Читать книгу The Selected Letters of John Cage - John Cage - Страница 12
Оглавление1. Don Sample, American poet and artist, with whom Cage cohabitated for a time in Los Angeles after his sojourn in Europe.
2. Adolph Weiss (1891–1971), American composer and bassoonist, the first American musician to study with Arnold Schoenberg. He became Cage’s first composition teacher.
3. American pianist Richard (Moritz) Buhlig (1880–1952) gave the first American performance of Schoenberg’s op. 11. He championed such European modernists as Ferruccio Busoni and Béla Bartók, and such American composers as Ruth Crawford and Henry Cowell.
4. Henry Cowell (1897–1965), experimental American composer, music theorist, pianist, and publisher, one of Cage’s closest colleagues. The rhythmic and harmonic concepts in his New Musical Resources (1930) exerted profound influence on experimental composers. He was married to the American ethnographer Sidney (Robertson) Cowell (1903–1995).
5. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Austrian composer, music theorist, and teacher, leader of the Second Viennese School, who numbered among his European students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and among his American students Lou Harrison and John Cage. Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, which became a widely influential compositional method making use of an ordered series of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. His name is strongly associated with dodecaphony. Among his writings is Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1957). See Cage’s letter to Adolph Weiss dated [May 1935] for an account of their first meeting, page 20.
6. (Sophie) Pauline (Gibling) Schindler (1893–1977), American writer, editor, and lecturer who specialized in architecture and the visual arts. During her marriage to the Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler (1887–1953), she hosted salons at their Kings Road House in Los Angeles, which were attended by Southern California’s artistically minded, leftist intelligentsia. She was at the helm of two central California publications—The Carmelite (Carmel) and Dune Forum (Oceano Dunes)—and frequently reviewed local cultural events. Cage’s article “Counterpoint” first appeared in Dune Forum 1, no. 2 (Feb. 15, 1934). Schindler is the dedicatee of Cage’s Composition for Three Voices (1934), a chromatic work that maintains extreme distances between the repetitions of individual tones of the twenty-five tone ranges of the instruments.
7. A total of twenty-eight letters between Cage and Schindler survive, all written while Schindler was based in Ojai and separated from her husband. See Maureen Mary, ed., “Letters: The Brief Love of John Cage for Pauline Schindler, 1934–35,” ex tempore 8, no. 1 (Summer 1996).
8. Mark Schindler, Pauline’s twelve-year-old son.
9. Pat O’Hara, Pauline’s lover, a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.
10. Joseph Achron (1886–1943) and William Grant Still (1895–1978), American composers active in Los Angeles in the 1930s who championed the use of ethnic elements in composition.
11. Xenia (Andreyevna) Kashevaroff (1913–1995), daughter of the archpriest of the Eastern Orthodox Russian-Greek Church of Alaska, a former art student at Reed College.
12. Properly, Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky (1864–1941), Russian expressionist painter, a key member of the New Munich Artist’s Association, The Blue Rider, and, later, The Blue Four, championed by Galka Scheyer (see note 28). The letter reads:
I cannot write in German or speak German, but I am very happy because I bought one of your paintings.
Now I have it.
I write music. You are my teacher.
I would like to write more, but I cannot express all the things I want to say in German.
It was number 116.
13. Bertha McCord Knisely, music critic for the Los Angeles weekly Saturday Night and a supporter of the composer Harry Partch (see note 339).
14. Lucretia Cage (née Harvey; 1885–1968), whose first piece for the Los Angeles Times, under the by-line Crete Cage, appeared on October 2, 1934. When her husband’s job for the U.S. Army necessitated a move to New Jersey, she resigned, her last piece appearing on February 14, 1939.
15. Likely three of Weiss’s 7 Songs (to texts by Emily Dickinson): 2. Cemetery, 3. The Railway Train, and Mysteries, performed by Mary Bell, soprano, and the New World String Quartet. They were released on the New Music Quarterly Recordings label, an adjunct operation to Cowell’s New Music Quarterly publication, in 1934.
16. Calista Rogers, a favorite singer among such Southern California composers as William Grant Still and Harry Partch.
17. Wendell Hoss (1892–1980), founder of the Los Angeles Horn Club and the International Horn Society, best known for his excellent transcription of the Bach Cello Suites.
18. Cage refers to intermittent work for his inventor father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), whose projects over the years ranged from submarines and internal combustion engines to radio (a crystal set that could be plugged into an ordinary electric light system) and an “Invisible Ray Vision System” (for seeing in the dark).
19. Cowell’s New Music Society advocated the work of contemporary composers across the Americas. Beginning in 1927, Cowell began publishing scores by young composers in his New Music Quarterly.
20. Cage refers to Pro Musica, a concert series that presented Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3, op. 30, performed by the Abas Quartet.
21. Formed in 1931 by a group of Jewish musicians and scholars in New York City and formally known as the America-Palestine Music Association of Musical Sciences. The organization became known as Mailamm, the Hebrew version (in an acronym) of its English title.
22. Kitaro Nyokyo Tamada reportedly ran a roadside fruit stand in Cowell’s Los Angeles neighborhood. Discovering that Tamada played the shakuhachi, Cowell took up the instrument and composed The Universal Flute, which he dedicated to his new friend. Cowell organized concerts by local Japanese-American performers, many of whom would be interned during the war years. Cage organized a concert for Tamada at Cowell’s home on April 13, 1935.
23. George Tremblay (1911–1982), Canadian-born American composer ardently devoted to Arnold Schoenberg and the twelve-tone method of composition.
24. The Reverend Andrew Petrovich Kashevaroff (1863–1940), longtime pastor of the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Juneau. He was married to Martha Bolshanin of Sitka, with whom he had six children. From 1920 he also served as curator of the Alaska State Library and Museum and wrote many articles on Alaska’s history and ethnology.
25. Cave played for the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and, later, the short-lived Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra.
26. Properly, Chautauqua, an idyllic town in western New York, roughly eighty miles from Buffalo; home to the historic Chautauqua Institution.
27. John Cage and Xenia Kashevaroff were married before the Hon. Henry C. Kelly, duly recorded by J. G. Livington, clerk of the Superior Court of the State of Arizona in and for Yuma County, on June 7, 1935. Witnesses were Anna C. Molloy and Fama E. Townsend.
28. Galka Scheyer (b. Emelie Esther Scheyer, 1889–1945), German-American painter, art dealer, and art collector who promoted the work of The Blue Four—Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee—which kindled Cage’s early enthusiasm in these artists. She and Pauline Schindler co-created art exhibitions and lecture series for various art venues along the West Coast.
29. Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), American composer and music critic. He was best known for the operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), with libretti by Gertrude Stein, and for his film scores for The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Louisiana Story (1948), the latter winning the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune (1940–1954) and was an early champion of Cage. Although their friendship did not survive Cage’s book-length study of Thomson’s life and music, written at Thomson’s request, Cage acknowledged his debt to Thomson to the end of his life.
30. Properly, Thomson’s Five Phrases from the Song of Solomon for soprano and percussion (1926), scored for soprano and percussion.
31. Cage was on faculty at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington, from September 1938 through the summer of 1939, employed as both composer and accompanist for the class Creative Composition and Percussion Instruments and for classes in modern dance taught by Bonnie Bird (1914–1995). Other faculty members included Margaret Jansen and Doris Denison, both of whom played in his percussion ensemble.
32. Johanna Beyer (1888–1944), German-American composer and pianist well represented in Cage’s early percussion programs.
33. Lou (Silver) Harrison (1917–2003), American composer known for incorporating elements of non-Western music and exploring just intonation and microtones. He was a student of Cowell, Schoenberg, and, later, K. P. H. Notoprojo (aka K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat and Pak Cokro). Several of Harrison’s early works were written for percussion, including his Fifth Simfony (1939).
34. The New School for Social Research in New York, founded in 1919, where Cowell early on taught a course titled Music of the World’s Peoples.
35. H(enry) A(llan) Moe (1894–1975), American administrator and humanist; in turn the first secretary, then administrator, and finally president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1925–1963); also the first director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
36. Cage had applied for a composer position with the Federal Music Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, but instead was given a job as a recreation counselor. He worked variously in this capacity, but usually with an emphasis on music.
37. Properly, teponaztli, a slit drum used in Central Mexico, traditionally made out of hollow hardwood logs.
38. Mills College in Oakland, California, where Cage worked as an accompanist, performed, and presented some of his work for the first time, including Second Construction (July 18, 1940), Dance Music for Elfrid Ide (July 27, 1941), and Fads and Fancies in the Academy (July 27, 1941). Cage’s ill-fated efforts to establish a Center for Experimental Music at Mills College are legendary.
39. Charles (Edward) Ives (1874–1954), American modernist composer, one of the first to achieve international renown for his extreme originality. He was among the first to experiment with such techniques as polytonality, polyrhythms, tone clusters, aleatoricism, and microtonality.
40. This concert took place on January 8, 1940, at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where the Cage Percussion Players (John Cage, Xenia Cage, Doris Denison, and Margarete Jansen) performed works by Cage (Quartet, 1935), Johanna Beyer, Ray Green, Lou Harrison, and William Russell. The same program was given at the University of Montana in Missoula (Jan. 9, 1940) and Whitman College (Jan. 11, 1940). On February 14, 1940, the ensemble presented a program at Reed College that included the premiere of Cage’s Second Construction.
41. Peter Yates (1909–1976), long-time associate editor of Arts and Architecture (1940–1967) and founder (with his wife, Frances Mullen) of the concert series Evenings on the Roof, which took place on the roof of the Yates’s Rudolf Schindler–designed home in Los Angeles and which gave contemporary composers the opportunity to hear their works performed. Yates had long associations with many important European and American composers of his time.
42. Living Room Music (1940), dedicated to “Xenia,” for percussion and speech quartet, in three movements, the first and third to be played on such everyday household items as magazines, a table-top, books, window frames, etc. The text of the popular second movement, “The World Is Round,” is by Gertrude Stein. Cage’s Living Room Music makes obvious reference to Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement, or “Furniture Music,” the term coined by Satie in 1917.
43. Cage and Harrison composed Double Music (1941), a percussion quartet for which Cage wrote parts 1 and 3 and Harrison wrote parts 2 and 4, each working independently. Instruments used include bells, brakedrums, sistra, gongs, tam-tams, and thundersheet.
44. Percy Grainger (1882–1961), Australian composer, pianist, and folksong collector. Grainger was one of Cowell’s most outspoken defenders during Cowell’s incarceration on a morals conviction, providing him a job upon his release from San Quentin prison in June 1940.
45. Marian Van Tuyl (1907–1987), American dance educator and performer who founded the dance department at Mills College in Oakland, California (1938–1970). She edited and published Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance (1951–1970). Her best-known collaboration with Cage is Fads and Fancies in the Academy (1940), originally subtitled A Gentle Satire on Progressive Education; less known is her contribution to a short experimental film, Horror Dream (1947), directed by Hy Hirsh and Sidney Peterson, which used a score by Cage drawn from his Imaginary Landscape series.
46. William Russell (1905–1992), American composer, among the first to integrate African, Caribbean, and Asian instruments as well as found objects and jazz elements into his compositions. Russell’s career as a composer was short, his list of works for percussion equally so: eight compositions in all, nearly all between 1932 and 1940.
47. Lester Horton (1906–1953), American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. He formed the Horton Dance Group (1934–1944) and, with Bella Lewitzky, the Dance Theater of Los Angeles (1946–1950). His best known works are his “choreodramas,” including Salome, which occupied him for nearly twenty years (1934–1953).
48. Gordon Webber (1909–1965), Canadian abstract artist, a student of László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus (later School of Design) in Chicago. In 1940 at Mills College in Oakland, California, Cage gave a percussion program in which dancers were replaced by moving lights created by Webber, who was also in residence.
49. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt (1877–1948), American educator, from 1916 to 1943 president of Mills College.
50. Rhythmicon (aka Polyrhythmophone), the first electronic drum (“rhythm”) machine, created by the Russian inventor Léon Theremin (b. Lev Sergeyevich Termen; 1896–1993), on commission from Henry Cowell. The instrument could produce up to sixteen different simultaneous rhythms—a periodic base rhythm on a selected fundamental pitch and fifteen progressively more rapid rhythms—each associated with one of the ascending notes of the fundamental pitch’s overtone series.
51. László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1968), Hungarian painter and photographer who advocated integrating technology and the arts. Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937–1938), he maintained his position when its name was changed in 1939 to the School of Design, where Cage taught in 1941–1942.
52. Lucille (“Lucie”) Bigelow Rosen (1891–1968), one of Léon Theremin’s U.S. supporters who became an adept thereminist and gave performances throughout the United States and Europe. She named an instrument Theremin constructed for her the September Theremin because it was in September (1938) that he was mysteriously whisked back to Russia and interred in a Siberian labor camp. The September Theremin was the most advanced instrument Theremin had built to date and is today on display at Caramoor’s Rosen House, alongside a Moog Music Etherwave Theremin.
