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PART TWO

1950–1961

BY THE TIME JOHN CAGE returned from Europe, he had learned enough French to correspond bilingually with Pierre Boulez. The nearly forty-five letters the two exchanged between May 1949 and August 1954 document one of the richest intellectual relationships in twentieth-century music history. Cage made clear his enormous enthusiasm for Boulez’s compositions and reported his efforts to get them performed in America. He also championed bringing the French composer to New York. Boulez replied in detailed, thoughtful letters with musical examples, some of essay length.

While Cage sometimes complained to Boulez about the poverty of American intellectual life, he also touted the young American composers working in New York who, with him, would form the New York School. They included Brooklyn-born Morton Feldman, whose scores in graphic notation excited him; his promising young pupil Christian Wolff, whose émigré parents, Kurt and Helen, published Pantheon Books; and Earle Brown, a grocer’s son who had studied mathematics and engineering who originated vivid new musical forms.

Indirectly through Boulez, Cage also formed one of the great relationships of his life. When Boulez sent him a copy of his extremely difficult Second Sonata (1947–1948), Cage showed it to Feldman, who told him it could be played only by a certain young pianist, David Tudor. The two met, and Cage marveled at Tudor’s stupendous technical skill. When Tudor undertook to master the Boulez piece and then gave its American premiere at Carnegie Recital Hall on December 17, 1950, Cage turned pages for him and felt, as he told Boulez, exalted. Although Cage fell deeply in love with Tudor, he tried not to interfere when Tudor took up romantically with the poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards, better known as “M.C.,” an equally close friend from Black Mountain College.

Cage’s letters from the decade contain particularly rich descriptions of his ideas and works. Indeed, titles of his compositions appear and reappear throughout, often illuminating dramatically evolving practices. The boldest and most far-reaching of these practices involved the development of his infamous chance operations, which resulted from his adaptation to composition of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination that Cage had received as a gift from Christian Wolff. As Cage explained to Boulez, he tossed coins to select hexagrams in the book, which he then allowed to determine every aspect of his compositions—tempo, duration, notes, etc. In this way, he said, he could diminish the force of his own personality and compose a piece of music entirely by chance. He told Boulez in great detail about his painstaking work on a composition for solo piano, Music of Changes (1951), which takes not only its inspiration but its title from the I Ching (literally, the “Book of Changes”). The demanding Music of Changes, Cage’s first work composed wholly with chance operations, would be given its premiere performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village on New Year’s Day, 1952, by, inevitably, David Tudor.

Cage’s radical artistic direction was affirmed by the classes he attended in the early 1950s at Columbia University given by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism. Suzuki had left Japan in 1936, at the age of seventy, and given a series of lectures throughout the Western world that profoundly influenced an entire generation of artists. Cage discovered through Suzuki’s teachings that like Cage’s recent music, Zen emphasized detachment, or no-mind. Cage was emboldened, and he expanded his chance techniques as he turned to composing music directly on magnetic tape. The new medium offered possibilities of sound and rhythm outside the range of traditional musical instruments. In May 1952 he worked laboriously to produce Williams Mix, named for American architect Paul Williams, whom Cage had first met at Black Mountain College. A letter to Boulez describes the intricacies involved in producing this work for eight tracks of magnetic tape, whereby Cage and various colleagues measured, cut, and spliced together more than six hundred slivers of chance-determined sounds. Premiered the following March at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Williams Mix left Cage feeling he finally had worked with the entire field of sound.

Cage twice interrupted his labors on Williams Mix to create two no less innovative pieces. In August of 1952, he and Cunningham were again in residence at Black Mountain College, now under the direction of the poet Charles Olson. Cage had become acquainted with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, two young actor/directors whose Living Theatre productions were staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Cage organized a few concerts there, and, being exposed to new ideas in contemporary theater, became impressed by the ideas of the avantgarde French playwright Antonin Artaud, especially as outlined in The Theater and Its Double (1938). As Cage understood Artaud, all elements of the theater should be treated independently rather than subordinated to a narrative thread. At Black Mountain College, Cage produced a theater event wherein the actors played “themselves,” during chance-determined lengths of time in a makeshift performance space doing what they chose, without a script. By most accounts, Olson read poetry while perched on a ladder, Cunningham danced while being chased by a dog, and Robert Rauschenberg, the daring young Texas artist also in residence, played records on a phonograph. What Cage created came to be thought of as the first “happening,” or at least its progenitor.

