed on the wall. Bamboo blinds. Furniture is painted white except for top surfaces and panels which are natural wood varnished. Woodwork off white and floor blue. All the furniture is modern and everything is easy to clean because as we were warned Chicago is filthy. Open windows produce soot. Whole piles of dust form without your knowing how. We have about 3 more days of work before we are finished cleaning and building and painting.

I have a job! At the University of Chicago as Kay Manning’s composer-accompanist. She is from the Humphrey-W. Group.⁷⁷ Also, of course, the Bauhaus work which will be as exciting as I can make it. In the next day or so I will see someone at Bell and Howell, the sound on film place (which has its headquarters and lab in Chicago) and try to wrangle equipment for experimental purposes from them. If I succeed, it will make this move really important.

In the course of time, I will get or try to get other jobs and then offer you the ones you want if you will come here too. Although the place is really a real Hell. The weather is exciting in that it gets unbearably hot and muggy and then does what you want it to do and knows it must do: lightning, thunder, and downpour of rain. Even Xenia is excited and happy when there is proof that electricity and rain are coming.

I have a beautiful desk to write music on.

I like the record very much, but I thought that Lou [Harrison]’s remarks were pussyfooting around the bush. His work is no more in sonata form than I am. The important thing is that percussion must be heard with excitement and not as though it were the same old stuff.

We were very depressed at first, because Chicago is the Ugly City. But we are making our corner of it so beautiful and I will be able to do good work here, that now we feel more normal. Gretchen and Alex are the best of friends.⁷⁸ Alex paints and just won (since we’ve been here) a $300.00 purchase prize from the S.F. Museum of Art. His painting which won the prize is probably on exhibit now. Please go and see it and tell us what you think. It’s called “Composition” and Alex is called Corazzo. Gretchen makes sculpture and mobile-like things, only they don’t move like Xenia’s do. They’re all in one piece.

The School of Design begins on the 23rd. And the University not until the 7th of October. So I have nothing to do now but look around, nest, organize a group, look for help from Bell + Howell, etc. Will probably write Fourth Construction.

To Doris Dennison

October 26, 1941 | 323 East Cermak Road, Chicago

Dear Doris:

You write such good letters. We enjoy them very much. We even learn about our Winnetka friends from you. I think, though, we’ll be seeing more of Brab⁷⁹ because I’m starting in November to do some experimental work in radio music at Northwestern University. They will build equipment, actually broadcast programs, etc. However, there’s no money in it so far. There’s a possibility of a research fellowship later on. I’ll work there Tuesday and Friday evenings, Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Naturally I’ll need a group of players, and fortunately Winnetka is near Evanston. If the fellowship comes through I’m going to offer you the other jobs I have now. Which are not so bad. The U. of Chicago job is like rolling off a log. Kay Manning is very pleasant and totally uninterested in choreography so that technique is all I play for. She is a good (technique) teacher. As for the Hull House job,⁸⁰ I’d rather not mention it, but it’s only 3 hrs. on Thursday evening—and another job I found is ghastly (also accompanying). I’m said to be the best dance musician in Chicago and everyone feels so fortunate, etc. But I shall be very glad to be doing something in radio and really experimenting. I have talked about it so long, and now I’ll really have equipment, etc., to do some of it.

You will be sorry to hear that I have not even unpacked the instruments yet at the Bauhaus. The class there is stimulating but I’ve started them making their own instruments. I have to wait about concerts until I know about the Arts Club here.⁸¹ The concert for them has to be the first one in Chicago. After they decide one way or another I can go ahead and get engagements. Until I have actual concerts in view I don’t want to start rehearsals. However, the radio group will be starting soon and that’s the same as a concert group. Merce said he’d come here and play if we did something in the spring.⁸² Joyce is married (did we tell you?).⁸³ Gordon is taking my class at the Bauhaus (I have 4 other students) all of them free. So that the only money I’m making is through accompanying. Fortunately our expenses are low. We have a marvelous oil stove that keeps our room unbearably hot. No trouble with coal + dirt. All our books are covered with cellophane to keep out the Chicago soot. Just read a new book—Kenneth Patchen’s Journal of Albion Moonlight.⁸⁴ I wrote to him today and asked him to work with me on a radio program that Polly Ann Schwartz’s mother says she can put across over CBS.⁸⁵ Bunny’s trying to get started again in bookbinding and I think she really will.⁸⁶ All of her mobiles except one busted coming here. She’s also going to work in that direction.

Tell Marian that I start to write to her lots of times but never get finished, that I love her and will try to get you an engagement at the Arts Club.

I’m going to write a score for Ruth Hatfield this winter.⁸⁷ A Mexican ballet. Martha⁸⁸ wrote thru Merce that she wanted me to work with her in New York, that she would provide for me and that I was fearless and completely imaginative (all of which gladdens my heart). But now I have a new love: radio. And I wish you were here to help me make platonic love to it. We’re going to have turntables equipped with buttons, etc., so that you don’t raise the needle: you just push the button and wind goes on and off.

I haven’t written any music. I started notes for the Fourth Construction⁸⁹ which will be composed for the next concert.

Please send Liz the music I wrote for her: that Jazz Study⁹⁰ (it’s at Mills). Also, please price large Chinese cymbals. Also how is the record business going?

[illegible] is fine.

Love to you et Margaret et Herb and Millers. Tell Glotzie to read Patchen’s book.

To Doris Dennison

[1942?] | Location not indicated

Dear Doris:

We need you so badly. Brabazon says you’re planning to come to Chicago. Please do + just get a stop-over so we all go to N.Y. late this Spring. You’ll have to play in the CBS workshop work.⁹¹ Patchen’s working on script now. He has a poem in current Harper’s Bazaar.

P.S. Did you notice Mrs. Harrison Williams chit chat in the same issue*? Yrs [name illegible, not John Cage]

P.S. Bunny doesn’t like me to like him. Wait until he’s the best-dressed man of 1986.

*I haven’t seen it yet.

To Doris Dennison

[March] 18, 1942 | 323 E. Cermak Road, Chicago

Dear Doris:

In a great hurry. Just heard from Brab that you + others heard a broadcast saying that Arts Club concert was a failure,⁹² + that audience walked out. Nothing is farther from the truth. What I need at this point is to know what station or stations made the broadcast in order that we can track it down + find out how it originated. Mrs. Schwartz will then act if it is a CBS station or a friend of hers if it’s NBC. Please do everything you can to find out what station it was and reply as fast as possible.

Always missing, needing you.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked March 21, 1942] | 323 East Cermak Road, Chicago

Dear Merce:

This is very tardy in comparison with telegrams, menus, etc. It is because we were completely sad that the reviews were impossible to send.⁹³ Bulliet hated it. Smith stayed only for the first dance, didn’t like it. And nobody liked it who got into print. It wasn’t the truth, but we couldn’t send reviews. If you still want them, let us know again, and we will blindfold ourselves.

Martha’s new dance seemed very good to me, although it was obviously ballet form, war-horse form; but I enjoyed it. One thing, the space of that stage is magnificent. And you were marvelous, and it was good to see the group moving around. Nobody liked Eric.⁹⁴ I was overjoyed that the audience was so spontaneous every time you left the stage. And I was amazed that the reviews didn’t headline your work. But they didn’t. Nobody recognizes Nijinsky when they see him.

About Arts Club: Rue Shaw says that you have to have concerts someplace else before she can give one at the Club. She is crazy about your work and felt rotten saying that, but that’s what the conclusion was. Please don’t be discouraged. I told her that you felt the same way about New York, that you wanted to do someplace else first. Bennington should be that possibility. Plus perhaps (I don’t know anything about it) Yale Theatre, someplace in colleges: Cornell, Harvard. Rue also said: I wish when Merce starts with Jean that their music is not piano music because everybody no longer likes typical dance concert music. One more piano is only doubling the error. It was better when Louis⁹⁵ had snare, wind and percussion and dance deal. What do you think? Giving it later in NY. Of course my fear is that people are anxious to say that our music is not enough by itself and must have dance, but I would not feel that way with you and Jean.⁹⁶ At any rate work hard and we’ll see you in June. If the radio thing goes through here, I’ll let you know when and if possible maybe you’ll play in it.

To Mrs. Rue Shaw⁹⁷

[Undated, ca. October 1, 1942] | 550 Hudson St., New York ⁹⁸

Dear Rue:

Your letter came today and today was first day of seeming to get to beginning to be settled: phone will be put in tomorrow: linoleum down in kitchen: gas + lights are on: stuff came through finally from Chicago: instruments are in studio (Fr[anziska] Boas) ready for rehearsal. Tomorrow I work in the morning at Sarah Lawrence: in the afternoon at Boas School and at 5 a dancer comes to give particulars about a new composition she wants and it looks like a beginning to be making. Pretty soon will be able to ask people to dinner, rehearse, give concerts, etc. And we are making a guest room for you Gretchen Alex Pat and Chicago. We will call it the Chicago room.

Thank you for going to trouble about Kenneth [Patchen]. Fortunately, he has a new $100.00 which saves the present situation and where it came from is apparently more. It never occurred to me that Miriam could work since she had a job as a waitress, but I don’t think she could do that or anything else anymore. Anyway they’re getting along now. We miss you and now that you mention it, I miss Henrietta whom we haven’t seen because we haven’t seen anybody (living in New Jersey), but tomorrow night we sleep in our new apartment and you will love it. At first we didn’t know whether the fireplace would really work but it will. We haven’t opened the boxes yet: I am anxious to see what painting—Alex is in it.

Just think: Our new address is really ours. 550 Hudson (2nd floor entire).

Now it is very late + I have to get up at 6. Please have a good Arts C[lub] year + when are you coming to stay with us?

Merce + Jean are dancing in about 3 wks. Kenneth’s new book Teeth of the Lion is being published now (printed now).

To Mrs. Rue Shaw

[Undated, sometime after February 14, 1943] | Location not indicated

I think your letter was very good and is accomplishing what I am sure you wanted it to: a self-evaluation, etc., on, principally, Merce’s part.

I did not agree with many of the things you said, but please know that I didn’t “scoff.”

The difference between a good and bad performance on Jean’s part is not very great. The opposite is true of Merce. I am sure that the reaction would have been very different had he turned in a good performance. He has, God knows where he got it, a serious inferiority complex. He is able to dance stunningly for Graham, but tends to be self-conscious in his own dances. (His father being in Chicago may not have helped.) All this amounts to agreeing with your statement about growing up.

Fortunately he is looking forward to his next performances (the Museum and somewhere in Detroit) because he says he knows what the trouble was in Chicago. I hope he does and that he will solve it.

I know from working so long with them that their dances have direction, are well composed both from a formal and emotional point of view. I do think that they are of such a nature that they require very magical theatrical accoutrements (magic of lights, good space, curtain, etc.).

I am sorry that the concert was not good, particularly because I had looked forward to it for so long. It did them a service and maybe somebody in the audience liked something. Let’s hope so.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked June 28, 1943] | [New York]

Dear Merce:

Saturday night nearly went crazy, because, not solving my problems until they occur, I very suddenly realized you were gone. Fly away with you but was in a zoo.

Sunday, interested? Woke up in time to see you, worried whether you had taxi fund, etc. but was helpless; went through hottest day of y[ea]r in and out of bath tub. A parade went under the window (a real one) with something like 5 percussion bands, one of them made of black people played beautifully; it must have been a chinoiserie about your having gone away.

I don’t know when it was that I found out how to let this month go by without continual sentimental pain. It’s very simple now, because I’m looking forward to seeing you again rather than backward to having seen you recently. That’s a happy way to be.

Another thing: I’m going to look at studios for you, not that I’m doing something you probably want to do yourself, but it will be good to give you a list, descriptions, etc., and then you’ll know that such and such exists. I’ve gathered that you want to be uptown.

By Friday or so you should get new article to translate,⁹⁹ which is long and will be very remunerative.

I say I’m unsentimental but I’m sitting at one of our tables and looking in a mirror where you often were.

We had a card this morning from the Patchens who are at Mr. Pleasant for the summer (!).

Please try writing to the Academy of M. care of the Library.¹⁰⁰

I don’t know: this gravity elastic feeling to let go and fall together with you is one thing, but it is better to live exactly where you are with as many permanent emotions in you as you can muster. Talking to myself.

Your spirit is with me. Did you send it or do I just have it?

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked June 29, 1943] | No location indicated

Rain finally came + it’s beautifully cool. Wonder how long it will last. It was marvelous because it started suddenly and then was alternately terrific and gentle.

I think of you all the time and therefor have little to say that would not embarrass you, for instance my first feeling about the rain was that it was like you.

Yesterday, with no success, I looked for a studio for you, found one that was useless for $125.00.

Otherwise the day was spent packing instruments, and studying the corporate structure of non-profit organizations, so that the Natl. Inst. for Biochem-Research would get under way legally. God knows why they didn’t employ a lawyer.

This morning rode elegant us-bus to Academy. Thought about enigma and his little friend.¹⁰¹

Someday maybe instead of writing I’ll send you a present.

I hope you’re having a beautiful time. Love you.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 2, 1943] | 550 Hudson St., New York

Prince,

Very exciting to get your spirit letter no questions asked (we have a post office). I am this day sending long forty to 50 dollar article which I hope won’t be travail to translate. At least you will get to know 3 more of your South American brothers.

When they (Benn[ington] Folk) get too intellectual, “answer them only with” art.¹⁰² Horror news: W. Lathrop¹⁰³ has been subsidized by private individ. to go look at S.W. Indians and then when return to N.Y. occurs will be subsid. to nauseate us via theatre. Saw him in proper place: subway.