53. Edgard (or Edgar) Varèse (1883–1965), French-born composer known as the father of electronic music for his use of new instruments and electronic resources. He emphasized timbre and rhythm over melody and harmony and invented the term “organized sound,” by which he meant that timbres and rhythms could be grouped together, subliminating into a wholly new definition of music.
54. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864–1953), American pianist and music patron, especially devoted to chamber works. Among her lasting achievements was the Berkshire Music Festival in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, out of which grew the Berkshire Symphonic Festival at Tanglewood.
55. Luigi Russolo (1883–1947), Italian Futurist painter and composer, author of the manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). His “noise concerts” in 1913 and after World War I established him as one of the first “noise” music experimenters and a theorist of electronic music. Arguing that the Industrial Revolution had given men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds, he developed a taxonomy of “noise-sounds” and designed noise-generating devices he called Intonarumori.
56. Harold Burris-Meyer (1902–1984), American researcher who advocated for the dramatic possibilities of pyschoacoustics in the theater. In addition to his work at the Stevens Institute and Bell Laboratories, he served as a tactical and strategic planner for unconventional warfare during World War II, investigating the use of sound as a weapon. With colleagues at the Muzak Corporation and the Magnetic Resources Corporation, he also created the first stereophonic recording.
57. George Antheil (1900–1959), American avant-garde composer active from the 1930s composing music for film and television in a more tonal style than his beginnings might have suggested. He wrote the autobiography Bad Boy of Music (New York: Doubleday, 1945).
58. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), prominent Mexican painter, husband of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). A retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1931.
59. Leopold (Anthony) Stokowski (1882–1977), British orchestral conductor, well known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
60. Carl Emil Seashore (1866–1949), American psychologist whose interests included audiology and measuring motivation and scholastic aptitude. A version of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability (1919) was long used in American schools, and his Psychology of Music (1938) long served as an essential college text.
61. The Edwin A. Fleischer Collection of Orchestral Music, the world’s largest lending library of orchestral performance material, housed within the Free Library of Philadelphia.
62. Bland L. Stradley, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University.
63. Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995), Russian-born American composer, conductor, musician, and lexicographer whose widely read Music Since 1900 provided a daily chronicle over six editions (1937–2001) of important musical events around the world. He was a great champion of contemporary composers, most notably Ives and Varèse.
64. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), prolific French composer and teacher, a member of Les Six. His works were influenced by jazz and made use of polytonality.
65. Ernst Toch (1887–1964), Austrian composer of classical works and film scores. Toch’s “Gesprochene Musik” was an idiom of his own invention for spoken chorus, and his most performed work in this vein was Geographical Fugue (Fuge aus der Geographie, 1930). According to Dorothy Lamb Crawford, it was in large part Cage’s enthusiasm for this work that led to Toch’s 1961 composition of a companion piece, Valse (see A Windfall of Musicians [Yale University Press, 2009]).
66. A monophonic electronic instrument invented c.1929 by Friedrich Trautwein (1888–1956) in Berlin. Sound is produced not on a keyboard but by depressing a wire over a metal plate, with volume controlled by finger pressure. The most famous use of the instrument is heard in Oskar Sala’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds (1963).
67. Leopold Stokowski, “New Horizons in Music,” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 4, no. 1A (1932): 11–19. In his talk at the Bell Telephone Laboratories before the Acoustic Society of America annual meeting on May 2, 1932, Stokowski proposed a novel use for the phonograph in his “synthetic opera”: having the singers’ voices recorded and heard offstage, replacing the performers onstage with “venuses who really look the part.”
68. John Mills, A Fugue in Cycles and Bels (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1935).
69. Modern Music (1924–1946), the first music review magazine for the League of Composers. Its original name, The League of Composers’ Review, was changed in 1925. With wide coverage and esteemed contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, the magazine significantly shaped pre–World War II American music.
70. Properly, Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (1900–1967), German-American filmmaker and painter, notable for his abstract musical animations. Cage worked briefly with Fischinger in the summer of 1937 and was impressed with Fischinger’s idea that a spirit dwells inside every object. Their working relationship was ill-fated, however. While working on Fischinger’s short film Optical Poem, Cage, noticing that Fischinger had nodded off and that the ash from his lit cigar had ignited some paper and rags on the floor, inadvertently splashed water on Fischinger’s camera. See Cage’s mesostic titled “forgive me,” to Elfriede Fischinger and dated May 8, 1980.
71. Properly, Bennington College, a liberal arts college founded in Bennington, Vermont, in 1932. Its School of Dance summer program was instituted in 1934 by Martha Hill, who brought in stellar teachers including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Charles Weidman. On August 1, 1942, Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman would give a joint program of their own works there, which they repeated at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York City later that year, adding Totem Ancestor (1942), another solo for Cunningham, with music by Cage.
72. Solovox, a monophonic keyboard attachment instrument intended to accompany the piano with organ-type lead voices, manufactured by the Hammond Organ Company.
73. See Edgard Varèse, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” Commonweal 33, no. 8 (Dec. 13, 1940).
74. John (Ernst) Steinbeck Jr. (1902–1968), American writer, who likely first met Cage in 1938 through Ed Ricketts (1897–1948), a marine biologist who hosted a casual salon at his laboratory on Cannery Row in Monterey, California.
75. Properly, Doris Denison and Margaret Jansen, two of the three “literate amateur musicians” (with Xenia Cage) who played in Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School, where both taught. Little is known about Jansen, other than that she was a pianist; Denison was a percussionist in Cage’s ensemble who became closely affiliated with the dance department at Mills College.
76. The Cages moved to Chicago in September 1941 on an invitation from Moholy-Nagy for Cage to teach in his School of Design. While there, Cage taught also at the University of Chicago, accompanying dance classes led by Kay Manning, and gave important performances at both the University of Chicago and at the Arts Club of Chicago.
77. The Humphrey-Weidman Group originated in 1928 when Doris Humphrey (1895–1958) and Charles Weidman (1901–1975) broke away from the Denishawn School and moved to New York City. They pioneered modern dance in the United States, founding a dance school and company to teach and perform their technique.
78. Gretchen (née Schoeninger) and Alexander Corazzo, Chicago-based artists whose “constructions and mobiles” were noted at the time. Gretchen, a childhood friend of Xenia’s, played in Cage’s percussion ensemble, which premiered Cage’s Ad Lib (1943), In the Name of the Holocaust (1942), and Shimmera (1942), all early piano pieces, at the Arts Club of Chicago on February 14, 1943.
79. Brabazon Lindsey, one of the players in the premiere radio broadcast performance of Cage’s The City Wears a Slouch Hat (see note 91).