Cage’s Black Mountain “happening” moved him to undertake another audacious work. Above the heads of the Black Mountain audience had hung one of Rauschenberg’s all-white canvases, painted with ordinary house paint. This “blank” painting encouraged Cage to pursue a musical idea he’d had for nearly a decade. Using chance methods, he composed 4'33" (1952), a work in three movements wherein no sounds are to be intentionally produced by the performer. It was first performed by Tudor a few weeks after the Black Mountain “happening” at a benefit concert given at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Tudor used a stopwatch to time the three movements, whose beginnings, lore has it, he indicated by closing the keyboard lid of the piano, endings by opening it. Predictably, 4'33" brought Cage a lot of attention, much of it mocking. A letter from Helen Wolff, Christian Wolff’s mother, arrived just prior to the work’s New York City premiere, calling 4'33" an immature prank. Cage’s thoughtful reply explains that his silent “sermon” on listening is in fact full of sounds.

Cage’s letters in the first half of the decade record that he twice changed addresses. Saddened to learn that his building in lower Manhattan would be torn down, he moved in for a while with Cunningham at 12 E. 17th Street. Then, in the summer of 1954, he left the city for the rural, 116-acre Gate Hill Cooperative being established by Paul and Vera Williams in Stony Point, New York. Hardly settled there, he accepted an invitation from Heinrich Ströbel, music director of Germany’s Southwest Radio, to appear at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Donaueschingen. He and Tudor played a new prepared-piano duet—Cage’s 31'57.9864" for a Pianist and 34'46.776" for a Pianist, both from 1954 and presented as 12'55.6078" for Two Prepared Pianos—and made a broadcast recording. Cage’s touring schedule from this point forward would increase dramatically, and he would be more often than not far away from his new Stony Point home.

As ever, Cage’s letters reveal ongoing financial struggles. In 1955 his annual income was $1,529.00, not enough to live on. He tried to earn more, sometimes reaching far afield from composition. For $400 a month he served as a graphic arts director (in effect, an “ad man”) with a New York textile firm founded by designer/collector Jack Lenor Larson. At Virgil Thomson’s request, he undertook with Kathleen O’Donnell Hoover to write a book-length account of Thomson’s life and work. And with David Tudor he tried to market a “Package Festival” that would consist of a concert of contemporary music, a lecture, and a dance by Cunningham’s company—three programs a day for three days. Cage also took up a faculty position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Commuting from Stony Point, some forty-five miles north, he initially offered courses on the music of Virgil Thomson, the music of Erik Satie, and experimental composition.

Although only obliquely mentioned in his letters, Cage profited from “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage” held at New York’s Town Hall on May 15, 1958, made possible through the efforts of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Emile de Antonio, who came together as Impresarios Inc. The program included the premiere of his groundbreaking Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–1958), whose piano part alone makes use of eighty-four different systems of notation. The piece represented a new phase in Cage’s musical thinking involving, significantly, indeterminacy. (A performance, as he later told German composer and musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, can involve any number of musicians on whatever instruments they choose, playing for any length of time.) The Town Hall concert showcased nearly a dozen works and was widely reviewed; it was also recorded by producer George Avakian and sold as a lavish three-LP box set that included an unprecedented number of texts, photographs, and manuscript pages. Cage’s adventurous music was thereby introduced to a new and larger audience.

Late in 1958, Cage made an eventful six-month tour of Europe. He made stops in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Oxford, and he crisscrossed Germany, often performing with Tudor and Cunningham. His most eventful experiences took place in Milan, where he befriended the Italian composer Luciano Berio and his American-born wife, the brilliant mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Berio gave Cage working space and technical assistance at the Studio di Fonologia, RAI’s facility for experimental audio research. Here, Cage created Fontana Mix (1958), named for his Italian landlady, an exciting indeterminate piece for magnetic tape that would serve as the means for composing several other works.