The weather here now is magical. Cool and sunny, it’s like San Francisco.

I get terribly lonesome for you. Had a note from Renata who is in Colorado looking at MTS [mountains]; she wants to see more of us and play percussion.

Sent my score to be published actually never thought that would occur. Made added note in it to arouse creative spirit in this land: “Determine size and position of mutes by experiment.” Read an article about “Sordino” in a musical dict., which came to conclusion that a plain penny put between violin strings is better than fancy mute. Every now + then the past smiles at me.¹⁰⁴

Today I have to trace graphs about the male hormone.

I stop doing that every now and then + read your letter over again.

Please don’t let intellectual art discussions intimidate you. They are only talking about art or loving it or God knows what, but you are it. You’re a visitation and any one who has a chance to be near you is damned fortunate. It’s like the stories of people talking about God or Christ + he is Incognito among them.

I nearly left this earth a few minutes ago—ecstasy—word from you. Pretty soon I’ll write music for you.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 20, 1943] | 550 Hudson St., New York

Letter came this morning: going to sea and sun will be marvelous, but please be lonesome enough to come back in not too distant time; I couldn’t help thinking how magic it would be to meet you some place on cliff or sand, but problems of communication and my own allergy to summer-nature mock romanticism.

No new word from Indian.

Martha’s dance sounds like maybe beauty. I hope it remains in intimacy; if it is tortured there, I can worship; but if it gets to “heights of frustration greatness,” would have difficulty.

I’ve found out that my muse’s name is Euterpe.¹⁰⁵ This does not incline me farther in direction of the art.

I hope I’m right in thinking you rec’d. 2nd money order for long article. No mention in letter. I have new translation and will check for it next Friday or Saturday. If you want money mailed to sea-shore place, let me know. ($13.25)

Rudy Reviel has arranged a meeting for me with man who runs Blue Angel.¹⁰⁶ La Touche¹⁰⁷ is back from Congo and persuaded B.A. that I should be attraction there. At first thought it would be all right, but since have changed my mind: I am so completely on fringe of acceptability that such an action would remove what of doubt remains in bourgeois heads. Cannot discuss this with Euterpe since we do not get on together; would prefer to discuss it with you.

I love you and often think of fancy reasons why: spirit is very close to me and mine, I sent it, close to you.

Have Buenos tiempos y coloratura benefices y comprobar natura.

Translation was much better this time and easier to get into shape.

There is one more to be done, but no time to get Photostats, etc., before you leave (besides you’re probably sick of Spanish medical language).

My whole desire is to run up and down the sea coast looking for you.

Love

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, 1944] ¹⁰⁸

[This note, contained in a very small envelope, without postmark, is fragile and has been cut up into small pieces, some of which, folded, have over time broken in two. The fragments, comprising everything extant, have been pieced together.]

i am in a world you make with recherches: and the leaf is suspended by a pin near the little wooden saint. these things mean very much to me; but i think it is not to my credit that they do. i am beginning to think that the reason i “give so much” is that i am so poor in spirit, hoping through leaning on every little gesture, thought, word, and mood of other to get my empty spaces filled. so my giving is really demanding. where shall i go and what shall i do: read a book? how to benefit by what can be said by oneself!

not being spontaneous and relaxed about natural things, i get ideas about people connected with art, fashion little pedestals, love them and bring the public in. a rather disgusting scene.

i love you always.

xenia went all alone.

beauty.

i am in a muddled state.

calliope calls.

soul-searching; i did it once before, about 12 years ago. i’m not very good at it.

louis and satie at breakfast, what did that mean?

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 3, 1944] | No location indicated

your letters i just plain love: they bring you so close that at any moment i expect the door will open and you will see me camouflaged in enigmatic home, built on shoes you made.

i went away for week-end; but you will be disappointed to know it was to Buchanan’s in New Jersey plus Virgil [Thomson]. However, it was quite pleasant, and everything was taken easily. There were not many bugs; it was cool; there were two yelling children, but on the whole well-behaved, and Virgil was in kind style. Drinks, swimming, damn good food; but best of all was the music and talks about music. Virgil had brought out one of the rare copies of Satie’s Socrate, and we must have played and sung it six times.¹⁰⁹ I know now many things wrong with Four Walls¹¹⁰ musically, basic of all being that i made too much expressiveness via melody-means. Some time i [will] make better music for you. Socrate is an incredibly beautiful work. There is no expression in the music or in the words, and the result is that it is overpoweringly expressive. The melody is simply an atmosphere which floats. The accompaniment is a continuous juxtaposition of square simplicities. But the combination is of such grace! Three pieces: the first is after a banquet, and Socrates is merely introduced by a little speech which rather completely avoids any profundity. The second piece is in the country, and Socrates and his companion talk about the history of the spot and how delightful the air and grass is, and there is a slight suggestion that following the conversation they lie down together on the grass. The third piece is a report of the death of Socrates, little things he said, little things the jailer said, how it was when he drank the poison and only at the very end is it finally said that he was “the most just, etc. great of men.” Sometimes I played it while Virgil tortured the air with song; mostly, however, he preferred to both play and sing, while I turned pages. We also went thru Four Saints, Filling Station, a piano sonata, a good deal of Mozart; and one evening The Perilous Night.¹¹¹ Virgil went into ecstasy which will not get into print. I am genius, and everything i write is fine he says and he says related to great things, etc. I cannot remember it all. Who cares?

Country was beautiful, and lying on the grass so that i could sometimes see the net a tree is against the sky or turning make a space for eyes between two trees and watch bird-movements across and in it. Beautiful daisies and a jungle of tiger lilies. Multitudinous lakes and canoes. I could tell how distinctly happy you would be in country wherever; and i really need not be with you for me or for you, because there was facility in inventing your presence and knowing that just then you were merely not visible or not audible.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 12, 1944] | 12 E. 17th St., New York

au prince delicieux.

your last letter is so beautiful i cannot answer it, only read it and lie on it.

music going beautifully, peace and fluently; i will hear it again tomorrow, but this time with fizdale because he senses phrase which gearhart does not know.

saw king’s row¹¹² which is very fine. went to amagansett and ny coktail group. swam in ocean and now have night-itchy sunburn. bicycled all over small hills.

i have two movements finished: seven to go; i think i have not written so well before. heard berg’s violin concerto reading score as record played at lou’s. it is very beautiful except when it gets chewingummy re intervals (da da da de; da da da do).

Did you meet the Cages in Denver?

bell sounds will enter now with crossing of the hands; utter grace is the goal.

the heat is not too bad and besides I live in the nude;

do beauty work (another secret: inexpressivity)

i am often in deep pain; i am afraid i am not human being

i talk to you all day long but when i start to write i cannot

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 20, 1944] | 12 E. 17th St., New York

Monsieur:

my muse fluidity continued and 4 movements are finished; last night i was able to hear 3rd and 4th movements; i had thought to copy 3rd movement yesterday, but I woke up so early that I was here by seven and it was a beautiful day so i wrote the 4th movement which got finished around two o’clock; and then i had both pieces to copy so as to be able to hear them, did that, had dinner, beginning to get jittery that they wouldn’t “sound,” bought some brandy and went to hear them.¹¹³ And thank God and Calliope, they are marvelous. All four hold together like one big movement and it is beautiful. The part i wrote to you about: the faster part: is fantastic. It is like a scherzo in paradise. Instead of writing hymn for wild church, I went back to original tempo and really continued second movement in more passionate vein. please hear it. i have been lucky and i am grateful. i had the most curious experiences writing the 4th piece which came so quickly: everything simply happened: phrases wrote themselves, ignored, seemingly, my “phrase structure” and then turned out to be on “phrase structure” side after all, making everything clear but passionate. i drank too much brandy after i found out the music was right, and i don’t feel very good today, although i will probably start next part. So far, piece is a little over 13 minutes. That is approximately length of Perilous Night: except this music holds together and is played without a break, but really it never is boring because it is always having new things happening. Have a new idea now upon which deliberation and dreaming must center: to make next part prestissimo (out of my range of execution) so that speed will enter for the spirit. i have never really written any fast, really fast, music, and i think i will do it: these unresonant sounds will take to it like water because they do not muddy each other. I am leaning towards the side of giving plain title like “Sonata for two pianos.” That would involve me in tempo titles for movements: andante, etc., of which i would not be too pleased. … haven’t heard from you for long week, except via spirit, which is what sustains me. will probably send little gift soon. the nights are no longer perilous, having moved into area of being terrifying. as darkness comes, i lose mind with loneliness and must work or go to movie to bring about utter fatigue which protects … i hope you love it there and have some beauty one to love … and i hope Four Walls is going well and that you are spirit-full … what need to wish? … you are strong … love you

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked July 22, 1944] | 12 E. 17th St., New York

[This letter is intentionally cut in various places, and it is also typewritten on the page both horizontally and vertically, as indicated below.]

[horizontal] today is beautiful and i am dreaming of you and enigma and how we are together today: your words in my ears making [me] limp and taut by turns with delight. oh, i am sure we could use each other today.

i like to believe that you are writing my music now: god knows i’m not doing it, because it simply seems to happen. the prestissimo is incredible the way you are and is perhaps a description and song about you.

banalities: blue check arrived and dv et Helmsley got theirs; i am afflicted with bills of all description, but do not seem to be able to be sensible about money. passed by clyde’s yesterday with their socks; they look beautiful. had, for a change, a pleasant time with Schuyler;¹¹⁴ he informs me that Oliver¹¹⁵ who called the other day and wanted to know whether you could hold a tune and what kind of voice you had, with Robbins,¹¹⁶ has you in mind for the lead of their dance-musical; it doesn’t mean you have to sing like galli-curci,¹¹⁷ but like American sailor[s] sing (and see stripes au meme temps?)

there is apparently a part in the book where you would go through a tunnel of love and everyone thinks you would do it very well: so do i, please go through mine, taking your time, if you will.

also schuyler had evening with virgil and v.t. now says i am ultra-genius, having seen some of 2 piano work, and that i am on a par with picasso, schoenberg, stravinsky, satie, matisse, cezanne, van gogh etc. ad nauseum: schuyler now thinks virgil had good reasons for not reviewing other concerts, will blare next one to skies, that his review of it is really already written, that he has been making careful decisions about what to say etc. i don’t like being great. it’s not good for my relation with calliope, who by the way, is not female, and looks exactly like you.

pardon the intrusion: but when in september will you be back? i would like to measure my breath in relation to the air between us.

[vertical] in one letter i said absurd things about inexpressivity; obviously wrong, but what i meant was that high expressivity often comes about through no attempt to make it or to express anything. had dinner one night with denby;¹¹⁸ i think he’s a sad little man who’s frightened of something. read his poetry which has some good qualities, but is by no means off this earth. i keep reading marvelous myths in joe’s book, but joe, too, is not really fine fine writer. of course, this is first draft i have and he will probably improve it. would you like me to send copy of finnegan book which is out now or would you rather save that for home-reading?¹¹⁹

need you deliciously.

gas bill came but is nothing; do not worry about it.

prestissimo will be complex at first, then simple then complex and then faster yet to end entire piece which should be finished in two weeks, because have more things to write; i am so happy with this music that i shall be sad when it is all written. each sound has gotten to be friendly and something i know and have pleasure with; they are so well trained, too.

send me some little twig or a hair from near enigma or a piece of grass you touched and sunbathed with, mon prince.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked Aug. 17, 1944] | 12 E. 17th St., New York

Monsieur:

Curious problem I have with words (I was not born an Irishman as you): tonight I wd. love to write an essay about music—it seems to me I know some things tonight—but good God! For hours with pencil in hand + only one stupid sentence. Who tied my tongue + stopped the spirit for words?

Maybe I can tell you what vision I have: rhythm is like the air or water or the ether that the planets move in,—it is in fact like space, and the whole problem in writing notes or making movements, etc., is to not destroy it. It has not the slightest thing to do with anything that is put into it: an accent or a metre or what else; it only begs to be free to be.

Does that mean anything?

The other thing I have idea about is tones (pitches): they least kill the spirit when they arrange themselves for the most part in scales or scale-like structures. So used they evoke + are magic. If jumps in the scale are used, one must soon reestablish scale or magic is gone, + petty sentiment rules. Proofs by way of example from graved-past. Debussy, Schoenberg, Bach, Mozart, Palestrina, Hindus. I will have to talk about this because I can’t sitting alone see all the angles.

I am resting from composing by doing copying (of which have great deal to do); still have 7 minutes to write. I bought a beautiful copy of Kenyon Review (Summer issue) which has many articles about G. M. Hopkins¹²⁰ in it and a beautiful article about economics + Adams’ Law of Civilization + Decay.¹²¹

Great lightning + thunder + rain tried to remove horror-heat but failed. When are we going to be together?

The Nameless One

To Mrs. Rue Shaw

[Undated, ca. Feb. 22, 1945] | Location not indicated

I am sending Virgil’s review.¹²² The concert is very beautiful and I hope that it can be done at the Arts Club. Five Steinway grands (Style M or L) are required, and I think it would be exciting to have them down the center of the room,—with the audience seated as at prize fights. Phone me or write if you need more documentation. It is a kind of concert which is very exciting and although we had a small audience here, Virgil says it had to be that way because large numbers are not present at really new things.

Let me know as soon as you can if there’s any chance and what money details would be like.