80. Hull House, co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, offering classes to working-class people, many European immigrants, in literature, history, art, music, and domestic activities.
81. The Arts Club of Chicago, founded in 1916 “to encourage higher standards of art, maintain galleries for that purpose, and to promote the mutual acquaintance of art lovers and art workers.”
82. Fully, Mercier (“Merce”) Philip Cunningham (1919–2009), American dancer and choreographer who by the end of his life would be at the forefront of modern dance. He and Cage had first met in 1938 at the Cornish School, Cage later traveling to Chicago with Xenia and Cunningham traveling to New York to dance with Martha Graham. The two would reconnect in Chicago and in New York, soon thereafter launching a collaborative relationship, both professional and personal.
83. Joyce Wike, anthropology student at the University of Washington who took dance classes at the Cornish School, befriended Cunningham, and performed in Cage’s percussion ensemble (1938, 1939). It has been posited that her study of Pacific Northwest Native ceremonial practices inspired Cunningham’s interest in Native American ceremonies, especially “spirit dancing,” a solo form.
84. Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972), largely self-taught American writer whose self-published antiwar novel The Journey of Albion Moonlight (1941) created controversy.
85. CBS Broadcasting Inc., a major commercial broadcasting network with roots in radio.
86. Bunny was Cage’s nickname for Xenia; although seen less frequently, also Xenia’s nickname for her husband.
87. Ruth Hatfield (b. 1914), Minneapolis-born modern dancer, choreographer, and dance educator; an original member of the San Francisco Dance League.
88. Martha Graham (1894–1991), American modern dancer and choreographer. With the formation of the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1926, she would employ stellar dancers over six decades, including Cunningham, who had moved to New York from Seattle specifically to dance for her. He remained until 1945.
89. This work would premiere under this title in San Francisco on May 7, 1942, but would soon be reworked and retitled Imaginary Landscape No. 2 (March No 1). It’s scored for percussion ensemble comprising tin cans, conch shell, ratchet, bass drum, buzzers, water gong, metal wastebaket, and lion’s roar, which are combined with an amplified coil of wire attached to a phonographic tone arm.
90. Cage’s Jazz Study (c.1941) for solo piano, long thought to be of doubtful authorship, in part because of the absence of original manuscripts. However, an envelope found after Cage’s death had written upon it “Doris Denison sent to JC 6/29/89. She says it is JC. He has no memory of it.” The use of jazz elements is somewhat uncharacteristic for Cage but not unprecedented; see other works from the period with jazz inflections such as Ad Lib (1943), Credo in US (1942), and Four Dances (1942–1943).
91. Cage’s The City Wears a Slouch Hat, subtitled Incidental Music for the Radio Play by Kenneth Patchen, composed on commission from the CBS Radio Workshop in Chicago and given its one and only broadcast on May 31, 1942, directed by Les Mitchell. Initially, Cage composed the work entirely for electronic sound effects, but a week before the broadcast, he was told that what he wanted to do was not possible in the allotted time. Cage recomposed the work for percussion ensemble and live sound effects just four days before the scheduled broadcast. The original manuscript is likely lost.
92. This concert took place on March 1, 1942, with Cage conducting an ensemble comprising Xenia Cage, Dorothy Fisher, Ruth Hatfield, Brabazon Lindsey, Stuart Lloyd, Rachel Machatton, Katherine Manning, Claire Oppenheim, and Marjorie Parkin in a program that included First Construction (In Metal) (1939) and the premiere of Imaginary Landscape No. 3 (1942), along with works by Lou Harrison and William Russell. A second, more explosive concert would take place at the Arts Club on February 14, 1943, with Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman in first performances of Ad Lib (1943), In the Name of the Holocaust (1942), and Shimmera (1943); also performed by Cage and musicians (Xenia Cage, Gretchen Schoeninger, and Stuart Lloyd) were Credo in US (1942), Totem Ancestor (1942), and Forever and Sunsmell (1942).
93. Martha Graham and Dance Company had performed at Chicago’s Civic Opera House on March 14, 1942, in a program that included the premiere of Land Be Bright, with music by Arthur Kreutz and sets and costumes by Charlotte Trowbridge. Featured dancers were Cunningham as the Yankee Orator, Erick Hawkins as the Indian Chingachgook, and Graham as Betsy Ross.
94. Properly, Erick Hawkins (1909–1994), American choreographer and dancer. With Cunningham, he became one of the first male dancers to join the Martha Graham Dance Company (1939). He and Graham were married from 1948 to 1954.
95. Louis Horst (1884–1964), American choreographer, composer, and pianist. He was musical director for the Denishawn company (1916–1925) before serving as musical director and dance composition teacher for Graham’s school and dance company (1926–1948).
96. Jean Erdman (b. 1916), American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. A principal in Martha Graham’s Dance Company, she was often partnered with Cunningham. Erdman formed the Jean Erdman Dance Group in 1944, and for six years presented annual concerts in New York City. Among important works were Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (1945) and Ophelia (1946), both with commissioned scores by Cage. She was married to the American mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell (1844–1987).
97. Rue Winterbotham Shaw, president of the Arts Club of Chicago from 1940 to 1979. She is best remembered for scheduling the March 1, 1942, performance by John Cage (see note 92) as one of the first events of her presidency, for persuading Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the club’s interior (gratis), and for commissioning sculptor Alexander Calder to create his standing mobile Red Petals for the Club.
98. Cage’s first letter from his and Xenia’s 550 Hudson St. apartment in New York.
99. Cage likely refers to ongoing work for his father, which occasionally included the translation of complex scientific materials, including medical articles by Spanish physicians. Curiously, Cunningham was not commonly known to be fluent in Spanish.
100. This is likely reference to the Academy of Music movie theater that opened in 1927 and that took the name of an (eponymous) opera house that had been situated across the street at E. 14th St. and Irving Place in New York City before being demolished in 1926. As Cage was married at the time of this letter, it is likely that he and Cunningham were initially clandestine in their correspondence.
101. Cage’s playful reference to his (“his little friend”) and Cunningham’s (“enigma”) penises, seen with some frequency throughout their letters of the 1940s.
102. Cunningham was in residence with the Martha Graham and Dance Company at Bennington College throughout much of 1943.
103. Welland Lathrop (1905–1981), American dancer and choreographer, from 1930 to 1934 resident at the Cornish School in Seattle. In 1946 he established the Welland Lathrop School and Dance Company, then formed, with Ann Halprin, the Halprin-Lathrop Dance Studio Theater (1948–1955).