Cage also secured a spot as a contestant on the popular television game show Lascia o Raddoppia (colloquially, “Double or Nothing”) in the quiz category of mushrooms. Living in Stony Point, Cage had discovered within himself a deep love of nature; fascinated, he collected mushrooms, read about mushrooms, and became, as he told Peter Yates, an “amateur mycologist.” His answers to a series of increasingly difficult questions on Lascia o Raddoppia over the course of five weekly programs won him five million lire (about $8,000) and a modicum of popular fame in Italy. It also afforded him momentary respite from his usual state of penury. Returning to America in March 1959, he used part of his winnings to purchase a grand piano for his Stony Point home as well as a Volkswagen bus for use by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company when it toured. His mushroom studies invigorated, in the spring Cage augmented his offerings at the New School with a course in mushroom identification.

Cage’s thinking was beginning to influence younger composers, some of whom wrote to him for advice and support. In October 1959 he received a letter and string trio score from a twenty-five-year-old experimental composer whose imagination impressed him: La Monte Young. Born in a small Idaho dairy farming community and settled in Los Angeles, Young greatly admired Cage and as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley had initiated performances of his works. Cage found particularly interesting Young’s use of continuous, long-lasting sounds or static drones. He took part, as he told Young, in a Living Theatre performance of his admirer’s noisy, scraping Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (1960), which he greatly enjoyed.

Cage expresses increasingly clear ideas about twentieth-century compositional trends in his letters of the period to Peter Yates. In what are often summary discussions, he describes how his contemporaries—both elders and peers—were changing the landscape of American music. By 1960, he identifies what were for him the key aspects of experimental music, most of which were reflected in his own compositions of the time.

Critical of the distribution system of experimental music in America, Cage wrote to John Edmunds, curator of the Americana Collection of the Music Division of the New York Public Library, about possible remedies. He had become anxious to publish his own music and collect in book form some of his many articles and lectures. In late 1959 he met Walter Hinrichsen, founder in 1948 of C. F. Peters Corporation in New York. By an agreement signed in June 1960, Hinrichsen launched his role as Cage’s sole music publisher with an aesthetic blast. Like many others, he found Cage’s handwritten notation to be quite beautiful, so he began by publishing, probably early in 1961, a four-volume facsimile edition of Cage’s complex, chance-determined Music of Changes.

At about the same time, Cage also realized his hope of having some of his published writings appear in book form. He had sent a stack of writings and a possible table of contents to Richard Winslow, director of the music department at Wesleyan University, who subsequently “inspired” the university’s press to publish the volume. Cage’s 275-page collection appeared in October 1961. Titled Silence: Lectures and Writings, it recorded Cage’s evolving understanding of music since 1937 and was prominently and mostly enthusiastically reviewed. Cage also accepted an invitation to serve as a fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies, where his one-term appointment was extended to two so that he remained at the center from October 1960 to June 1961. Although he rekindled his hope to start his Center for Experimental Music, this time at Wesleyan, it was again not to be.

Letters from the late 1950s show Cage beginning to assemble the electronic theater/music event Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), which he titled after a Czechoslovakian book of star maps he’d used in its composition. He discussed the nature of this piece in some detail in a letter to Yates dated August 17, 1961, noting its basis in his theory of indeterminate composition, his reliance upon celestial maps, his use of contact microphones to amplify the instruments, and his emphasis on short, soft sounds. He addressed some of the problems he’d encountered in producing the work in a letter to Lawrence Morton, director of the Monday Evening Concerts (the successor to Yates’s Evenings on the Roof) in Los Angeles, who had written to him about scheduling a performance.

Even for Cage, Atlas Eclipticalis is unusually, even epically, adventurous. Often paired with his Winter Music (1957), a full performance calls for twenty pianists and eighty-six other instruments, all in effect playing as soloists. But Cage was beginning to understand the limitations of his players and presenters, and his works, now often scored for variable instrumentation, were becoming naturally open to negotiation. The Los Angeles performance went on with fourteen instrumentalists, in March 1962.

To Pierre Boulez²²¹

January 17 [1950] | Location not indicated

My dear Pierre,

Your letter has just arrived here at home. I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was to get it. Without news of you I am without news of music, and you know I love music with all my heart.