Will be in New Yorker Talk of the Town this week.¹²³

To Ruth Page¹²⁴

May 26, 1945 | 12 E. 17th St., New York

After talking with Noguchi,¹²⁵ I decided that, if you still desire it, I will compose the music you requested.

In this connection please send me what ideas you have at present in connection with it; it is a pity that I did not see you when you were here.

I will be particularly interested in the large time divisions you plan, if any. My present intention is to compose for two pianos transformed with mutes; this will provide a larger and more flexible medium than percussion.

My fee would be on the basis of $30.00 per performance minute; and the requirement for its payment would be: one-half of the total amount on signing of a contract and the other half after completion of the score and before its first performance. The payment of this fee would entitle you to sole performance rights for the period of a year from the time of the completion of the score, not including broadcasts or recordings or use in connection with films. For each performance following the first one, I would require a fee of $25.00. I understand from Noguchi that the ballet will be approximately 15 minutes long; my fee has been estimated with this length in mind.

I would recommend that Arthur Gold and Robert Fitzdale,¹²⁶ duo-pianists familiar with my music, be engaged for the first performance.

These are my conditions. I would also like a contract to include the fact that the music may not be altered or changed in any way except by me.

If these conditions are acceptable to you, I shall be glad to receive a contract which expresses them, and a letter which presents your thoughts with regard to the work.

To Thomas Hart Fisher¹²⁷

June 24, 1945 | 12 East 17th St., New York

Dear Mr. Fisher:

Thank you for your letter, and Miss Page for hers; this in reply to both.

I do not receive the freedom you offer me to experiment with much enthusiasm. The use of electrical keyboard instruments, either those which might be found or some which might be invented and constructed, seems to me impractical: impractical both from your point of view and from my own. You would be faced with transportation and pit problems which would be nearly insurmountable: I would be faced with new instrumental problems which would not allow me the benefit of the technique I have developed with those instruments with which I am familiar. This same problem faces me in composition for a regular symphony orchestra; and, although I wrote in the letter before this that I would be willing to write for orchestra, I am by no means enthusiastic about doing it. It is impossible to experiment with an orchestra since one generally hears his work for the first time at a nearly final rehearsal. The addition of many percussion or other novel instruments to a symphony orchestra will merely make it impractical for you. I have a further objection: serious and aesthetically basic. I do not like the idea of writing “percussion” music for a ballet based on a subject related to percussion per se. The music then becomes literally percussion music, and is empty of what suggestiveness or expressiveness it might otherwise have. Here, of course, we could come to agreement through following the moods of the poem, but not publicizing the derivation of the ballet and music from Poe or from bells.

It seems to me that there are two ways of working: one which is intellectual and, in America, necessarily seemingly amateurish and only semi-professional (in this way one does one’s best work regardless of money, practicality or popularity); the other way of working which is geared to meet the demands of mass-American-distribution systems (in this way of working one meets with a multiplicity of obstacles to the free imagination which can only be solved through a multiplicity of compromises).

I am in a curious position. I realize that your offer to give me this commission is an honor and an opportunity, but I doubt whether it will be to our mutual advantage. Your offer is based on your liking of my prepared piano music, and yet my writing such music for you will merely create problems for you. And unless I so write, I will have to make compromises which I am not willing to make. (If I wrote for symphony orchestra, it would not be for the purpose of imitating my compositions for percussion or prepared piano.)

If this letter has not discouraged you, I suggest that conversations will help us far more than further letters. I am very busy with several other commissions, and I would therefor appreciate it if Miss Page can arrange to again come to New York. It is possible that we might come to some agreement and produce something interesting and worth the trouble.

To Merce Cunningham

[Undated, postmarked March 19, 1946] | 326 Monroe St., New York¹²⁸

Dearest

I am at a peculiar kind of stand-still. Inspiration ceased. I have discarded one of the Sonatas¹²⁹ and thrown away many sketches. I have three good ones finished. Of these Maro has chosen two to play and I will write, God willing, two more that please. Laussat¹³⁰ and I are at odds but still comforts to one another. She does nature things in the house which doesn’t help matters between us. I think she does it because I do it and it’s the first time that she’s been privy to the little room. I think my standstill is due to having been impressed pretty deeply by Alan’s concert,¹³¹ Lou’s new book on Ruggles¹³² and dissonant polyphony, and a long conversation I had with Virgil re expressivity. I do not know exactly where I stand. So I am still and waiting. I will copy the sonatas I have and wait a while. I love you forever. I hope my telegram kept bad previous letter from having bad effect. Your suit is not being sent till tomorrow because the weather was bad and they could not let me have it safely until tomorrow (Monday). I will send key ring and chain then too. When they get around to making the shoes, should they be in colors or simply plain to be dyed? They may not have the colors in suede they said, and you might have trouble matching what colors they do have. What do you advise? I didn’t see Genevieve Jones; she was never in when I called; you should perhaps write to her: 5851 Forbes St. Pittsburgh 17 Pennsylvania. I love you.

My class went beautifully and they want it to go on forever they said; I had about eight in it. And they are composing two-minute dances. They gasped at end of class and said nothing like it had ever happened to them before.

It is very hard for me, not being with you. I miss you deeply.

[handwritten on left bottom] Love I love you.

Mailing suit now.

Books arrived.

To Charles Ives

May 13, 1947 | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Ives:

Lou Harrison, our mutual friend, has been very ill lately, and at the advice of his doctor and analyst, Richard M. Brickner, 1000 Park Avenue, New York City, is at present receiving custodial care at Stony Lodge, Ossining-on-the-Hudson, New York. His illness is diagnosed as a curable case of schizophrenia. He must remain at Stony Lodge until he is granted admittance to the Psychoanalytic Clinic at 722 W. 168, N.Y.C. When he is in the latter hospital, there will be no charge for his treatment, which, I understand, will be excellent. While he is at Stony Lodge, however, the charges amount to about ten dollars a day.

Being one of his closest friends, I have taken the responsibility of arranging for the payment of bills connected with this illness; I, myself, am not able to help, since I just manage to pay my own bills. I am, therefor, approaching his friends whom I have reason to believe might be both willing and able to be of assistance in this matter.

The first bill from Stony Lodge covers a period of nine days ending May 15 and amounts to $96.42. Lou may need to stay there two or three weeks, dependent as I mentioned on his gaining admittance to the other hospital.

Would you be willing to assume all or any part of this expense? I am certain that Lou will want to repay as soon as he is well and working those who help him at this time. He does not know that I am asking for this assistance. Any details which you want to know can be given by me, or by Dr. Brickner, whose address I have given, or by Dr. Berger at Stony Lodge.

The day I took Lou to Stony Lodge, he asked me to write to you concerning the work which you had given him to do in connection with your compositions. Naturally, he is unable to do it at present. If there is urgency about this, I will be glad to take care of either the return of mss. to you or their transmission to someone else. Otherwise, he might continue that work when he is well.

I look forward to a reply at your convenience.¹³³

To Mrs. Charles Ives¹³⁴

[ca. late 1947] | Location not indicated

Dear Mrs. Ives:

Through Mrs. Cowell, I hear that extended work on Mr. Ives’ compositions is to be done. It is my feeling that Lou will be able to do this and that he might even devote week-ends to it immediately. He is recovering quickly and is in full possession of his mental faculties (he remains somewhat unstable emotionally, but that too will be improved). At any rate, he will be in need of work; and I can think of no other work which would be as congenial to him. Please let me know what your needs are, the work to be done, etc. And I will discuss it with Lou. Or, you might even write directly to him at the

Psychiatric Institute + Hospital

722 W. 168th St.

NYC 32

To Anni and Joseph Albers¹³⁵

[Sometime after April 8, 1948] | Location not indicated

Dear Anni + Albers:

You were so friendly and Black Mountain was so good to be at, and the last minute gestures and gifts brought us to a kind of ecstasy (the heads among the eggs were discovered near the summit of the Smokies where the mists made everything gently awe-inspiring,—you were as generous as they).

We visited a Trappist Monastary at Gethsemani in Kentucky (there is also one nearer you in Georgia), and we heard the monks singing Gregorian Chants; we may stay there a few days on the way back.

Every experience in going through the country and stopping with friends or as with you making new friends is revelatory. Of course, there is also ugliness and meanness too (a disgusting dinner + waitress in Indiana); but for the most part this trip seems tending always toward what is beautiful and meaningful, and I can only say that we feel we were profoundly lucky to spend some days with you.

Merce is doing his technique now in the middle of [Gretchen and Alex] Corazzo’s kitchen. Last night we read out loud one of your pamphlets, Anni, and all of us were moved by the clarity and truth of your thoughts.

Being in New York without leaving it for so long had made me believe that only within each one of us singly can what we require come about, but now at Black Mountain and again with the Trappists I see that people can work still together. We have only “to imitate nature in her manner of operation.”

We love the gifts you gave us, but especially loved being with you.

Tomorrow morning we go on to Wisconsin.

[Merce Cunningham’s part] I did my exercising on the Corazzo kitchen floor, but kept thinking about the Black Mountain dining-hall. I wonder why?

The Trappists were interesting, but Black Mountain was better, because we were able, not just to observe, but to share, if even a little intangibly.

To Katherine Sophie Dreier¹³⁶ and Joseph Albers

June 17, 1948 | New York City

Night Letter for Dreiers and Albers

From New York City

GREETINGS TO ALL. HAVE MADE SEVERAL ATTEMPTS TO OBTAIN SCHOLARSHIP FUND FOR MERCE’S STUDENTS BUT TO NO AVAIL.¹³⁷ BECAUSE OF THEIR INNER TRANQUILITY AND SUMMER PLANS (SARA HAD ALREADY GOTTEN SUITABLE CLOTHES AND FLASHLIGHT) PLEASE SEND FINAL WORD BY FRIDAY WHETHER ONE, TWO, OR THREE OF THEM CAN BE TAKEN CARE OF. THEY ARE PENNILESS. ALL OF US ARE EXHAUSTED HERE AND HAVE PROFOUND NEED OF BLACK MOUNTAIN. CAN LIPPOLDS COME TOO?¹³⁸ THEY HAVE TESTED THEIR HEARSE FOR SLEEPING PURPOSES AND FIND IT WORKS. SARA PRACTICALLY INSISTS ON COMING IN THE MANNER OF A STOWAWAY IF NECESSARY. PLEASE CONSIDER ME THOUGHTFUL IN ALL OF THIS FOR I HAVE NOT MENTIONED ALL THE MANY OTHERS WHO WANT TO COME TOO.

To Peter Yates

September 9, 1948 | Location not indicated

Dear Peter:

Was awfully busy this summer teaching but finally got through the mss., which I found very interesting, and liked very much although you’re probably more interested in “constructive criticism.” So:

Your information about Satie,¹³⁹ whom I know a good deal about (having spent the summer going through his life + works at Black Mtn. College), is not accurate: e.g., the Messe des Pauvres is an early work (circa 1898), and you give the impression of its being a late work. You leave out mention of most of his important works and in no sense give him the importance due him, which is, I believe, to have consistently structured his music on lengths of time rather than harmonic relations. I’m sure he was aware of doing this but I doubt whether he knew its real importance, which is real: liberation from the Beethoven yoke, far more real than that granted by S[choenberg] with the 12-tone row.

Your inaccuracies about Satie make me skeptical about the rest of the factual information. Is it accurate?

How on earth can you call him a dilettante?

With Webern he is, from my point of view, the 20th century.

However, I really enjoyed the mss. + don’t mean to give another impression.

It looks like we’re coming on another tour in January + February this time. Maybe you can arrange something?

It would be fun to live in the same town + talk the book in detail.

To Peter Yates

[Undated, ca. mid 1948] | Location not indicated

Dear Peter:

The breathlessness is here in New York and it is very easy to fall into it.

Lou has returned here and I spent a long time with him yesterday. He seems to me in very good condition. He is not married. But he has, at least it seemed to me, an inner security and general peaceful well-being about him which was very comforting. The breathlessness mentioned above he felt as he came near Chicago, and so he looks forward to a teaching job in San Francisco which he hopes to get for next summer. This year he will teach composition at the Greenwich School Music House.¹⁴⁰ For the first time in about a year and a half we talked about music in the way we used to.

I do not know whether I am being rabid about Satie or not. However I give him first place with Webern and I fight for them both. So that when you ask for a list of his major works, I am baffled and would find it much easier to list his inconsequential works, for they are so few in number. He himself did not like Genevieve de Brabant and the Jack in the Box: he dropped them behind a piano and told people who asked for them that he had lost them on a bus. They are not very good works. Also I don’t find the 5 Grimaces very interesting. However, one of them is a brilliant piece: the fourth one, and very important from my own point of view because it is written in the same rhythmic structure that I have employed in all my work since 1938.

The Messe des Pauvres is certainly an early work, since around 1900 Satie said, I will no longer compose on my knees (my information all comes from a biography, Erik Satie, by [Pierre-Daniel] Templier, which people who knew Satie accept as authoritative). It is technically and commentarily part and parcel of the other early works: I know the Sarabandes, Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes, Fils de Etoiles, Porte Heroique du Ciel, 4 Preludes, Danses Gothiques, and a few others. The maturity of the commentary here is because it is in agreement with the perennial philosophy which Satie devoted himself to in his early life, through the Rosicrucians, and through the establishing of his own church. What seems to me as being in even greater maturity is the commentary later in the Third Nocturne (circa 1920) (after Socrate), “avec serenite,” the word serenity never having been used by him before or elsewhere.