104. The reference here is to Cage’s “prepared piano,” heard first in his Bacchanale “dance accompaniment” to a work by Syvilla Fort, a faculty member at the Cornish School, first performed in Seattle on April 28, 1940. Per Fort’s request for a work with an African “inflection,” Cage intended to write for percussion ensemble. However, because the performance space was small and Cage had only a traditional grand piano with which to work, he began experimenting with objects placed inside the piano—among and between its strings—in an effort to alter its sounds. The prepared piano became a signal instrument for Cage. In 1949, after the New York premiere of his (complete) masterpiece for the instrument, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), Cage received citations from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
105. Cage’s dissatisfaction with Euterpe (in Greek mythology the muse of music) was remedied by his later adoption in her place of Calliope (the muse presiding over eloquence and epic poetry, the “superior” muse, with Ovid speaking of her as the “chief of all muses”). Cunningham’s muse was, of course, Terpsichore, her name deriving from the Greek words “delight” and “dance.”
106. The Blue Angel, among New York City’s early supper clubs, officially opened at 152 E. 55th St. on April 14, 1943, the brainchild of Paris-born Herbert Jacoby. Its name was suggested by Marlene Dietrich’s eponymous first hit movie (1930).
107. John La Touche (1914–1956), American lyricist.
108. While undated, this letter may be synchronous with Xenia’s decision to leave her husband, moving in late February 1944 out of the Hudson St. apartment they shared and back, briefly, to Peggy Guggenheim’s mansion on Beekman Place. From all accounts, Xenia was permissive about sex; Cage was, after all, involved with Don Sample at the time of their engagement. But something about her husband’s year-long affair with Cunningham was for her irreconcilable.
109. Cage’s devotion to the work of Erik Satie expressed itself variously throughout his life. In 1944, he would undertake his first composition based on Satie’s Socrate (1919–1920) with an arrangement for solo piano of the work’s first movement, to which Cunningham contributed a choreographic aspect titled Idyllic Song. The work was presented as part of their first out-of-town performance in Richmond, Virginia, on November 18, 1944. As the manuscripts related to this work pertain only to a 1947 arrangement of the first movement scored for two pianos, Cage must have returned to it three years later. Cage and Cunningham together would revisit the work in a 1969 collaboration, Cage’s Cheap Imitation and Cunningham’s Second Hand (see notes 627 and 811), both works completing the second and third movements.
110. Cage’s Four Walls (1944) for solo piano and voice, originally used as music for the eponymous dance play by Cunningham and first performed in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on August 22, 1944. Ultimately, only scene 7 of Cage’s score includes a text by Cunningham, “Sweet love my throat is gurgling.” The dance is programmatic, its theme one of a dysfunctional family. Cage’s psychologically intense music is entirely diatonic, the structure a setting of contrasts.
111. Cage’s The Perilous Night (1943–1944) for solo prepared piano, in six untitled movements. This work was written during a period in Cage’s life that was tinged with sadness and confusion as a result of his early involvement with Cunningham and his growing estrangement from his wife. The title derives from a collection of Irish folktales; the music recounts the dangers of erotic love. It is one of Cage’s early pieces not used in conjunction with a choreographic work by Cunningham.
112. The 1942 film Kings Row, starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan, directed by Sam Wood.
113. Cage’s A Book of Music (1944) for two prepared pianos would be given its first performance at the New School for Social Research in New York by Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold (see note 126) on January 21, 1945. This was likely Cage’s first commission from professional performers.
114. Schuyler (Garrison) Chapin (1923–2009), American impresario and producer, later vice-president of Lincoln Center (1963), co-founder of its Film Society (1969), and general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (1972).
115. Oliver Smith (1918–1994), American set designer.
116. Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), American theater producer, director, and choreographer who also worked in film and television, celebrated in his lifetime with five Tony and two Academy Awards.
117. Amelita Galli-Curci (1882–1963), Italian coloratura soprano whose early twentieth-century gramophone records garnered widespread popularity.
118. Edwin (Orr) Denby (1903–1983), American dance critic, considered by both Cage and Cunningham to be the finest of his time. His partner was the Swiss-born American photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914–1999).
119. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).
120. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), English poet and Jesuit priest. This special edition of the Kenyon Review (1944), celebrating the poet’s centenary, comprised proceedings of a symposium on his poetry. Interestingly, it includes a piece by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (“The Analogical Mirrors”), who was unknown to Cage in 1944 but of great importance to him some twenty years later. See note 583.
121. Cage may be referring to Donald J. Pierce’s review of the book (by Brook Adams and Charles A. Beard) titled “The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History,” Political Science Quarterly 58, no. 3 (1943): 437–438.
122. Virgil Thomson’s “Expressive Percussion (John Cage) (1945),” published in the New York Herald Tribune, is an effusive, unrevealing review of a concert of Cage’s works at the New School on February 21, 1945. The program included A Book of Music (1944), premiered by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale.
123. See Mary Webb and Berton Roueche, “Prepared Pianist,” New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1945, 17, a review of the concert referenced above that mentions “five prepared pianos,” which jibes with Cage’s report (although he doesn’t specify that the pianos be prepared). No mention is made of specific works on the program, and it is possible that Cage himself performed.
124. Ruth Page (1899–1991), American ballerina and company director, one of the first ballet choreographers to employ American subject matter. She requested Cage compose the music for a ballet based on “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, but when terms could not be agreed upon, Darius Milhaud wrote the score.
125. Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), Japanese American artist, best known for his sculpture and public works. He designed several stage sets for Martha Graham productions, for Page’s The Bells (assisted by Yuji Ito), and for the Cage/Cunningham collaborative work The Seasons, which would premiere in New York on May 18, 1947.
126. Arthur Gold (1917–1990) and, properly, Robert Fizdale (1920–1995), American duo pianists, known cheerfully as “The Boys” in New York’s artistic community, who commissioned important works for two pianos in the middle of the twentieth century.
127. Thomas Hart Fisher, Chicago-based attorney and Ruth Page’s business manager and husband.
128. Learning that his Hudson St. apartment was to be converted, Cage moved to 326 Monroe St., on the lower end of Manhattan. This was a tenement neighborhood, and he dubbed his new sixth-floor walk-up loft “Bozza’s Mansion,” after the name of his landlord. He knocked out parts of the wall to put in large picture windows that faced the East River. The result was a light, airy, uncluttered space, with many plants but minimal furniture, so superb that it attracted notice in House and Garden, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. The year 1946 brought yet another change: on October 25, Xenia sought and won a divorce from Cage, appearing alone as the plaintiff in a district court in Idaho. Cage had agreed to her complaint in advance by formal stipulation and was ordered to pay $100 per month in alimony.