You write English admirably. (Thanks)

The trip to South America must be marvelous! Now it must be made even better by coming down to New York. I shall try to arrange concerts, lectures (I can talk to Copland about Tanglewood, etc.); and you can stay at home here and I can make use of an un-nailed piano(!).²²² Everyone here is talking about you (pronouncing the Z) but no one has heard your music (exceptions: Copland, Thomson). The musical atmosphere is ready—everyone full of desire. We even really need the vitality which you could give. Because our musical life is not very lively at present. We have some Schoenberg (Serenade, conducted by Mitropoulos, etc.) and there are some “young ones” who are taking up the Stravinsky question again (Mavra, etc.). But the date is now 1950, I believe. There is Jolivet, but not for me (I heard the recording in Paris, and the work doesn’t interest me). Messiaen was here;—I love him for his ideas about rhythm. Almost everyone was against him because of his half-religious half-Hollywood spirit. I invited him here (big reception, dinner, and music), and he explained his Turangalila score to some composers.

Since knowing you, our music sounds feeble to me. In truth, it is only you who interests me. I have heard Stefan Wolpe’s Sonata (violin and piano)²²³ and some of BEN WEBER’s works.²²⁴ That’s all; and both tend towards Berg rather than Webern. And what is amazing, we have two composers writing pentatonic music! Poor Merton Brown is beginning to see psychoanalysts. People talk about a Kirchner (Leon).²²⁵ One of these days I am going to hear the music of MILTON BABBITT,²²⁶ who is the most Webernian. He has talked to me about rhythmic inversions. He takes a duration, and he inverts the fractions (corresponding to the octave and interval inversion). But he looks like a musicologist.

William Masselos is going to play your Sonata (2nd piano) but he has asked for a year to work on it.²²⁷ He is very busy. Two quartets now want to play your quartet.²²⁸ I have said two years to work on it (to put some fear into them, which is good for the health).

I have just finished recording my cinema music.²²⁹ I started that piece of work in a dream: I wanted to write without musical ideas (unrelated sounds) and record the results 4 times, changing the position of the nails each time. That way, I wanted to get subtle changes of frequency (mobility), timbre, duration (by writing notes too difficult to play exactly) and amplitude (electronically altered each time). But I found musical ideas all about me, and the result will be (I mean “would have been”) no more than simple or perhaps Japanese canons. I abandoned the dream and I wrote some music. Also the adventure was halted by machines which are too perfect nowadays. They are stupid. Even so I had fun in the 2nd part by recording noises synthetically (without performers). Chance comes in here to give us the unknown. Apparently the film will be seen in Paris (as soon as I know the date, I’ll let you know).

Cunningham gave his dance concert on the 15th of January. It was a great success. I’m sending you the programme.

I am going to have lunch with Nicole Henriot²³⁰ on the 18th. We will talk about you which will be a great pleasure to me.

(Whilst you are in Brazil, get some cotton for your ears so that you are not Milhauded.²³¹)

Tomorrow I have to play the Sonatas and Interludes for Henry Cowell’s pupils. The class is going to come to my place. I should rather remain alone and quiet working on the quartet which I began in Paris and which (I want to say, which I didn’t have the courage to show you).²³²

Virgil Thomson liked your article in Polyphonie, “Propositions,” a lot. He told me he is going to write an article on your ideas about rhythm.”²³³

Now something about the Construction in Metal.²³⁴ The rhythmic structure is 4, 3, 2, 3, 4. (16 × 16). You can see that the first number (4) equals the number of figures that follow it. This first number is divided 1, 1, 1, 1, and first I present the ideas that are developed in the 3, then those in the 2, etc. Regarding the method: there are 16 rhythmic motives divided 4, 4, 4, 4, conceived as circular series

When you are on 1, you can go 1 2 3 4 1 or retrograde. You can repeat (e.g., 1122344322 etc.). But you cannot 2⇒4 or 1⇒3. When you are on 2, you can not only use the same idea but you can go back to 1 using the “doorways” 1 or 4. (Very simple games.) Equally there are 16 instruments for each player. (Fixation with the figure 16.) But (funnily enough) there are only 6 players! I don’t know why (perhaps I only had 6 players at the time). And the relationships between the instruments (in the method) are similar to those between rhythms (circle-series), according to which the work is written in (four measures, 3 measures, 2 measures, 3 measures, 4 measures, the whole lot 16 times). The score isn’t here at home but I shall now try to give you the names of the instruments. (in English)