After the first period, religious and mystical, there are the cafe chantant works; then the Trois Morceaux, which combines aspects of the mystical with aspects of the charming and the vulgar. Then the study of counterpoint for the second time (he had gone through the Conservatory earlier) in the Schola Cantorum and the resultant works: En Habit de Cheval, Apercues desagreeables, which, it seems to me, see and then renounce neo-classicism. Following this comes the period of commonly-called “satirical pieces”; they are not properly so-thought-of: they are parallel to the work of Paul Klee,¹⁴¹ and conserve their fantasy and magic waiting patiently to glow any time anyone lets them. Of these: Embryons, Croquis, 3 Valses, Descriptions, Avant-dernieres pensees, Sports et Divertissements, Enfantines, Trois preludes, etc., etc. I particularly am devoted to the Enfantines and the Sports, although when I say that, I feel unfaithful to the others. The Enfantines surpass all other children’s pieces of this century, easily and surely. Then comes Parade, before came the violin piece, some songs, beauties: Trois melodies, Trois poemes, Quatre melodies, Ludions, then the Socrate, the Nocturnes, Mercure and finally Relache with its incredible Entr’acte. I have missed many but Templier is not at hand nor the music nor the time; for instance I miss the play, Le Piege de Meduse, and its music.

As I see music there are four departments of it inviting thought and action: structure (which is the division into parts of a composition); form (which is morphology-content); method (which is note to note or instant to instant procedure); and material (which is actual sound and silence). Schoenberg’s contribution is in the minor area of method. Satie’s is in the major area of structure. So is Webern’s; his pre-12-tone works are structured according to phraseology instead of harmony, as are Satie’s, as are mine. Schoenberg still thinks as Beethoven but new-fangles it through new method. Stravinsky is seductive, via sound, and confesses intellectual poverty by exploiting music of the past. The pre-eminence of Webern is confessed by the 12-tone composers of contemporary Europe. Webern and Satie are distinctly the composers of the century who V out instead of V’ing in: I mean they open the doors, they do not focus in to deadness. Shall I go on? Let me know.

I look all the time for the Variations of Webern. I can’t find them. I have given my copy away so that a pianist will play it.

Form is the area of music that anybody goes into freely: the 19th-century error was to imitate Beetoven’s form-feeling, which in terms of the neurosis is what Schoenberg mostly does. Satie and Webern are free and original in their form, besides being so in their structure. The method of Satie, which is frequently banal, is what disguises his riches and prevents serious people from taking him seriously. They, however, have misplaced their seriousness.

However, I realize that it is probably silly to send you these ideas because they relate to a body of ideas that I find useful, and your ideas relate to what you find useful; however, one often makes the questionable act of thinking that his ideas and actions are generally applicable.

For many reasons, I would prefer to offer again this year the Sonatas and Interludes, and without other music on the program. In the first place I find “programs” no longer useful, because they stand in the way of the proper use of music which is to quiet and concentrate the mind, and not to giddify it with entertainment, no matter how intellectual. In relation to the shakuhachi music, which is so marvelous, there must be no other music. It is against proper being, unnatural. The same is true of these pieces of mine, and I say it in no spirit of self-praise, but simply in simple thought about what music is and does. I am not interested in success but simply in music. I am fairly certain however that there are a number of people in Los Angeles who have not heard the Sonatas, but heard of them, who would like to hear them. I intend to resist recording these pieces and yet I want to offer them to be heard and used. Having heard them once is a very good beginning for hearing them again. I myself have heard them countless times, and I find them more and more useful, rather than less and less so.

My other reasons are less important but to do with practicality. I have no new music, having spent the whole summer with Satie and teaching. The two piano works which I have demand extreme virtuosity and long work with the mutes in the piano which would not be possible. It would also require for the single concert 5 pianos, and no end of nervous arrangements, since I am necessarily in Los Angeles only a short time. Also the 3 Dances are recorded and can be heard that way.

So, without wanting to be annoying, exactly the contrary, I would like again to play just the Sonatas and Interludes and to offer it clearly distinctly from other musical experience.

My most affectionate greetings to both of you.

Feb. 21st, a Monday, would be good for me. Is it good for you or Lester?

To Jack Heliker and Merton Brown¹⁴²

[November 1948] | Location not indicated

Dear Jack and Merton:

This is thanksgiving day and it is very cool but not cold yet; we have not yet had any snow; now and then it has been Indian summer. We miss you very much, and there is no one to take your place. Once we went to visit Easton Pribble,¹⁴³ but he never calls either one of us; I suspect that socially he is a bit lethargic. Lou is well but still goes to the Dr. whom he is now trying to educate in return. We hope that Jack has taught the monkeys how to speak English and move with American gestures. We are still making tour arrangements, and we will arrive the first of April in Holland (Rotterdam). I met a very nice music critic who works in Paris, Frederick Goldbeck,¹⁴⁴ who edited Contrepoint, and I loaned him Merton’s scores. He leaves here on the 9th of December, and should Merton go back to Paris he should look him up. (He is anti-neoclassical, considers it as we do, an international plague. He is also not 12-tone in admiration. He likes Debussy, Varese, early Schoenberg, early Webern, Ruggles, now you and me.) Are you painting yet, Jack? Maybe we are going to do The Seasons¹⁴⁵ in January, and I will have to do the rehearsal piano and the light cues. I am starting to write a piece for piano and orchestra, but I am still only timid in relation to it. Somedays too ecstatic others too timid. Reading Eckhart and have discovered that his tempo is very fast;¹⁴⁶ if you read him as though you were a winchell it works magnificently, like fire. Merce has lots of new dances which he will do on tour. He is more and more unbelievable to watch move. Jack’s letter seemed sad to us; but I never really think of him as a traveler, but only painting in the corner of the room (I’ve thought that before going to Europe you should have tried painting in the kitchen just to see how moving a little bit felt). Now Merce wants to write a little bit.

[Merce Cunningham’s portion] the only trouble about john playing for the seasons rehearsals is that he cant play the score as well as you can, Merton, and it is harder to rehearse with him. i don’t know what the dancers will do. on our tour in the united states we have to run from chicago through sleet and snow to eugene oregon in four days. thats so we can make more money faster to get to europe quicker. it is so sad not to be able to go to cornelia street once in a while now, so we will hurry to italy and the via de cornelia. heres a brochure telling how wonderful we are. arthur gold and robert fizdale concert was terrible, slick and slack (nabokoff) chataqua (thomson) facile and mozart sounding like a contemporary work, and not a very good one (cage and cunningham) and a party for the artists afterwards that had a bunch of broadway comedians present to instill life (into the gathering). ruggles is at the chelsea hotel for the winter and he and virgil had tea, and they are great friends, and ruggles confided that virgil is a great man, and everybodys happy. henry cowell looks like a leprechaun in a wheelchair ready to burst forth at any point. john said, as he was taking a shower, that eckhart says that the soul is the gatherer together for the other disparate forces. we had a nice time this afternoon. did you? we miss you so much. lou seems much better, and so bright about so many things again.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

[Sometime prior to March 24] 1949 | Location not indicated

Thank you for all the food and money and love and the tree; I give nothing in return for all I have is yours.

For some reason which I cannot figure out, I have been unable to tell you that I have been planning to follow the tour here in America with one in Europe. Maybe I hoped that the plans would fall through. I really don’t want to go. On the other hand, Virgil T[homson] and others advise it strongly. I will make enough money on the tour here to pay my way there. And so far there are a few engagements: one with the Brussels Radio, the French Nat’l Radio; Bob and Arthur would play my two piano pieces in Paris. This afternoon when Peggy Bate¹⁴⁷ called it was to say that a Scandinavian tour can be arranged. Through Albers at Black Mtn. I have a connection in Switzerland, etc. Moreover, Gita Sarabhai¹⁴⁸ will be in Paris at the same time.

I am deeply embarrassed that I am writing this news rather than telling you; I would probably have to be psycho-analyzed to find out why I haven’t been able to tell you.

Being away for a fairly long time, I will arrange to sublet the apartment, which I hate to leave.

So that for the time that all this will last, this touring, you will be relieved of the burden that I continually think of myself as being.

The French critic I met here is the most important one over there; he thinks my work the best he has found here. That ensures good reception of my work in Europe. I would rather stay here + compose, but on the other hand, I have a responsibility having made this music to let other people hear it. I don’t think of it as career-business, but only as a kind of duty. Once I am on the trip, I will probably love it. But I hate to leave.

To Mr. Kenneth Klein¹⁴⁹

January 18, 1949 | 326 Monroe St., New York

Dear Mr. Klein:

Regarding our recent business connection, I am writing to say that although I have only gratitude and appreciation for the services of yourself and those in your office, I feel obliged, for the reasons listed below, to lodge this formal complaint.

1. Because of the incident familiar to you of my work of the last three years in connection with the Sonatas and Interludes is possibly lost, unless by luck and hard work I am fortunate enough to regain the exact preparation which I had carefully saved, and successfully, until the incident known to both of us. The audience on the second evening heard only an approximation of the sound intended.

2. The box office is supposed to open at 7:30 p.m. but each evening did not open until nearly eight o’clock.

3. Several of my friends told me that although they wished to pay for their admission to the concert they could not find anyone to whom to give their money either at the box office or upstairs. They obtained admission to the concert without challenge and later offered to pay me; how many others, not friends, entered freely, I have no way of knowing.

4. On the second night several people were informed at the box office that the house was sold out and that tickets were unobtainable except in the balcony (my mother was one of these), even though the orchestra was at least half empty.

5. Arrangements were made to have the lighting done between 12:00 noon and 2:00 p.m. As you know this arrangement was not maintained.

6. The tuner from the Steinway Company either did not tune the piano at all or [tuned it] badly, since before preparing the piano I found several notes in the upper register to be actually double tones.

7. What with the conversation of the ushers directly behind the door of the hall, and the passing by of many people in the corridors (no sign given them that silence should be preserved), plus the sound of singing nearby, to say nothing of the orchestra quite audible from next door, it is virtually impossible to hear music properly in the recital hall, even though its acoustics are “excellent.”

This letter is in no sense a demand for reparations, although if, from an objective point of view, you would feel it just to make them, I would in no sense refuse them.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

April, 1949 | Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Your letter sent to Maggie Nogueira was so marvelous;¹⁵⁰ it told absolutely everything and (she insists I call her so) brought the letter to the boat so that I read it even before getting off the boat. It was so marvelous (the only adjective I know now) to meet her; she is vitality itself. She arrived at 9 a.m. but it’s being April Fool’s the boat was very late (6–8 hours late because of fog which kept us sitting in the Channel), she made friends with an English lady on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Maggie is very beautiful + her accent and intonation reminds me of Peggy. We drove from the boat under a tunnel (river) (!) very much like the Hudson Tunnel, through Rotterdam, The Hague and finally Amsterdam. One city runs into another as in New Jersey. But of course Holland is beautifully flat and there are windmills and canals and some tulips already blooming. Because of the canals you often see boats sitting out in the fields; in Los Angeles they would be turned into Ship Ahoy restaurants because they are near the main highways. Almost nothing of the effects of war is visible since the Dutch are so neat and industrious: the utterly bombed-out parts appear now as parks and each city has large areas of building resembling our housing developments. Many people use bicycles and there are many flower-shops.

Maggie took us to her house and we drank Holland gin. Then her chauffeur took us to a hotel and she went to the opera. After the opera she had a supper-party at her house and we were there until 2:30. This morning I am up late and hoping that these 8 months or 7 will not be as packed with activity as these 2 days. Maggie has made all kinds of appointments, parties, etc., for us for the next days and wants us to spend August here with her in a house on one of the old canals. The whole experience is extra-ordinary and on the overwhelming side. We telephoned Peggy + and that was a pleasure and also a sadness that she was not here. And how often I wish you both were here too! You would love it so much.

The boat had its smoothest crossing in ten years. I was not at all ill. We met charming people: one who will arrange concerts in the U.S. zone in Germany. She is the wife of a man in counter-intelligence.

I have to hurry to lunch with Maggie. Will write soon again.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

April, 1949 | Amsterdam

Have just written a letter to Maro¹⁵¹ explaining about music and court arrangements and you can get that information from her. Everything has happened one thing after another. I have made connections here with the Society for Contemporary Music,¹⁵² and they will present a concert with Maro playing the Sonatas. I have met many composers and seen so much that is beautiful and to remember. Tomorrow we go to Brussels. I telegraphed to find out if they still expect me to play but there was no answer, so I do not know. The man who made the arrangements is very ill, so it may be that with a new Director I may not play. We will see.

I have also telegraphed ahead for reservations in Palermo, Sicily, and the address from April 20–30 is Villa Lincoln.

Via Archirofi 10

Palermo, Sicily

Italia

Peggy’s friend Maggie Nogueira has been marvelous to us, letting us use her car (with chauffeur), inviting us to lunch and dinner + tonight to a theater. She is a lovely + energetic person. There is so much to eat in Holland and it is all so good: everything is rich and full of butter. The cost of living is about like New York

The flowers—all kinds—not just tulips just about take your breath away. One of the most amazing things in Amsterdam is the red-light district which is the oldest part. The women at night sit in their rooms with the curtains pulled aside, just as though they were on a stage. They mostly spend the time sewing or knitting until someone stops. Then the curtains are drawn and for those on the outside the Act is over whereas actually it is only then beginning. All of this in a setting of canals + beautiful old churches. Amsterdam, I hear, is famous as the “city of women in shop windows.” The water in the canals is so poisonous that if you should fall in you would later get very ill if not die. They were always pushing Germans in during the war. More soon.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

April 15, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

I have not quite recovered from the surprise of getting the Guggenheim.¹⁵³ But I begin to. I sent you the telegram and then finally came to my wits and wrote a letter to Mr. Moe, the Secretary General, asking him to postpone the period of my tenure until my return to New York. I hope he agrees to do that. I am also sending him this afternoon a doctor’s certificate as to my health. And I corrected the biographical statement. If there is more for me to do, either you or he will let me know. I cannot believe that it happened and that I am not dreaming. How marvelous to be relieved of the financial problem!