129. Reference here is to Cage’s masterwork for solo prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), seventy minutes in length, the first work in which he expresses the permanent emotions of Indian tradition and his first composition using Hindu philosophy as a basis. The piano preparations are elaborate: forty-five notes, mainly screws and bolts, but also fifteen pieces of rubber, four pieces of plastic, six nuts, and one eraser. Maro Ajemian (see note 151), to whom the work is dedicated, would give its first partial performance at New York’s Town Hall on April 14, 1946; the first complete performance was likely given by Cage himself at Black Mountain College in North Carolina on April 6, 1948.
130. Laussat, the Cage/Cunningham household cat.
131. Alan Hovhaness (b. Alan Vaness Chakmakjian; 1911–2000), Armenian-born American composer who numbered some sixty-seven symphonies among his nearly five hundred works.
132. See Lou Harrison, About Carl Ruggles (Yonkers, NY: Oscar Baradinsky, 1946).
133. Upon receipt of this letter, Ives sent $250 to Harrison to cover the cost of treatment. This sum was provided to Harrison for editing and conducting the first performance of Ives’s Third Symphony (1908–1910; New York, April 5, 1946) and was, not insignificantly, one-half of the amount Ives received upon being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1947. Harrison would be hospitalized for nine months.
134. Harmony Twitchell Ives (1876–1979), wife of Charles Ives from 1908 until his death in 1954. She was the daughter of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell, whose church services were served by her husband as organist.
135. Josef Albers (1888–1976), German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential art-education programs of the twentieth century, and his wife, Anni Albers (b. Annelise Fleischmann; 1899–1994), German-American textile artist and printmaker. With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, the two immigrated to North Carolina, where Albers became head of the new Black Mountain College, initiating summer seminars that were free of the rigors of regular academic sessions. Cage and Cunningham visited first in spring 1948 and returned together and separately until 1953, at which time Cunningham’s Dance Company was formed there.
136. Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877–1952), American artist, social reformer/suffragette, and arts patron. In January 1920, she, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in Dreier’s apartment; she became its driving force. In 1941, she and Duchamp presented the Société Anonyme’s art collection to Yale University.
137. Cunningham’s students in 1947 included Dorothy Berea, Shirley Broughton, Gisela Caccialanza, Mili Churchill, Tanaquil LeClerq, Fred Danieli, Dorothy Dushock, Eleanor Goff, Sara Hamhill (the “stowaway”), Gerard Leavitt, Judith Martin, Job Sanders, and Beatrice Tompkins.
138. Richard (1915–2002) and Louise Lippold, close friends. Richard was an American sculptor, best known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium. The Sun (1953–56), made from gold wire on commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, would be the subject of an unfinished collaborative film undertaken by Cage and Lippold in 1956. The fourteenth and fifteenth movements of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948) are subtitled “Gemini—After the Work of Richard Lippold.”
139. More fully, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866–1925), turn-of-the-century French composer, pianist, and writer. Between 1944 and 1992, the year of his death, Cage would compose no fewer than sixteen works inspired by or making use of Satie. See Laura Kuhn, exhibition catalog for Cage’s Satie: Composition for Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, September 28–December 30, 2012.
140. A settlement house founded Thanksgiving Day 1902 for New York’s increasing immigrant population, Greenwich House offered programs in social services, arts, and education.
141. Paul Klee (1879–1940), German-Swiss painter whose work embodied elements of expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and orientalism. His work inspired many composers, including Cage.
142. Merton Brown (1913–2001), American composer, and John (“Jack”) Heliker (1909–2000), American painter. Heliker was on faculty at Columbia University; Brown, a student of Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles, developed a system of composition known as “dissonant counterpoint.”
143. Easton Pribble (1917–2003), American painter and art instructor, long associated with the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.
144. Frederick Goldbeck, French writer and music critic, who once described Cage as the “Giraudouxian of our time.”
145. The Seasons (1947), ballet in one act for orchestra, originally used as music for the eponymous choreographic work by Cunningham, with stage decor by Isamu Noguchi, first performed in New York, May 18, 1947. This is a sweet, lyrical composition, like the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948) and String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–1950) indicative of Cage’s interest in Indian aesthetics. The orchestral version, the orchestration of which was assisted by Lou Harrison and Virgil Thomson, was preceded the same year by a version for solo piano.
146. Eckhart von Hochheim (c.1260–c1327), commonly known as Meister Eckhart, German theologian, philosopher, and mystic.
147. Peggy Bate (1912–1990), better known as Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Australian composer who served from 1949 to 1958 as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, overlapping for a time with Thomson. In an article for Vogue (Nov. 15, 1950), she would include Cage in her list of “Musical Explorers: Six Americans Who Are Changing the Musical Vocabulary” (others were Hovhaness, McPhee, Bowles, Harrison, and Varèse).
148. Geeta (or Gita) Sarabhai, important Indian musician, one of the first female pakhavaj players in the world, and a member of the Ahmedabad Sarabhai textile family. She and Cage first met in 1946 when she traveled to the United States for study, concerned about the influence of Western music on the traditional music of her country. Cage taught her counterpoint, while she informed him on the subjects of Indian music and philosophy. It was from Sarabhai that Cage learned that in Indian thought the purpose of music is “to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences,” an idea he noted often. While Cage would in time befriend many in the Sarabhai family, he remained especially close to Gita and her sister, Gira.
149. Kenneth Klein, booking agent for Carnegie Hall from 1948 to 1955. Cage refers here to concerts that took place on January 12 and 13, 1949, of his recently completed Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–1948), performed by Maro Ajemian. The piano preparations were apparently removed or tampered with after the first concert, so that the preparations for the second concert had to be hastily replaced and thus were inadequate. Cage’s complaint in item 7 is particularly interesting, given his later insistence on accommodating the sounds of the environment in the concert experience. It may be that experiences like this one at Carnegie Hall led him to change his mind.
150. Properly, Margareda Guedos de Nogueira, a wealthy Brazilian woman employed in the diplomatic service of the Brazilian Department of Foreign Affairs. She was close to Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s troubled English-born composer/husband, Stanley Bate (1911–1959); in April 1950, upon the heels of his divorce from Peggy, he and Nogueira would be married in Rio de Janeiro. Maggie and Peggy remained close friends long after Stanley’s suicide in 1959.
151. Maro Ajemian (1921–1978), American pianist who specialized in contemporary music. Cage dedicated his Sonatas and Interludes to her, a work she would record for the first time in 1950.
152. Properly, the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), founded in Salzburg in 1922, an important network of members from about fifty countries devoted to the promotion and presentation of contemporary music.