1st performer	Thundersheet, orchestral bells
2nd "	Piano (The pianist has an assistant who uses metal cylinders on the strings; the pianist plays trills; the assistant turns them into glissandi.)
3rd "	12 graduated Sleigh or oxen bells, suspended sleigh bells, thundersheet.
4th "	4 Brake drums (from the wheels of automobiles)8 cowbells3 Japanese Temple gongs, Thundersheet
5th "	Thundersheet, 4 Turkish cymbals8 anvils or pipe lengths4 Chinese cymbals
6th "	Thundersheet, 4 muted gongs1 suspended "water gongTam Tam

The number 16 occurs in some cases in considering changing the method of striking (difference of sonority).

You know that with exposition and development (without recapitulation) and with the form (climax, apotheosis (?)), etc., this Construction is 19th century. Your ideas for the lectures are very good. I have nothing to add. Suzuki’s works on Zen Buddhism are about to be published.²³⁵ I seem a bit empty. I have come from the film work and the Cunningham concert and I have to play the Sonatas tomorrow morning, and I am still not properly started as far as the Quartet goes. And I am tired.

English part:

[Armand] Gatti’s letter was marvelous and by now there must be a new Gatti. Give my love to them all and say I am writing to him tomorrow. I think of you all almost every day and I miss you deeply. Tell Saby²³⁶ that I am very fond of his drawing that he gave me.

The great trouble with our life here is the absence of an intellectual life. No one has an idea. And should one by accident get one, no one would have the time to consider it. That must account for the pentatonic music.

I know you will enjoy travelling to South America; it must be very beautiful. I have never been there. Please keep me well-informed about your plans so that should the Tanglewood idea go through, you could always be reached.

I forgot to mention that the New Music Edition is publishing one of Woronow’s pieces (the Sonnet to Dallapiccola). I must write and tell him so.

I am starting a society called “Capitalists Inc.” (so that we will not be accused of being Communists); everyone who joins has to show that he has destroyed not less than 100 disks of music or one sound recording device; also everyone who joins automatically becomes President. We will have connections with 2 other organizations, that for the implementation of nonsense (anyone wanting to do something absurd will be financed to do it) and that Against Progress. If the American influence gets too strong in France I am sure you will want to join.

To Cecil Smith²³⁷

November 22, 1950 | 326 Monroe St., New York City

Dear Cecil Smith:

Over and over again in Satie-criticism, the complaint is filed that humor was used as a mask behind which to hide an inability to write music. (Equally outrageously, one might imagine that St. Francis sermonized to birds because of an inability to convey ideas to other animate beings.) Your last issue of Musical America contains an example: “Erik Satie” by Abraham Skulsky. It seems not to have occurred to Mr. Skulsky, nor to Mr. Rollo Myers in his recent book, Erik Satie, that Satie may not have been forced but may, on the contrary, have been free to laugh.

When one takes oneself, one’s gains and losses, one’s popularity and disfavor, seriously, it is quite impossible to laugh (except forcedly, or at someone). Satie, however, was disinterested, and was thus able to laugh or weep as he chose. He knew in his loneliness and in his courage where his center was: in himself and in his nature of loving music. There is no great difference between hearing “Consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin” and a piece by Erik Satie.

Forced, nervous laughter takes place when someone is trying to impress somebody for purposes of getting somewhere. Satie, free of such interest, entitled his first pieces commissioned by a publisher Three Flabby Preludes for a Dog. It being fairly clear who is referred to by the word dog, giving that title was evidently a social act militant in nature, not nonsensical as Mr. Skulsky would have it.

Mr. Skulsky records that all of Satie’s music is humorous excepting the Gymnopedies, the Sarabandes, and Socrate. This is simply not true. Think, for instance, of the Nocturnes, the Quatre Melodies, the Danses Gothiques, the other posthumous works, and of Sylvie (which, contrary to Mr. Myers’ information, has not disappeared, and contrary to Mr. Skulsky’s judgment re the Gymnopedies is the first work of the composer to bear the stamp of his originality). In fact, if one tries to think of a funny piece by Satie it’s really tough: Les Courses, perhaps the Embryons Desseches, and, certainly, La Belle Excentrique. When Satie used words (cf. T. S. Eliot’s: “I gotta use words when I talk to you”), his expression was often humorous, always brilliantly imaginative. When he wrote music, he was unexceptionally the art’s most serious servant: he performed his tasks simply and unpretentiously. He wrote more often than not short pieces, as did Scarlatti and [François] Couperin and, as will, let’s hope, etc. (cf. Paul Klee, who said something about wanting to ignore Europe and about needing to make things small like seeds).