Sunday we leave for Palermo, and until then have been loaned an apartment in a chic hotel near the Champs Elysees by a friend, Muriel Errera-Finck, whom I don’t think you met. She is charming and has gone to Mt. St. Michel for Easter and thought it just as well that we stay in the apt. She and her husband have taken very good care of us taking us to dinner, lunches, etc. We had a very good and cheap room on the Ile de St. Louis which is my favorite part of Paris, right behind Notre Dame, about 75 cents a day for 2, but here we are with a bad typewriter, a real bathroom elegance et al. Muriel is also trying to swing a concert in the home of the Comtesse de Polignac,¹⁵⁴ which is the top of musical life in Paris, if not in Europe. I haven’t done anything about music in Paris yet, because I was so surprised about the Guggenheim which happened the first day here. In Brussels I met many composers and had a marvelous time; there may be a concert in October at the Palais des Beaux Arts there. I am going to have to have a suit made in Italy because my brown one and blue one wore out completely and all I have is the linen one and Dad’s Xmas one.

Paris is out of this world beautiful and the weather superb. Last night to the Jean-Louis Barrault Theatre and again tonight to see Hamlet. It is quite different from before not in itself (Paris), but in me. I love it. Merce works everyday in a studio near the Place Clichy and is trying to arrange a dance program for May there. The city is so beautiful and it is so easy to be alive here, almost too easy; you have to protect yourself I am sure by working, but right now in transit cannot work. It is difficult to imagine how America got to be so unEuropean; there is so much general understanding here about how things should be to be beautiful and make life a joy.

Forgive this letter and its incoherence and lack of news. I simply don’t know yet which way to turn.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

1949 [ca. April 26] | Palermo

Dearest Mother + Dad:

The Festival¹⁵⁵ proves so far to be not too worthwhile. There have been 8 works so far and only one, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg (which is scarcely contemporary music), has been surpassingly beautiful. There are many fine people here and I was interested last night to meet a Mr. Gradowitz from Israel who is very devoted to my music. I have been several times with Panufnik,¹⁵⁶ a Polish composer whose work I admire; and so it goes. The town itself is as I wrote: dusty, filthy, noisy and full of beggars and people who try to get as much out of you as they can. The food is mediocre and one is semi-ill all of the time, + flat on his back the rest of the time. A rather unpleasant picture. As soon as you leave Palermo and go in the country everything improves and is quite beautiful. The hills are drier even than around L.A., rocky + covered with beautiful tiny dwarfed flowers: iris, poppies, etc. And every view of the Mediterranean is a joy: it is a deep blue but a bright turquoise color near the shores. And if you walk out on a stone pier where there are fishermen cleaning fish + people carrying nets or mending ropes, you can see right to the bottom—the water is so clear and transparent.

In the pension there is (as everywhere) a shortage of water, and that makes bathing, etc., almost a major problem.

It seems to take about 4 days for an airmail letter to reach me. From the 3rd to the 7th of May I will go to Milan where you could write c/o American Express (I don’t know their address), but you could find it out by asking the office in N.Y. There will be a festival of 12-tone music and I will review that too.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

April 27, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Peggy:

Your letter to Palermo came as a bird from heaven (how grateful I am!); I had sunk so low for the music here is devoid of the spirit and there is little of anything to provide recuperation, for everything is wrong. We went to visit a beautiful church and a movie was being made in it. ISCM luncheons in Benedictine cloisters! But now with your letter all seems changed and this is only a state preceding beauty. How easily one can forget (!) especially when plumbing is non-existent and food in some mysterious way poisonous.

I have had several talks with Panufnik, and find him very sensitive and charming. I looked at his scores and explained mine to him (he said he would not sleep that night).

So far in the festival: a magnificent performance of Pierrot Lunaire by Marya Freund (74 yrs. old)¹⁵⁷ and a beautiful piano piece by Wladriner [?] Woronoff (a 12-tone white Russian living in Belgium).¹⁵⁸ He is exciting because he studies poetry and has derived a rhythmic structure (in this piece) from the sonnet. Unfortunately, few heard the piece in the spirit I did.

The news about the Guggenheim is alarming and I am miserable that I am the only one of the friends to get it. I can’t believe that Alan didn’t get it. He is, fortunately, born an Armenian, however.

Your wildest intuitions about this festival could not equal what actually takes place. Programs are printed but take place other ways and other times. Midnight surprise concerts when everyone is overcome with fatigue. It is a kind of devilish magic stunt: music pulled out of a hat before or after one can Luigi Dallapiccola. Instead of India why not stay in N.Y.? Maggie should get herself posted in N.Y. I leave here to go to Milan for the “First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music.”¹⁵⁹ I rather think it will be interesting. Out of these ashes? Why doesn’t someone start understanding Satie? Merton Brown has written a beautiful new piano piece. [Rudolf] Escher, of course, and maybe Victor Legley,¹⁶⁰ a Belgian again.

I long so soon to be home again. The audiences here are getting smaller: people leaving because there is quite clearly nothing nourishing. Mr. Clark is a kind of idiot-king and his wife is a scarecrow. The Pit was ghastly. I find Mr. Gradowitz from Israel very fine,—we agreed that the ISCM should dissolve if it can only do this. He wants the next year’s festivities to take place in Tel-Aviv,—which would be conveniently near Egypt and India.

But it looks like the U.S.A. is out again next year, for “our differences” cannot be settled unless delegates arrive to settle them.

Europe is not a place now for societies. I remember with delight our meeting at Henry Cowell’s. But why not keep the money for Alan and you and Lou? These are all supported one way or another by their governments.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

May 17, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Just finished writing the article for Musical America which turned out to be difficult for me to write,¹⁶¹ so that I have not done any other writing until it was finished, and so you must forgive me for not sending a letter sooner. I am still rushed because being back in Paris and beginning to meet lots of people takes very much time and is exhausting. I got all your letters at the Express office yesterday and it took many pleasant hours to read them and thank you for all V[irgil] T[homson]’s articles and all the news. The weather here is cold and damp, but Paris is so beautiful it’s practically like being home again. I have little regard for Italy and travelling there was so unpleasant. I missed The Last Supper in Milan because the 12-tone Congress took all my time. My two new suits are beautiful, but unpressed right now because I had to stuff them into suitcases the moment I got them. Have met a marvelous old Baron through Maggie Nogueira here in Paris who knew Satie, Virgil and knows everybody, and he is a magnificent person, poor as Job’s turkey but full of a marvelous quietness and wit.¹⁶² Sonya¹⁶³ is here now and I had a telegram from Gita who is coming. Bob and Arthur are playing one of my Dances on the 24th of June at the Salle Gaveau, and lots of people are trying to wrangle private premieres of both my music and Merce’s dancing, a kind of social war to see who sees us first; it will probably result in no one doing anything. I had a nice letter from the Guggenheim people saying everything was fine and they would give me the Fellowship when I come back or whenever I want it, but that it should be when I can settle down and work for a clear year. The Herald-Tribune sent me a letter so that I can get free tickets to anything in Europe, and I received a copy of the Tiger’s Eye and was pleased to see the article looking printed.¹⁶⁴ I am going to try to get it translated and published here too. There are lots of friends here; Matta is here and having a show.¹⁶⁵ Muriel Errera and her husband, Maggie Dunham, Edwin Denby and his brother and his wife; it’s practically NYC. Sonya is living in a marvelously beautiful place near the Palais Royal but may move into our hotel which is cheap and on the Ile de St. Louis, where we stayed before. We go to the same restaurant every day and have our napkins saved there in a box on the wall; the Baron goes there too. The sun is just coming out now and last night the Seine was beautiful with a slight drizzle coming down so that you didn’t need a rain-coat. Notre Dame, everything is marvelous. I’m very happy and so glad to be away from Italy which is so money-conscious and full of ruins. In Paris everything is used, but in Rome you just look at it. I played in the [American] Academy and they had a very fancy party for everybody, a buffet dinner before the concert and then the Lord sent a hail-storm for a dramatic prelude and afterwards everything was quiet, and I think many liked the music, but one Italian lady laughed all the way through. The next day there was another concert by Andor Foldes¹⁶⁶ at the Academy, and many people had heard about my music during the day and wished they had been invited. I met the American Ambassador, and he was wearing a suit just like one I had ordered. Maggie Nogueira is going to come down from Amsterdam for the concert in June. This isn’t a very good letter, but I have to go to lunch now and will write much more often now because I don’t have to write any more articles for magazines. Did the Tribune articles appear?

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

May 20, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Just got your new letter with the picture of the cats in it. They must be charming, and I suppose you will know how to keep them from being too troublesome later on. Good luck! And thank you for sending the Herald-T[ribune]. article because by comparing it with what I wrote I am able to learn a great deal about reviewing. They only cut out four words and part of one sentence; they were the places I became sentimental. I praised the Schoenberg work very highly after the comma which is the end of the article. I’ve heard about Olin Downes’ criticism of the Sonatas but rather enjoy his disliking them so intensely.¹⁶⁷ Yesterday Merce and I gave a party for Edwin Denby’s brother and wife, the Baron Mollet whom I described in the last letter, David Dana, who is Maggie Nogueira’s son, Matta, Sonya and another girl whose name I don’t know. The whole party cost about $1, downstairs in the bar, and everybody had anything they wanted to order. Wine and liquor are very cheap here. Champagne costs about $1 a bottle, but I haven’t had any yet. After the party a French composer, Maurice Roche,¹⁶⁸ came along and we had dinner with Matta and Sonya and then went to see two surrealist plays that were marvelously acted in a little theater near St. Germain des Pres. Afterwards we walked through the Palais Royal with Sonya to her hotel. This morning I went around to agents and theaters with my letter from the Tribune saying I wanted tickets free for the Press, and they gave them to me; I can go free to anything. It’s quite a marvelous feeling. Tonight for instance I hear the Poulenc-Fournier¹⁶⁹ concert and a first performance of Poulenc’s new cello sonata. Also in the course of the day I found two pieces of Satie that I didn’t have, and you can imagine what a pleasure that was. Merce visited the Dance Archives here. We found two museums, one of Asiatic art and the other of early movies, but there wasn’t time to enjoy them. Tonight I think I’ll wear my new suit. Today when I was sitting in a cafe I began to think about new music and had some ideas. It will be such a pleasure to get to work when I do. The boat we have reservations on, but no places, is not going to sail in November so we may have the whole thing switched from the Holland-America Line to the French Line and sail on either the De Grasse or the Ile de France in October. Also I had my hair cut today and tomorrow will take a bath around the corner. The bath house is only open Thursday through Sunday. Merce has been working in the hotel room, but tomorrow he has a studio in Montmartre and will work there every morning.

Another day: The Poulenc concert was quite marvelous until they played his new cello sonata which is terribly sentimental. The audience was up in the clouds with Bach, Debussy and Stravinsky and then fell flat at the end of the concert. Afterward a bunch of us went to a cafe and Edwin Denby’s brother bought a bottle of champagne which was delicious. Tell Maro it costs about $400 to give a concert in Paris at the Salle Gaveau. What shall we do? That price includes everything, publicity, etc. It is the most beautiful hall. I’m hoping that someone will get interested and finance it for the Sonatas at least. Yesterday I sent a lot of pneumatiques (city-telegrams) to people I had introductions to, and this morning Messiaen,¹⁷⁰ the composer, telephoned and I’m to hear him play in his church Sunday. That ought to be pretty marvelous.

The weather is cold and damp here but I don’t seem to mind too much because Paris is so glorious. Today we have lunch with two friends of Lou, Mike Kazaras and his wife, and tonight a party at Lionel Abel’s, and tomorrow one at Helion’s.¹⁷¹ There gets to be the same kind of merry-go-round as in NY. And, moreover, the same people. It strongly suggests going back to N.Y. and getting to work. My new music ideas are proving more and more interesting to me, but they are so new in conception to me that I still can’t quite grasp them, and I begin to want to know whether they will work or not. I need a piano and need to work; on the other hand I’m fairly certain I can’t manage it until I get back to the river.