153. Cage received two unexpected honors in 1949: a prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters award of $1,000 for “an originality of workmanship that has extended the expressive range of music,” and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, in part on the strength of a letter of recommendation from Virgil Thomson, praising Cage as “the most original composer in America, if not in the world.”
154. Likely the home of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1943), American patron whose music salons continued after her death under the aegis of the Singer-Polignac Foundation, which she had established with private funds in 1928. Singer was an amateur musician who commissioned many works by important French composers of her time, including Erik Satie (Socrate).
155. Virgil Thomson had arranged for Cage to cover music festivals while in Europe as a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, thus Cage and Cunningham were in Palermo to attend the ISCM Festival, April 22–30, 1949. This was Cage’s first real experience of contemporary musical life while abroad.
156. Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991), Polish composer. As a conductor he re-established the Warsaw Philharmonic after the end of World War II. He would defect to the United Kingdom in 1954, serving for a time as chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
157. Marya Freund (1876–1966), Polish (naturalized French) soprano, a champion of contemporary music. In addition to works by Schoenberg, whose Pierrot Lunaire she premiered in 1922, she performed works by Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, and Stravinsky.
158. Wladimir Woronoff (1903–1980), Russian-born Belgian composer. From 1946 to 1948 he concentrated on twelve-tone technique, which likely piqued Cage’s interest; otherwise his compositions were mostly modal.
159. The First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music, organized by Richard Malipiero in Milan in May 1949, was also attended by, among others, Bruno Maderna, Camillo Togni, René Leibowitz, and Hans Erich Apostel.
160. Properly, Vic Legley (1915–1994), French-born Belgian violist and composer.
161. Musical America, the oldest magazine in the United States reporting on classical music, founded in 1898 by John Christian Freund. Cage’s “Contemporary Music Festivals Are Held in Italy” appeared in its June 1949 issue, reprinted in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993).
162. Jean Mollet (1877–1964), French writer and pataphysician, dubbed “Baron” by Apollinaire, with whom he founded, in early 1903, the periodical Aesop’s Feast.
163. Properly, Sonia (or Sonja) Sekula (1918–1963), Swiss-born American artist closely linked with the abstract expressionist movement whose works were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery. She was a resident in the Monroe St. apartment where Cage lived.
164. John Cage, “Raison d’être de la musique modern,” Contrepoints, une revue de musique, no. 6 (Paris: Richard Masse Éditeurs, 1949): 55–61.
165. Roberto (Sebastián Antonio) Matta (Echaurren) (1911–2002), one of Chile’s best-known painters and a seminal figure in twentieth-century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.
166. Andor Foldes (originally Földes) (1913–1992), Hungarian pianist.
167. (Edwin) Olin Downes (1886–1955), American music critic for the Boston Post (1906–1924) and the New York Times (1924–1955). His disparaging opinions of some of the finest composers of his time (not only Cage, but also Edward Elgar, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg) later weakened his credibility.
168. Maurice Roche (1924–1997), French novelist, composer, and musicologist.
169. Francis (Jean Marcel) Poulenc (1899–1963), French composer, member of Les Six; and Pierre Fournier (1906–1986), French cellist.
170. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), French composer, organist, and ornithologist.
171. Jean Hélion (1904–1987), French painter of modernist art whose midcareer rejection of abstraction resulted in some five decades of figurative work. Hélion’s third wife was Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, daughter of Peggy Guggenheim (see note 175).
172. By “the 12-tone business,” Cage refers to his coverage in May 1949 of the First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music.
173. Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), French composer, conductor, and pianist, a philosophical leader of postwar music in France. His lively exchange of letters with Cage between May 1949 and August 1954 were originally published as Pierre Boulez/John Cage: Correspondance et documents, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 1990).
174. Aaron Copland (1900–1990), American composer, teacher, writer, and conductor, influential in forging a distinctly American style of composition.
175. Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim (1898–1979), American art collector, bohemian, and socialite who created an extraordinary art collection in Europe and the United States between 1938 and 1946.
176. Properly, Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), Italian fashion designer prominent between the two World Wars. Her creations, some made in collaboration with contemporary artists including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau, were influenced by her involvement in the Dada/surrealist art movements.
177. Frank Wigglesworth (see note 515).
178. Likely Mario Negri (1916–1987), Italian sculptor and writer.
179. Properly, Lake Winnemucca, a dry lake bed in northwestern Nevada on the dividing line between Washoe and Pershing counties, home to several petroglyphs dated between 14,800 and 10,500 years ago.
180. Bonnie Bird (1915–1995), American teacher and dancer, a Martha Graham protogé and Cage’s colleague at the Cornish School, where she served as head of the dance department from 1937. Among her students were Cunningham and Remy Charlip (1929–2012), who would become one of the founding members of the Merce Cunninghan Dance Company.
181. The Ondes Martenot, also known as the Ondium Martenot, Martenot, and Ondes Musicales, an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by the French cellist and inventor Maurice Martenot (1898–1980). Similar in design to the theremin, its sonic capabilities were later expanded by the addition of timbral controls and switchable loudspeakers.
182. Paul (Frederic) Bowles (1910–1999), American expatriate composer, author, and translator who achieved both critical and popular acclaim for his novels, beginning with his first, The Sheltering Sky (1949). His wife was the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973).
183. John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” The Tiger’s Eye (March 1949), reprinted in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
184. René Leibowitz (1913–1972), Polish-born French composer, conductor, music theorist, and teacher.
185. Serge Nigg (1924–2008), French composer. His Variations for piano and ten instruments (1946) is reputedly the first dodecaphonic work composed by a French composer.
186. Pyotr Petrovich Suvshinsky (1892–1985), later known as Pierre Souvtchinsky, Ukrainian patron and writer on music. Emigrating from Russia in 1922, he settled in Paris, where he would co-found with Boulez and Jean-Louis Barrault the Domaine musical concert series, active from 1954 to 1973.
187. Cage’s “square-root” principle, also sometimes referred to as his “micro-macrocosmic” principle, regulated the structures of his compositions of the period, wherein the large parts of a work had the same proportion as the phrases of a single unit. For Cage, this kind of structure, often rhythmic, could be expressed with sounds, including noises, or it could be expressed as stillness and movement in dance. It guided his earliest collaborations with Cunningham, who experimented with the same technique.
188. Suzanne Tézenas, French literary socialite close to Boulez, whom she assisted to found the Domaine musical concert series in Paris. Her unpublished “Lettre de John Cage à Suzanne Tézenas, New York, 4 fevrier 1955” is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On October 17, 1949, Cage would perform his Sonatas and Interludes at the Tézenas salon, with an introductory lecture by Boulez.