(It appears we have reached the second complaint filed by critics against Satie: he wrote no big works with the exception of Socrate.)

The length of a work, however, is no measure of its quality or beauty, most of post-Renaissance art-propaganda to the contrary. If we glance momentarily at R. H. Blythe’s book on haiku (the Japanese poetic structure: 5, 7, 5 syllables), we read (pg. 272): “Haiku thus make the greatest demand upon our internal poverty. Shakespeare (cf. Beethoven) pours out his universal soul, and we are abased before his omniscience and overflowing power. Haiku require of us that our soul should find its own infinity within the limits of some finite thing.” My mind runs now to Satie’s Vexations,²³⁸ a short piece to be played 840 times in a row. A performance of this piece would be a measure, accurate as a mirror, of one’s “poverty of spirit” without which, incidentally, one loses the kingdom of heaven.

More and more it seems to be that relegating Satie to the position of having been very influential but in his own work finally unimportant is refusing to accept the challenge he so bravely gave us.

To Pierre Boulez

December 18, 1950 | [New York City]

My dear Pierre

Yesterday evening, we heard your Sonata; David Tudor²³⁹ played it (magnificently, too) instead of Masselos. Tudor is going to make a recording for you, and, if you like, we could press for a public recording. (Many thanks for the disc of Soleil des Eaux;²⁴⁰ Heugel²⁴¹ and you both sent me a copy. I have given one of them to Tudor. David Tudor is twenty-five, like you, and he is a friend of Morton Feldman.²⁴²) Before Masselos had begun work on the Sonata, Feldman told me that Tudor had already devoted three months of study to the work (this was in spring/summer). From that it was obvious to choose Tudor (my French is too bad; forgive me if I continue in English). Tudor had spontaneously devoted himself to the labor of understanding and playing the Sonata; I loaned him the original which you had given me with the sketches.²⁴³ He studied French in order to read your articles in Contrepoint and Polyphonie (by the way, they never send me these,—although I subscribed), and he has made a collection and study of Artaud.²⁴⁴ He is an extraordinary person, and at the concert (as I was turning pages for him) I had feelings of an exaltation equal to that you had introduced me to at 4 rue Beautreillis. Naturally the audience was divided (for the various reasons audiences are), but I can tell you with joy that you have here a strong and devoted following. Your music gives to those who love it an arousing and breathtaking enlightenment. I am still always trembling afterwards. After the concert Tudor, Feldman and I with 20 others celebrated and then finally at 4 a.m. the three of us were alone walking through the streets still talking of you and music. The evening before Tudor had played in my apartment and there were many who came to hear, including Varèse, Maro Ajemian, Mrs. E. E. Cummings,²⁴⁵ etc., etc., etc. I enclose some critical notices (which are not studies), programme, etc. Now we want to prepare a performance of the String Quartet, when can the score + parts be available? We have a real hunger.

[in the margin, attached by an arrow to the foregoing phrase] I would love to arrange a second invitation here for you on the occasion of the Quartet (performance). As you see, I know nothing about the war.²⁴⁶

It was a great joy to hear many times all 4 mvts. of the Sonata (a pleasure you had not given me); the entire work is marvelous but the 4th mvt. among them is transcendent.

If you could take the time to write to Tudor (perhaps after he sends you a recording) he would be very happy I know. His address is 69 E. 4th St., N.Y.C.

Feldman’s music is extremely beautiful now. It changes with each piece; I find him my closest friend now among the composers here.