I think it would be better to let Merce pay me back for the heater business, because the other way seems so complicated; and then I’ll pay you. The simplest is for you to take it out of the money I left and then he just pays me. We’re very anxious to find a house which would be a cheaper way to live and work. Eating in restaurants is very expensive. This isn’t a very good letter, but it must suggest the loose-end sort of feeling I have right now, not being tourist for the moment and just beginning to meet the Frenchmen. Yesterday I took a bath, but they don’t have towels since the war, and it makes things rather complicated.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

May 27, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Another nice letter from you today and my article on the 12-tone business.¹⁷² They didn’t change a word! Would you watch for the article in Musical America: should be in their June issue. Hope you’re not having too much trouble with the apartment problem. I also had a fine letter from Lou, who is taking the job at Reed College I found for him this summer. And I just answered a letter from Virgil who wrote that my articles were “lovely.” All this makes me feel very efficient because it is hard to find time to write, since there are so many appointments that I really don’t have time to even look at Paris. The only church I’ve gone to “visit” is Notre Dame but it is next door. Everything gets increasingly musical, and very interesting. I’ve met a marvelous composer: Pierre Boulez,¹⁷³ and we talk a great deal. This afternoon we go in the country and hear my records which he hasn’t heard yet. His music is the best I’ve found in Europe and is a pure joy. I introduced him yesterday to Copland¹⁷⁴ and Bob and Arthur. I just go from one place to another and am gradually getting into the musical circles I wanted to; it takes time but is worth it. The modern music life here is much more under-ground than it is in NY. Everything takes place in homes, because the concert-public won’t listen to it yet. Next week-end Merce and I will give a program for invited people in Helion’s studio. Helion is a painter who married a daughter of Peggy Guggenheim.¹⁷⁵ Maggie Nogueira comes down from Amsterdam next week-end too. Last night we had dinner with Muriel and Guy Finck, and talked about the difference between America and Europe. There is actually not much to tell, because everything is so very much like being in New York, the big difference being that I have no place to work. Apartments are impossible to find here; there just aren’t any. People telephone all the time, leave messages, etc., same as in NY. Invitations, etc. I get terribly tired because besides running around all the time, I have always to speak French and that is exhausting because I can’t always find the words to fit my thoughts. The more I think about the apartment on the river, the more I am delighted that I had the sense to make a place which was perfect for my needs. I look forward to being home again. We definitely sail now on the Ile de France, I think Oct. 22. By the way, if you could send some towels it would be marvelous; there aren’t any that remind one of towels. I get to take a shower again today because the bath-house is open (Friday). Yesterday the shops and everything were closed because it was the Feast of the Ascension. People have been going to see Merce working and plans are starting for performances. Also dancers want to study with him. Matta just called and is arranging special performances with Schiapparelli¹⁷⁶ of our music and dance. And today already looks so crowded with activity. My music in the country, then a Mozart recording by [Roger] Desormiere, and then dinner with Matta and some experimental theatre afterwards. That’s everyday happening! If I look very aged when I get back home you’ll understand why.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

[May] 30, 1949 | Paris

Dear Peggy:

Good news: Pierre Boulez! His music is marvelous, a spirit like fire-works, every event a discovery. It is only secondarily 12-tone. Primarily it is all a matter of rhythmic “cellules.” That very contemporary musical term simply means a musical object defined only according to the durations. Rational and irrational evidences are postulated of it and then there begins a technique of variation that is very imposing. The twelve tones are then applied so as to not be chromatic or “serial” but to keep alive the individuality of each sound. Marvelous clarity and liberty of sound. 24 yrs. old.

Taking Copland to meet him this afternoon! Imaginez ca!

Boulez will have to be our foreign correspondent. I also want us to publish his music in the New Music Edition. Will shortly send a copy of his 2nd Piano Sonata to Frank W.¹⁷⁷

Merton has written a beautiful new piece, with descriptions of new things in his world. He’ll arrive in Paris shortly.

Paris is magnificent, and the musical life is superb, all underground or over the radio. Normal concert life is far less interesting than ours, but the underground is more passionate.

Didn’t see Negri:¹⁷⁸ he was off in the Lake District somewhere.

Boulez is mobile alert and precise; his thought is micro where mine is macro; studied with Messiaen and Honegger and sans contacte Webern.

I envy your being in Nevada, my favourite state. I hope you love it and get to see the country around Winemucca.¹⁷⁹ Maybe you’ll get up north to see Lou in Portland. If you do, please give him my love and also Bonnie Bird¹⁸⁰ and Lloyd and Virginia Reynolds (faculty Reed College). Virginia makes marvelous homemade bread. And weaves. And Lloyd is one of the Kings. In San Francisco, please see the painter Varda, down near Telegraph Hill. And get him to make French-fried potatoes. And in Los Angeles, Richard Buhlig, 104 S. Carondelet; Peter Yates, 1635 Michetorena (pianist and music-lover).

How good it will be to see you again. Sailing on Ile de France Oct. 22. Geeta Sarabhai is coming here from India. Maggie from Amsterdam. (She wants us to come live in Amsterdam in August, but Merce is beginning to have pupils, etc.). And everybody is arranging to see his dancing and hear the music of the prepared piano. Boulez arranges everything (I was afraid he wouldn’t like my music but he is crazy about it.)

We were wrong if we ever thought life was NYC only; we live [on] air now and of course it is everywhere. Nevertheless I am anxious to be home because I made it to be able to work in it and all the friends are there, but now there are getting to be so many here! Nothing but joy wherever you look!

[Vladimir] Woronow too in Belgium. I can get along without Dallapiccola providing we keep Puccini and Debussy, and without Messiaen too, except it was a great pleasure to hear him play the organ last Sunday and I hope again tomorrow. He goes to Tanglewood this summer, and besides helped give us Boulez.

Boulez makes his living playing the Ondes Martenot,¹⁸¹ but doesn’t like them.

Desormiere wants me to find out what piece of Ives he should play; would you ask Lou? I told him Portals of Ruggles and Integrals or Hyperprism of Varese. Send any suggestions. He is marvelously ready to do it. I hope they play Webern while I’m here.

I have the awful feeling that I’m not answering your letter properly. Pause while I read it again. I’ll tell you all about Paul as soon as I know.¹⁸² Bob and Arthur are pretty sure he will arrive for the concert. Virgil wrote but didn’t say anything about the Tiger’s Eye.¹⁸³ He said my Tribune articles were “lovely.” You can get all my ideas about the 12-tone congress and the festival from them. I can’t stand Leibowitz.¹⁸⁴ Nobody I’ve met can. Nobody likes Nigg¹⁸⁵ either. I wrote a longer article for M. America. I don’t share the enthusiasm for Rome and Italy. Utterly at home here. You can write to Hotel de Bourgogne, 31 Rue St. Louis en l’Ile, Paris IV. If I move it will only be a few doors, because I love this island. Also it turns out to be the quarter all the new French artists choose to live in. Boulez is 5 minutes away. A poet he admires on one of the Quais of the Island, etc. [Pierre] Souvtschinsky¹⁸⁶ and Boulez are arranging a private playing of the Sonatas for the 17th of June. B. and A. play on the 24th. Merce probably dances in Helion’s studio on the 10th. And, oh, I’ve gathered many rare Satie items: Ogives, La Belle Excentrique, the orchestration of Le Piege de Meduse, Genevieve de Brabant, Croquis et Agaceries, Uspud. Also on the track of the score for Socrate which is right now in England. Boulez can’t understand interest in Satie. If I had any criticism of his thought, which I don’t, it would be that he is too wrapped up in method (what I call method),—controls. Minute controls. But they result in such beautiful music chez lui.

I have to talk French a great deal and struggle like a fish out of water.

I’m gradually getting a new musical idea: it isn’t very clear yet, but it has to do with the two and three dimensional extension of the sq[uare] r[oo]t idea.¹⁸⁷ So that one could paint or sculpt instead of limn. Time as usual plus amplitude and, or, frequency.

Miss you.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

June 1, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Things are progressing very well with the giving of concerts. Pierre Boulez, the composer I admire most here, introduces me to everyone, painters poets, critics, musicians, and arranges the private concerts which I am about to give. I play on the 7th at the Conservatoire in the Salle Gounod for the class of Messiaen, whose improvising I hear each Sunday morning at the Trinite. On the 10th Merce and I give a joint program in Helion’s study near the Jardins de Luxembourg. That will be an invited audience. On the 17th I play in the home of Mme. Tezenas,¹⁸⁸ and that will again be an invited audience. Boulez is crazy about my music, and I about his. That is very pleasant. In fact everything is unbelievably delightful. Then on the 24th Bob and Arthur have their concert in the Salle Gaveau, and play one of my Dances. Merton Brown and Jack Heliker are here now from Italy, and this morning Merton and I go to Frederick Goldbeck’s to show him Merton’s new music. Goldbeck is an important critic whom I met in New York through Virgil. Last night we visited Alice B. Toklas¹⁸⁹ and saw again all the paintings of Gertrude Stein and heard conversation about all the famous people she has known. I filled out the necessary blanks for sailing in October on the Ile de France. Yesterday I got a very pleasant letter from Musical America saying they were delighted with my article because of its “vitality and validity” and that took a load off my mind because I was afraid they wouldn’t like it. It is a very funny article. The days here are magnificent right now: no rain, and beautiful white billowy clouds over the buildings. Maggie Nogueira arrives from Amsterdam tomorrow and also tomorrow I play my large records for Boulez and some other composers at the radio station. Soon I will make arrangements for a radio broadcast, but everything is better here if one doesn’t hurry too much. Matta is arranging some performance in the home of Schiaparelli too. So you can imagine how busy everything is. The days pass by quickly and with little chance for tourist activity. Now and then when I have a moment I drop into a church or look into a courtyard and am delighted. But just being in Paris is enough. I am anxious to get to the Bibliotheque Nationale and see their Satie collection to see whether I really have gotten everything, because my collection is now so nearly complete that I am greedy to have it be really complete. I meet every now and then someone who knew Satie, and get many interesting stories about him. He was such a marvelous and strange person. I must have told you about visiting the house he lived in in Arcueil. I suggested to Musical America that I write another article about Pierre Boulez the way Peggy wrote one about me. There really isn’t much more to tell and now I have to hurry to Goldbeck’s.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

[June 22, 1949] | Paris

Dear Mother and Dad:

Finally I have a piano to work on, and it’s a Steinway. It was rented by a girl I know in N.Y. and she will work in the morning, and I in the afternoons, and we will share the rent. I start this afternoon. Makes everything much better. This Friday Bob and Arthur play. This evening I go to meet Boris de Schloezer and Marina Scriabine.¹⁹⁰ With Boulez. Also arranged yesterday to do some pieces on a program in July. I rather hope that I might get a job to write for a movie, but that’s just in my mind. It’s because life is so expensive here. I think I’ll write for strings and prepared piano. Maybe a harp too, because the street the piano is on is called rue de la Harpe. I’m enclosing a slip about registered mail that John Goodwin sent me.¹⁹¹ Can you do anything about it? A new music magazine here is interested in my article that was published in Tiger’s Eye. Maybe will translate. I also have in mind slightly to make a trip to Switzerland following the Aix en Provence festival; I’ll do it if the radios there engage me to play. I’d love to see the collections of Paul Klee’s work there. There isn’t much more to say. My life is just plain music talk and hearing music and now writing music, collecting the Satie works, etc. And then eating most of the time in the little restaurant on the rue Mabillon, and walking home along the Quais. It is very, very beautiful here and the weather is delightfully cool.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

June 27, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Well, Bob and Arthur’s concert is over with; they didn’t play very well: they’ve gone down hill since their first two concerts in NY. They don’t play together, they always play loudly, and on top of that they don’t seem to believe what they play. The whole concert was rather dreary. I think they had to give away all the tickets to get an audience besides. One critic came up to me afterwards and said he wanted to thank me for my music, that I was the only one he was thanking. The whole thing is rather strange because I’ve gotten to like Arthur much more than I ever did before. I think it’s sad, because they were very fine musicians.

There have been lots of parties, and here everybody drinks champagne. It flows like water and is quite marvelous. Sometimes there are martinis, but mostly champagne, and people serve beautiful pastries and canapes and breast of chicken and ham and salads and consomme, all at just a party, not a dinner. I visited one of the Baronesses of Rothschild in an amazing house on the Avenue Foch, full of works of art. Even the chairs were museum pieces. And on the walls Goya, Memling and Hals. And such a display of food for a tea as one can scarcely imagine. Then the same day B and A’s concert and a party afterwards in a beautifully faded home on the Rue des Saints Peres. Also full of paintings and food. The same evening at midnight, but I didn’t go to it. Merce did some choreography for a ball that was held in Mme. Pompadour’s home, now owned by an Englishman, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were present. And next week I go with Mme. Tezenas to a private performance of Satie’s Socrate. In tails, and dinner with Mme. Tezenas before at 8:30. Fantastic life. There have been a number of stories and will be more, including one now. I have a piano to work on but my mind isn’t clear enough yet. To get anywhere. Last night a bunch of us went to the Circque Medrane, a beautiful single-ring circus in Montmartre. The most marvelous show, you would have loved it: ponies and horses and acrobats and dancers and clowns. And in the afternoon yesterday visited the oriental museum and saw magnificent Chinese bronzes from 14 centuries before Christ which are the most beautiful works of art I have ever seen. And then a tea at Frederick Goldbeck’s with musicians, etc. And all next week is planned already. How to breathe becomes the main problem. The same evening the Socrate is being done it turns out there will be a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The weather continues delightful, with no rain and cool. One of the main problems is taking a bath which has to be done Thurs, Fri, Sat, or Sun, but those are precisely the busiest days otherwise. Sonya’s still in Switzerland, loving it. And now I’m beginning to get on the track of some unpublished Satie mss. Tomorrow I go again to the Conservatoire to see some of his notes, etc. Hope everything goes well for you, you don’t write so much and I wonder how you are.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

June 28, 1949 | Paris

Dear Peggy:

Letters today from you, VT, and Cecil Smith, all charming. Virgil’s remark about you demands repetition: Expecting Peggy back today, all thoroughly divorced and just as good as new. And about me: Your trip and adventures are like Little Rollo in the Magic Forest. Isn’t he marvelous? Tonight I go to a party for Paul [Bowles] and so shall have an excellent opportunity to give him the clipping you sent this morning. His piece was played and received well. Bob and Arthur characteristically didn’t invite him to share the applause, and so he (uncharacteristically?) jumped over a red velvet barrier and bowed from the stage (producing a few boos by by-product). We had dinner together one night, and he is charming; but I didn’t like the music and neither did most whom I talked to, but the “public” loved it. Unless Paul changes musically radically, I am no longer interested. Souvtschinsky, e.g., said to me after the concert, thank you, and you are the only one I am thanking. Explanation: Bob and Arthur have gone down hill extraordinarily. They don’t play together anymore, have no range of dynamics, and don’t seem to mean what they play. So that you can’t tell the differen[ce] between Rieti¹⁹² and Mozart. And my piece which isn’t supposed to was full of unprepared notes, simple mistakes, generously applied. Curiously, Arthur is more and more a human being, delightful to be with; I like him personally more and more. I read today a beautiful remark by Satie in one of his notebooks at the Conservatoire: Les saints sont des modeles non surpasses. Un homme comme St. Joseph est de beaucoup superieur a Napoleon ler, a Copenic et autres genies. [“A man like St. Joseph is far superior to a Napoleon I, a Copenicus, and other geniuses.”] I’ve found lots of Satie that is nearly unknown; songs mostly, and some of the very early piano pieces published by his father. Maybe I sound terrible, but I’m against the Antheil idea. I’m convinced he is of no importance, and I don’t see why we should revive something that apparently was never of any value. How he hoodwinked so many I don’t know, but Virgil and Maurice¹⁹³ say it was because you have to know him and how he lives and what he really means, because in his music it never comes through. I’m leading a wild marvelous life practically completely musical, meeting, talking, drinking champagne, eating dinner, concerts, etc. Tomorrow Hugues Cuenod¹⁹⁴ sings the Socrate in somebody’s home, and I have to go all dressed up. The same evening Paris hears the Pierrot Lunaire, some for the first time. It turns out Leibowitz is mostly not liked here even by the twelve-toners. And really hated by the others. I’d rather like to come home sooner than November; I’d like to come home in September. And I wish someone could persuade Maro not to come over; I can’t see that it would do anything for her except lower her bank account considerably. Life is expensive and so are concerts, and the public is not prepared for modern music of our kind. Even Bob and Arthur who had planned the whole thing with strategy had to paper their house thoroughly to get an audience. And nobody liked the music. Please tell her, as I did in my letter, to rest and work and be tranquilly American. If she writes and says she will not come, I’ll come back even in August.

To Virgil Thomson

[June 29,] 1949 | Paris

Dear Virgil:

Thank you for the Satie list; I have bought many works for you including a Mercure. I haven’t run across a Piege de Meduse in piano form for you, but I do have the score for instruments for you. And now the Satie works unfold again, since I made a visit to the Society for Authors, Composers, etc.¹⁹⁵ and looked at the book in which his works were listed. It contained mention of about 15 that I have never heard of: Intermedes (Ouverture, Musique de Nuit, Chaconne et gigue) which was played over the radio here in 1944; Legende Californienne; Pain benie de la Gaite; Petit Recueil des Fetes; Allons y Chochotte; Diner des Peintres Francais; Illusion; Imperial Oxford; Stand-Wall; Transatlantique, and some others. In the morning I made a copy of a nine-measure piece called Le Prissonier Mausade which I found at the Conservatoire in mss. It seems to be near Socrate and the Nocturnes in technique and feeling. Tomorrow I meet Sauguet,¹⁹⁶ and perhaps will see him tonight because Cuenod is going to sing the Socrate in somebody’s home, and Mme. Tezenas is going to take me. Also tonight Leibowitz is giving a concert including the Pierrot Lunaire; so this evening will occupy one way or another everybody. Three important works of Satie still remain utterly hidden: Le Medecin Malgre Lui (the dialogues you often mentioned); La Musique d’Ameublement (which several say never existed, but yesterday at the Conservatoire I saw a notebook for it with all the measures marked out and the instrumentation but no notes); and Paul et Virginie (which is supposed to be in [Jean] Cocteau’s hands; I have written to Cocteau but so far he has not answered).

Naturally very pleased that you are writing a piano sonata and that my portrait is in it.¹⁹⁷

I tried several days to compose and couldn’t. When I’m not actually trying I think I have lots of ideas, but when I begin to work, they disappear.

In your letter you say ‘“Send your Aix reports”; should I write several?

I am going to try to get a photograph of the Socrate score; but at present it is in England for performances there. It is quite shocking to realize that there is only one copy in the world and that it might accidentally be destroyed. I shall certainly use that as an argument with Eschig¹⁹⁸ to try and get it.

I may write an article about Boulez for Cecil Smith; he liked my Festivals article.

I would like to come home sooner: in September. I am anxious to be working.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

July 8, 1949 | Paris

Today I shall go to see whether I can get a boat to return sooner than Oct. 22. I hope to come back now in late August or early September.

The other day there were marvelous fireworks at Versailles in the Bassin de Neptune. I have never seen such a breathtakingly beautiful display. Maybe when I get back I will be able to describe it. There were even waterfalls of fire while fountains were playing with colored lights thrown on them! And the afternoon before the fireworks spent walking through the gardens (and the fountains were working).

Yesterday had lunch with Henri Michaux,¹⁹⁹ one of the important (admired) poets here. He loves the Orient too + music and made the most constructive criticisms of my work I have yet received. We may collaborate together on the opera I have always wanted to write: The Life of Mila Repa, the Tibetan Yogi. I will have lunch with him again next week.

Monday we give a performance in the Vieux Columbier on a program arranged by the French Radio.

This morning I went to hear oriental music again in the Museé Guinet. I found out this afternoon that all the boats are full up in September, and unless there is a cancellation I will have to stay until Oct. 22. Today I got my ticket to go south. I leave here on the 19th in the evening for Toulon. Muriel will pick me up there + take me to

Les Bois Saint Joseph

Carqueiranne Var. (address from 20th to 24th)

Then on the 24th we drive to Aix-en-Provence (you can reach me there Poste Restante) where I stay until the first of August. After that I may go to Switzerland if I can get one of the radios to invite me to play.

Michaux gave me one of his books that has just been translated into English, A Barbarian in Asia (New Directions). You would enjoy reading it I think. I keep wondering where Geeta is. A cable from her long ago + then no word at all.

Most everybody is leaving in August (leaving Paris).

A lovely letter today from Maro. She insists on coming over here even though I tried to persuade her not to.

Was interviewed again yesterday and also heard that the French ISCM has voted to have some of my music on their programs next year.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

[ca. July 12, 1949] | Paris

Dearest Peggy,

Your letter [arrived] and it is good to hear that you are back, apartment in shape and that you are going to write music. The summer in N.Y. is marvelous for writing music. And the loneliness is not the least ingredient. I met a poet—Georges Huguet—who’s off to be narco-analyzed; he has no loneliness and no longer any ability to use loneliness.

Paul is back in Tangiers; Bob and Arthur are in Italy.

For some reason I have not yet understood, I seem to be staying here until October; no boats, and my apartment is not mine until then.

Next week I go to Aix-en-Provence and will write an article about the festival there. I shall eat figs and try to avoid garlic. I am going to try to visit Avignon, Tarascon, Les Baux + St. Remy (an Alice Toklas itinerary). Geeta Sarabhai has been married + is coming to Switzerland and then Paris in August. Maggie wants me to come to Amsterdam with the Baron Mollet in August.

I do not find enough time to be simple and quiet, and so I really don’t know anything about what I am doing. Now and then a terrible fatigue settles down and then of course I wait. When I try to figure out an equilibrium which takes New York—Paris as starting point, I don’t get very far. My greatest difficulty recently is with Henri Michaux whose Barbarian in Asia is a New Directions book. He says my ideas and feelings are Chinese rather than Hindu; all that mystifies me, because our nowness is where we begin and the air.

I haven’t written music for so long. If only I knew how I would sit down and do it.

For the Lemonade: suggestion: Satie’s Genevieve de Brabant. You can get it in the Public Library.

I am sad because I got to know Pierre Boulez, the composer whose music I most admire, as well as I could,—but you cannot say we are friends. I speak French all the time but it is still a barrier. To not understand slang is to separate yourself. When I speak all is tension + no relaxation.

Merce had a great success at the Vieux Columbier a few days ago. He did 3 dances on a program sponsored by the Radio. The audience was marvelous and provided an ovation. We were very pleased. It was a hot night, too, + the people had whistled and booed others off the stage.

I hear that the French ISCM has decided they want some of my music on their programs next year.

In other words, both for Merce and for me, many things here are suggested and happen; but none of it strikes me with an enthusiastic response. Our life in New York is incomparably more open and healthy.

I feel like a swimmer who must swim under water longer than he thinks he can. Even the necessity of finding more Satie has disappeared in me. Maybe a clarification will come. But certainly not until I get home.

I am jealous of your N.Y. loneliness; write beautiful music.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

July 13, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother + Dad:

This evening we give another performance, in the Vieux Columbier, and all day there were rehearsals. Tanaquil LeClercq (who was Merce’s partner in The Seasons) is dancing with him again and Betty Nichols too.²⁰⁰ Everybody was very happy at the rehearsal and I think it will go well tonight.

Today is the first really hot day. Everybody looks for shade. The hotel is cool and so is the theater, fortunately. More and more Americans arrive all the time so that one is continually thinking about America + I for one wish to be back. I think of all simple things like your garden, or the view from my apt.

I miss your letters so much; they never come anymore. I’m having some beautiful shoes made, because I rarely see any I really like and one day I saw these in a shop (a model), and I decided to get them. They are light colored: a kind of greyish-yellow.

This morning a letter from you and it was good to hear, but I am sorry about the weather. The performance in the Vieux Columbier was a marvelous success; the audience was thrilling. I have never played nor Merce danced for such an audience. They had booed + whistled others off the stage and it was a hot, crowded theater. When we came along they were like one person quiet and concentrated and when we finished a wild ovation. It was a very exciting experience. All our friends were very happy. And everyone says we must now give a large public concert in October. But there is the money problem.

Today I go to have lunch with Michaux again, the poet. I have been reading his books + unfortunately am not as enthusiastic about them as I had hoped to be.

Geeta arrives soon—married. I may go to Switzerland to see her after Aix. The Aix people asked me to give a lecture, but I refused because of my language difficulty. Merce stays here; he is teaching all the time + has many pupils. I also may go to Amsterdam later in August.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

July 23, 1949 | Carquinanne, France

Dearest Mother + Dad:

In the midst of 5 days at Carquinanne near Toulon. It is very quiet and the view is beautiful: very much like California, there are even eucalyptus trees! And all the flowers I connect with Marge and Walter’s garden.²⁰¹ Muriel and Guy who have taken this house are very wealthy but eat practically nothing so that, what with swimming and fresh air, we are very hungry (I brought Tanaquil LeClercq and Betty Nichols with me). Also conversation is difficult because there are no common interests. We swim and dine silently and then there are naps, and I am working on another article (about Boulez’s music). And I just finished reading a book in French. Actually it is quiet and that is good. Tomorrow night there will be a village fête and we will go, and then the next day Muriel and Guy will drive me up to Aix-en-Provence. By that time I will be starving. I had hoped that there would be a bathtub with hot water (which I haven’t seen since before Palermo); there is a bath, but no hot water. I spend the time avoiding the sun, mosquitoes, etc. And there is the same incessant insect sound that was around Bl. Mtn. College.

More and more I am convinced that I will stay put when once I get back.

Although now, by leaving Paris, I find I have made many friends there.

Hope the weather is not too hot.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

August 8, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Tomorrow the apartment begins—53 rue de la Harpe but I think the best address would be care of American Express or 31 rue St. Louis en l’Ile as before,—because after a month I will come back here unless a boat turns up sooner. I will begin to work. I expect there may be difficulties at first—the transition from not working to working; but if I manage to get started on something which I can continue in New York I will be more than satisfied. Geeta should arrive this week; I am anxious to see her. Otherwise Paris is relatively quiet and I should be able to work. The weather is not hot at present only heavy,—and threatening storms. I am enclosing a few things for the scrap-book. One that George Avakian sent me from America.²⁰² Sunday I visited the large zoo here which is very beautiful. They use moats instead of fences and that makes the animals seem less closed-in. The monkeys have a marvelous cliff-dwelling + they are very funny + attract large crowds.

It will be fine to be a composer again or at least get up in the morning in the same place where a piano is. Also I have found a store where there is peanut-butter. Coffee, salad-oil + sugar + rice are rationed. Otherwise everything is available. What I miss most is Dad’s cold remedy.²⁰³

I worry about the bad article I wrote about Aix. Maybe they will decide not to print it. I took the whole thing so seriously + after all it was just a pleasant summer festival.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

August 16, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother + Dad:

Now it is quite hot and I hope that means that you are having cooler weather. My article about Aix appeared here + I send it to you for the scrap book. A Dutch composer I met in Aix is here now and may arrange a concert in Holland for me; I also ran into André Souris²⁰⁴ from Brussels who may arrange a public concert in Belgium. I am composing a little but not well. At least I have enough the feeling of what composing is so that I look forward to next year and imagine that music will come. Hope.

Maro arrives late this month + Geeta not until Sept. 15. It is hot + I am not very sensible. Tonight Maggie Dunham (friend of Virgil’s) comes to dinner. I am cooking an Arabian dish called cous-cous. And tomato salad with olives + celery in it + radishes. Beautiful wine which is dated but only 200 francs a bottle (which is about 60¢). And then ice cream which they put up in boxes without dry ice + it stays for 3 hours.