189. Alice B(abette) Toklas (1877–1967), American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde in the early twentieth century, early on companion to the American experimental writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Cage set three of Stein’s poems to music in his youthful Three Songs (1932–1933): “Twenty years after,” “If it was to be,” and “At East and ingredients.”
190. Boris de Schlözer (1881–1969), Russian-born French writer, musicologist, and translator, heralded for his early biography of Stravinsky (1929), and his niece, Marina Scriabin (1911–1998), Russian-born French musicologist and composer and daughter of the renowned Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915).
191. Goodwin was subletting Cage’s Monroe St. apartment during his trip to Europe.
192. Vittorio Rieti (1898–1994), Jewish-Italian composer who settled in the United States in 1940. Ostensibly the two composers had little in common, but in 2006 two of their works—Cage’s Chess Pieces and Rieti’s Pasticchio (Chess Serenade), both from 1944—would come together in a Mode Records CD/DVD (The Complete John Cage Edition, vol. 34, The Piano Works 7), a first recording for both pieces.
193. Maurice Grosser (1903–1986), American landscape painter and life partner of Virgil Thomson. He devised the scenario for two of Thomson’s operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947).
194. Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod (1902–2010), Swiss singer.
195. More fully, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of two performing rights organizations in the United States (along with Broadcast Music, Inc., or BMI) that license performances of music by its member composers.
196. Henri Sauguet (1901–1989), French composer and music critic who shared Cage’s enthusiasm for the music of Erik Satie.
197. Thomson composed more than 150 musical “portraits,” which were in the main charming tonal ditties on names of his closest friends. The greater majority are for piano, a few for instrumental combinations. For a complete listing and analysis, see Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1986).
198. Editions Eschig (later Durand-Salabert-Eschig), Satie’s publisher (see note 811).
199. Henri Michaux (1899–1984), Belgian-born French poet, writer, and painter. The collaborative opera project Cage proposes came to naught.
200. Likely a performance of Cunningham’s Effusions Avant L’Heure (1949) paired with Cage’s A Valentine Out of Season for prepared piano (1949), premiered at Jean Hélion’s studio on June 9, 1945. LeClerq and Nichols were at the time members of Balanchine’s Ballet Society Company.
201. Margaret (“Marge”) Harvey (and husband George), one of Cage’s four maternal aunts; the others were Sadie, Josie, and Phoebe, the last his first music teacher. Aunt Marge was a contralto whose voice Cage greatly admired, but she reputedly abandoned any idea of singing professionally upon marriage. Neither Sadie nor Josie is mentioned in the present collection, but Sadie appears several times in Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You’ll Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1973,” in X: Writings ’79–’82 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
202. George Avakian (b.1919), American record producer known particularly for his work with Columbia Records. He produced the first live long-playing record—Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Avakian’s wife was the violinist Anahid Ajemian, sister of the pianist Maro Ajemian, who gave many fine performances of Cage’s piano works. Avakian would be the producer of “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage at Town Hall” in New York on May 15, 1958, which he recorded and released the following year. This mammoth undertaking was funded, in part, by Emile de Antonio, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg as Impresarios Inc.
203. Cage refers here to one of his father’s many patents, his “Mist-A-Cold,” relating “generally to aspiratory devices and more particularly to an improved inhaler, suitable for oral or nasal inhalation” (patent no. 2,579,362), application made October 31, 1946, approved December 18, 1951.
204. André Souris (1899–1970), Belgian composer, conductor, musicologist, and writer, strongly associated with the surrealist art movement.
205. Armand Gatti (b. 1924), French playwright, poet, journalist, and filmmaker. He provided the poetry set by Boulez in his Oubli signal lapidé for twelve voices a cappella, first performed in 1952.
206. Cage is beginning work on his String Quartet in Four Parts, which would be completed in 1950 (see note 232).
207. Minna Lederman (later Daniel; 1896–1995), American music writer and long-time editor of Modern Music, which exerted considerable influence over the direction of pre–World War II American music. She later contributed to Saturday Review, The American Mercury, and The Nation; also edited Stravinsky in the Theater (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949). Her husband was the American artist Mell Daniel (1899–1975).
208. Max Jacob (1876–1944), French poet, painter, writer, and critic, an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists (having befriended them all).
209. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), French author and art critic, one of the foremost poets of the early twentieth century and credited with coining the term surrealism and with writing the first surrealist work, the play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1917).
210. The actual quotations are “C’est dans le silence que se fait l’introspection; c’est par le silence que l’extérieur descendra en vous.” (“Silence is where introspection happens; silence is where the outside will go down into you. Who will speak in praise of silence?”, Jacob, from Conseils à un jeune poête: Suivis de Conseils à un étudient [1972]); and “Ils vous enterreront tout vivants et éveillés dans le monde nocturne et fermé des songes” (“They will bury you alive and wide awake in the nocturnal and closed world of dreams.”), Apollinaire, from L’esprit nouveau et les Poètes [1917]).
211. Max Ernst (1891–1976), German artist and poet, a pioneer in both the Dada and surrealist movements. His third wife, from 1942 to 1946, was Peggy Guggenheim; his fourth, from 1946–1976, the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012).
212. Colin McPhee (1900–1964), Canadian composer and musicologist known for his ethnomusicological studies of Bali. Among his compositions is Tabuh Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra (1936).
213. Likely (Juliette) Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), French composer, conductor, and teacher who taught many leading composers of the twentieth century, including Thomson, Copland, Elliott Carter, and David Diamond.
214. André Jolivet (1905–1974), French composer, known for his devotion to French culture and musical ideas, with particular interest in acoustics and atonality.
215. Joan Miró (i Ferrà) (1893–1983), Catalan painter and sculptor.
216. Alexander Calder (1898–1976), American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile; also created “stabiles,” or stationary sculptures, and wire figures, most notably for a vast miniature circus. Cage would produce music for a documentary film by Herbert Matter titled Music for “Works of Calder” (1949–1950) (see following note), which won an award for best musical score at the Woodstock Art Film Festival later the same year.
217. Herbert Matter (1907–1984), Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer best known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. At the time of this letter he was at work on the film Works of Calder, for which Cage was to compose the score. Matter’s wife, Mercedes (née Carles; 1913–2001) was a founder of the New York Studio School.
218. From 1948 to 1954, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and its successor, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), administered the programs of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), to help rebuild European economies after World War II.
219. Constantin Brăncuşi (1876–1957), Romanian sculptor who made his career in France, commonly referred to as the patriarch of modern sculpture.
220. Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (1948). Cage did not like this book, his favorites being Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie, trans. Elena and David French (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969) and virtually anything written or compiled by Ornella Volta, director of the Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie in Paris.