My music too is changing. I am writing now an entire evening of music for Merce to be done January 17 (flute, trumpet, 4 percussion players, piano, not prepared, violin and cello).²⁴⁷ I still have one mvt. of the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra to complete; it may be performed in March in Hartford, Connecticut. My string quartet will also be done in March both in Hartford and here in New York. For the Concerto and the ballet I use charts giving in the form of a checkerboard pre-orchestrated combinations of sound; it is evident that “moves” may be made on this “board” followed by corresponding or non-corresponding moves. In the Concerto there are 2 such charts (one for the orchestra + one for the piano) bringing about the possibility of “given” relationships. In the dance music the idea of a gradual metamorphosis of the chart into a new chart is employed. Two other ideas are in my mind now: that each square of the chart be taken as the (at that moment) visible member of a large family of sounds; and the other idea that 4 charts, each one referring to only one characteristic of sound, could be used instead of one. All this brings me closer to a “chance” or if you like to an un-aesthetic choice. I keep, of course, the means of rhythmic structure feeling that that is the “espace sonore” in which these sounds may exist and change. Composition becomes “throwing sound into silence,” and rhythm which in my Sonatas had been one of breathing becomes now one of a flow of sound and silence. I will send you soon some results.

Thank you again for the recording of your orchestral work (which, seems to me, must be an earlier work²⁴⁸); the parts that interest me the most are those at the beginning and at the end. I admire the separation of voice and orchestra at the beginning. The entire continuity is marvelously poetic and changing and suggests an opera. But I have the feeling that this is an earlier work than those of yours I am attached to through having heard or seen more often. In other words you have walked on to use your metaphor of one foot in front of the other. Tell me, if what I say is wrong.

Your Sonata is still in our ears, and gratitude will never cease. Those who had no courage to directly listen are troubled; you have increased the danger their apathy brings them to. But now I am no longer one of a few Americans who are devoted to you, but one of many.

I would still love to publish one of Yvette G[rimaud]’s works.

[in the left margin] How are friends! Gatti, Stephane and Souvtchinsky. The feminine principle.

[above] Merry Xmas! Happy New Year!

[in the right margin] How are you? I am unwell occasionally.

To David Tudor²⁴⁹

[Between January 21 and 27, 1951] | [New York]

Dear David:

Morty just left and you can see from this paper something of what we were doing this evening.²⁵⁰ It was a question of finding a way of writing the graph music on transparent paper so that it can be reproduced cheaply, and what you see here was a transitional stage, the final outcome is stunning and perfectly clear but only the utterly essential lines remain. Vertical lines (indicating the measures) are dotted (which makes the solid thick lines of the sounds clear). The horizontal lines are thin but only present when needed. The result is a space design very beautiful to look at and easy to read. You will see it later of course when you come back.

Merce’s concert was sensational and very controversial.²⁵¹ People either loved or hated it. I myself had a fine time. And all those directly concerned did too. Morty’s and Christian’s pieces were both hissed and bravoed. Some people left in the middle of the evening. I was delighted with all the music including my own. Now of course it is difficult for me to write about it because I have begun work on the Concerto again,²⁵² and my feeling is displaced from the ballet. But the sounds were such that I have no fears (if I had them before) about the work I am doing. And Morty and Xian²⁵³ liked it too, so what is necessary more? I failed in making a recording (for lack of microphone and wire at last minute and rehearsal exigencies). Morty Seymour Barab²⁵⁴ and Maro helped me finish the copying. And Maro worked very hard on the piano part which she said was difficult and which she never played acceptably until the performance + even then left out or muddled up whole sections. However it went as a whole fairly well and we managed to stay with the dancers. There was a party here afterward, and we all drank toasts to you and to Boulez.

Virgil tells me that he’s not convinced about Morty, that he is too much the “anointed one” (oil dripping off his shoulders). However, I’m more or less generally broadcasting my faith in his work and to the point of fanaticism. I spent a troublesome hr. + ½ arguing with Arthur Berger²⁵⁵ re Morty and Xian’s music because Arthur has to review the concert next Sunday. And then another hr. with Minna Lederman, who began to take the music more seriously when I explained Suzuki’s identification of subject and object vs. the usual cause and effect thought. She even invited me to dinner to talk further. And then we will hear Varese’s Ionization up at Juilliard with Dallapiccola, Krenek and Stravinsky.²⁵⁶

As I go on with the Concerto, I think only of your playing it and hope your circumstances will permit that. I miss you very deeply,—and will be very happy when you come back.