I’m hoping to get a coffee grinder to bring back to America. Gatti,²⁰⁵ the Italian poet (friend of Boulez), gave me some coffee but it needs to be ground.

To Maro Ajemian

[Postmarked August 20, 1949] | 31 rue St. Louis en l’Ile, Paris IVe

Dearest Maro:

Your lovely letter arrived and was a pleasure. I have many times thought of writing, especially around the concert time; I had visions even of sending flowers or some touch of Europe, but I didn’t, because everything gets involved here as it does everywhere else, except Nevada, and then it seemed to me that I remembered writing to you earlier and getting no response, but that is a rather unnecessary reason.

I’ll see about the Salle Gaveau dates very soon and let you know. It is without doubt the best place to play. Very soon I’ll know about the sound of the prepared piano there because Bob and Arthur are playing their concert on the 24th there (June); I rather think it will work very well there. It is such a beautiful hall; it reminds one of music.

I haven’t met Louise Dyer yet.

As you can see I’m methodically answering your letter: next point:

The program you mention is good: Riegger, Webern, Hovhaness, Leibowitz, and Bartok, except for the Leibowitz. He is even less liked here than in New York. I don’t see why you don’t do the Ives Sonata with Anahid. Another good idea would be to get me to write a piece for violin and prepared piano to give you as an arrival present.

My contract with the Contemporary Music people in Amsterdam was about the Sonatas, but I haven’t heard from them again and I don’t know about it anymore. I may spend August in Amsterdam.

Otherwise I shall stay in Paris. There are no special commitments yet in October, but they may develop.

I am playing the Sonatas in a home the day after tomorrow for a bunch of composers. Everybody is quite delighted with the prepared piano. I played for Messiaen’s class; and they’ve heard the records I brought along, and Merce danced in a painter’s studio before an audience that STOOD UP and was delighted afterward. 20 people stayed and wandered out to dinner together, it looks like a banquet, and then to a bar and stayed till midnight. The concert was at 5. My favorite composer here is Boulez; in Holland, Escher; in Belgium, Woronoff and Legley.

I have no particular desire for a public event, although if we figured out something special, it would be fun. In many ways, I should prefer to still be in America composing, and not to have come at all, and many times I have thought to write and warn you not to come. If you think of it as an investment in the future, I would perhaps [say] yes: although I should prefer going to the west of the USA. It is expensive, difficult to get into the life of, and rather alert to its own values rather than to the ones we know. Life has been so difficult for them, and is now getting better, that I doubt whether they like to be interrupted by outsiders. Edwin calls it the French National Honor. But Merce says Paris is pretty.

However, I suppose you’re determined to come over. And how much I should like to be home again right now! Merce says this is a depressing letter; I don’t mean it that way. It seems to me that we all have a very fine musical life going along in New York, and I want to get back in it.

Another day: I feel no differently so am going to send this rather than nothing. I played yesterday and it was a “great success.” But the real success lies in staying home and getting some work done quietly. How easily aimless everything becomes when one leaves “home.”

[handwritten] I am definitely all for staying in America. There is nothing to be gained here really. The whole thing is frightfully diverting + expensive in time money energy etc.

Forgive black emotion.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

August 20, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and David:

You will be happy to know as I am that I’ve finished the first movement of the String Quartet.²⁰⁶ It is a little over 3½ minutes; the second movement will be a little over 4½; the third 10 minutes; + the last only about 1½. Without actually using silence, I should like to praise it.

This piece is like the opening of another door: the possibilities implied are unlimited and without the rhythmic structure I found by working with percussion and the newness, freshness of sound I found in the prepared piano it would be impossible. Now it seems easy, and I am grateful that it happened that I could write here—even if the whole work doesn’t get finished by the time I have to leave the apartment + piano. I still have it started which was, as I wrote to you, what I hoped for. That has acted too to start a clarification of my ideas out of which may come another article about the difference between Europe + America + the parallel needs to destroy and construct. Our ignorance which we protect is so that we can invent. Dad understands that, I am sure.

This pen-point is no good.

If they don’t publish the article on Aix, would you call Mr. Francis Perkins at the Tribune, explain that the article was published Aug. 13 in the Paris edition and that I would like to have a check in payment. And what should I do about it?

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

August 27, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

The $100 arrived and thank you for sending it. Maro arrives today,—I was able to reserve rooms for her and her mother in a very beautiful hotel in the gardens of the Palais Royal. I shall try to meet her boat-train this afternoon.

I have run into problems with my new piece. I have not yet found the way for it to be a String Quartet. It is as though I had decided to write a Str Q. + then without realizing it had written something else that I don’t know about.

Since writing above much has happened. Maro + her mother arrived + at first were very disappointed with my choice of hotel which Mrs. Ajemian said was like a furnished room. Actually it is like a poem but I suppose it is difficult for some to sleep in poems. I have spent the last 2 days helping them in every conceivable way: trunks, the concert, changing money on the black market (Mrs. Ajemian is very “Cagey”) (having brought in a lot of dollars which she didn’t declare), and the funny thing is they let me pay for everything, taxis, etc.—which as you know I can’t afford to do. I am simply going to stop seeing them as much, much as I am fond of them. Today, Mrs. A. finally realized how beautiful the hotel is + decided to stay there.

And my music solved itself—is a quartet + I am happy about it + then your letter saying my Aix article was good + apparently it was because Minna Lederman²⁰⁷ wrote saying it was my best article so far too. All that is a pleasure.

I just got the $100. It is apparently very slow arriving (probably not by air). I did get the Aix letters. Underlinings to answer your capitals.

It is marvelous to see Maro here + it is only Mrs. Ajemian who is so unreasonable + money mad. I don’t see why she’s decided to take advantage of me.

Tomorrow morning I will finish the instrumentation of the first movement + then in the evening there are fireworks again on the Seine to celebrate the Liberation.

I am very happy but after 12 hours of trunks when I wanted to be composing I couldn’t help expressing my feelings.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

August 30, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Peggy:

I am so happy now. Maro is here and we often talk of you, and I have finished the first mvt. of a string quartet and the second mvt. is started and the 3rd and 4th envisaged in shape and feeling. Two ideas I found in Max Jacob²⁰⁸ and Guillaume Apollinaire²⁰⁹ served + serve to point the directions. “C’est par le silence que l’exterieur descendre en vous … Rien de bon ne sort que ou silence. Qui fera l’éloge ou silence?” and for the second mvt: “Ils vous entrâver ont tout vivants et éveillés dans le monde nocturne et fermé des songes.”²¹⁰ Thank God for the month of August which each year is so good. Max Ernst²¹¹ is here but I haven’t seen him yet. Merton Brown leaves next Tuesday for N.Y. + then to Vermont to recuperate from Europe. I am just as full of desire to be there as soon as possible—still no boats. I have a piano for only one more week + I am afraid it will be awful to wake up + not be able to continue working on the Quartet. But then people will be coming back + I can continue Satie-search + pay my respects to more composers. So far have ignored [Georges] Auric, Nigg and not seen enough of Sauguet, whom I like. And then of course more Boulez + maybe concerts in Belgium.

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

[Shortly after August 30, 1949] | Paris

Dearest Peggy,

I miss your letters and hope one is about to arrive. Maro is langorously here (very devoted to N[otre-] D[ame] which she has not yet entered). I have finished 1st mvt. of Quartet and am pleased with it. Boulez has finished a Quartet (worked a year and ½ on it) which is going to nourish everybody for some time to come. I will one way or another bring it back with me. Billy [Masselos] must play his 2nd Sonata (and his 1st). Such marvelous music. I think it pushes to the frontier as far as our capacity to respond goes. Of course that capacity moves even as we sleep. In the face of his music I am somewhat in danger of Colin McPheeitis²¹² (giving in to exterior truth); my own ideas fortunately still take the form of straws to which I cling. How glorious it is, music, rising up any where any time strong as though new-born.

In five days or so I will be again without piano + full sail in a sea of distractions. Andre Souris may arrange a concert in Brussels + I may play for radio here, etc.

Maro leaves to take the London temperature sometime this week. Merce is mysteriously ill. Jack + Merton are déjàpartis. I f[oun]d a book all about music in the light of St. Augustine + dedicated to Arthur Lowrié (good friend of Varèse).

To Peggy Glanville-Hicks

[Undated, postmarked September 6, 1949] | Paris

I find another reason why psychoanalysis is bad especially in America. Our problem there is construction (the need here is destruction,—nothing is vital here unless it destroys + psychoanalysis was discovered here as a way to destroy—further split apart). I have more to say is this direction, but it has begun to clear up in my thinking—the America-Europe problem (I am happier too). When we have difficulty understanding Europe it is because they need precisely the opposite of what we need. And I believe we are right because we are affirmative, whereas only negation works here. They keep expecting something from ashes, where we have only to plant to produce growth.

I have two rules for overcoming neuroses. If with other people, be with them, rather than alone; if alone, be single and pointed + luminescent + not back of or in front of where you are. So many Americans are neurotic, but I understood the problem the other day when I met a very charming but neurotic Dutch girl. She had to be alone when with others, + I am sure when alone she couldn’t find the center. I am writing a String Quartet. If I don’t get back now it is all right; I feel strong again.

I saw Nadia²¹³ but only for an instant. Please stay with us and don’t go away to India. Geeta arrives 15th of Sept. here. Saw Jolivet²¹⁴ twice.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

September 19, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother and Dad:

Gita gave me some beautiful material but it turns out not for a suit but for some shirts. Yesterday we went to see some new paintings by Miro.²¹⁵ The day before we visited Auric the composer and he suggested another way to find some of Satie’s music that I have not yet found. Through Gita’s sister Geera, I met Max Bill, a Swiss painter + friend of Albers to whom I had written about concerts in Switzerland, but then lost interest in. The result now is that I may play in Zurich on the 15th of October shortly before sailing on the 22nd. Tomorrow I call the French radio about playing here.

I have also begun picking up presents here and there. The more I think of the difficulties and expense of your fixing up the apartment before I get back the less it pleases me. It would be so easy for me to get to work on it when I get back. Did I tell you the Calder movie people telephoned me from N.Y. in the middle of the night recently?²¹⁶ And then sent a friend of theirs to see me here to make sure I’d write some music for them? I don’t know whether the Guggenheim Foundation will permit it. However, we’ll see.

To Herbert Matter²¹⁷

[Undated, postmarked September 27, 1949] | Paris

Dear Herbert:

Thank you for your very kind letter. My plans rather indicate sailing on the 22nd of October and arriving just before the first of November (Ile de France).

A number of things make that seem right. I may play for the radio here, in Switzerland and in Brussels. Articles are being published in translation which I want to proof-read. I still have details in my work on Satie and young French composers to see people about, etc.

If you can arrange to let me write the music when I return I imagine I can get the Guggenheim people to agree. Explain that after all the world continues. When there is now Autumn there is Winter and then Spring comes. And 10 yrs. later things appear to have been less exigent.

I am glad to hear the film is in good shape and I am sure it wd. be a fantastic pleasure to work on it.

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

October 5, 1949 | Paris

Dearest Mother + Dad:

An astonishing offer today to control all the sound + music of a large Marshall Plan²¹⁸ exhibition here (in the Grand Palais) in March. I would be able to collaborate with technicians to my heart’s content + be paid somewhere between $600 and $1000 for roughly 3 months’ work. I have not accepted it yet. It would mean staying here at least through March + possibly on thru the Spring. Also many other things which I forget in view of this large one such as articles in England, here, + Switzerland and also a painter wants to collaborate with me on a “project” he has in mind. And a poet on an opera. Etc. Etc. The Marshall Plan idea however interests me very much because I would have such problems as 5 movies shown at once in a single room (audience in middle) for which I suggested “space music,” sounds coming from different directions to make a single whole. Now that I think of it not at all different from what happens in a cathedral. But then the other problem—to make music for separate exhibitions that are on a path be individual + yet connected (like a melody) is marvelous. All my Fr[ench] friends want me to stay + do it. But as I say I have not decided. If I stayed I wd. have to arrange with the Guggenheim to begin sending me money until this gets started and I would have to be examined to see if I’m a Communist (takes 2 wks). I’d have to have an apt. + piano—everything that I have in N.Y. Your letter just arrived saying apartment is freshly painted and I am drawn to come back as planned. What I don’t know is this: is the Marshall idea an only opportunity or is it one of many that will start coming to me? I wd. be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do in 1940 when I wrote letters + saw film people in Los Angeles.

Please reply quickly (I have to give them a quick decision).

To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

October 8, 1949 | Paris

A quick note to let you know I refused the Marshall Plan idea. And will arrive as scheduled (Ile de France) unless the Meredith people find me a cancellation on boat or plane in which case I would cable to you. Am out of money again + anxiously looking for money you sent. However your letters suggest you are in trouble financially (I hope not badly). Merce paid the heater business through money his father has been sending him regularly. I am sorry to hear the apartment was badly handled by Goodwin (everybody but oneself so handles a place). However, theoretically the apt. is easily put back in shape + I am in no hurry. After all I lived 4 months in it with brick dust, etc. I shall just slowly get it back in shape.

These last days in Paris are full of activity and most marvelous. Maro’s concert tomorrow. Today a rehearsal of a Kafka play + this afternoon I visit the Comtess of Polignac (Satie mss.) Yesterday visited Brancusi,²¹⁹ who knew Satie + had dinner with Rollo Myers (Satie book²²⁰) (which I am reviewing) + Goldbeck (who’s translating my Tiger’s Eye article). (Will also be translated into Polish.)