I am going to apply for a renewal of the Guggenheim; I phoned them and still have time. I wrote a funny article for Musical America which I am enclosing for your amusement.²⁵⁷ I envy the travelling through the country you are enjoying because I know what a pleasure it is to see how nature operates,—and then to imitate that “manner of operation” in one’s work and life. Magical clues by trees, and the flat continuous land.

It is late and quiet here, and I trust you pardon my rambling on like this as though I had nothing to say.

Life continues to be incredibly beautiful, each moment, and now I hear your voice over the phone and see the shape of your hands.

How marvelous of you to have given me fire! Every time it works infallibly. It is like knowing a secret.

My pleasure in returning to the Concerto is the pleasure of not being responsible to another imagination. And so I work directly and am silly enough to think the quality of work “better.” I am at least in a more direct (because private) situation.

Berger thought the ending piece of the ballet would have made a “lovely accompaniment for a melodic tune.” Shows you what we’re up against. Virgil however says, “I think you’ve got something there!” Isaac²⁵⁸ came to rehearsals and performance and was very interested. Hirsch told Morty and me he’s one of us. My mother said the concert made her think of how Marie Antoinette must have felt after the French Revolution! It is curious how anxious people are to tell what they thought. Lou said he thought my music was “lovely”; since he said this before the concert, I was somewhat disturbed, so I tossed some coins and got the hexagram “The Power of the Great” the Creative and the Arousing, and the advice not to be stubborn, proud or belligerent.²⁵⁹

We had some difficulty with Morty’s piece in rehearsal because the parts were not correct which didn’t disturb him but did me. Xian’s finally proofed them, and the performance was beautiful. I was surprised that Morty had made mistakes because in copying my music he made none at all.

I am going quietly into the Concerto, trying to pretend that I had not left it, so as not to be noticed.

What shall I do about my age perplexing you? Shall I grow a beard?

And how fat are you now?

Miss you, David, very much.

I do not tell you about loving you because you said you were afraid it would kill you. I do love you but it will always be so that you need not be afraid.

To David Tudor

[ca. early June 1951] | 326 Monroe St., New York City

Dear David:

To tell you the news and that I miss you. Am often making the lowest form of prayer (petitionary) that you are having a fine time.

Mostly the news regards the music I’m writing, but that is so detailed that only it will tell you about it. I now have a kind of schedule whereby I toss 80 to a 100 hexagrams before going to bed, so that my day’s work is laid out for me when I arise. It is interesting to note that the coins seem to know that they are involved in producing a long movement, for after 3 pages (most of which you saw) of tempo changes the next 3 settle to one tempo, accelerate to another which holds through the next 3, ritard then to another which again holds! And all slow tempi (80, 88, 72 (hommage (no doubt) to M[orton] F[eldman]), so that the coins are aware, clearly, that this is not only a long piece but a 2nd mvt. However, there are frequent changes of the mobility-immobility relation (which never took place in the part you have).

I have also begun removing the armored scales from the plants, an activity that wonderfully resembles composition (note by note).

And I wrote 2 more haiku for Maro,²⁶⁰ who commissioned them (pays for 1 month rent on the piano). Anahid + I played the v[iolin] + p[iano]. pieces at a party and practically no one liked them; even that music estranges my former friends—what will they feel next year?²⁶¹

Christian wrote the pieces for you which you probably already have. Morty and I heard them here one afternoon and Morty said they were “absolutely.” When Xian began to play I made a move to close the window so that we wouldn’t hear the traffic, but Xian said “no, leave it open; that’s the point.” His new ideas are amazing and involve the mosaic ideas in your pieces but with asymetrical superpositions made clear by the special timbre situations for each mosaic (ensembles, necessarily).

I saw Alan Watts twice, and you and Jean + Joe²⁶² will probably see him in Boulder when he passes through. He says we are not writing music but doing ear-cleaning. I said whatever you call it makes little difference.

My classes at Columbia are almost over.²⁶³ People were all writing and performing after one “lesson.” A music supervisor from Minnesota who visited incognito was “amazed” at results. I also gave a lecture on how to become uncultured.

One day, concerned over my livelihood problem, I reflected that I was indeed working, but not being paid for it. So I composed a letter which I have sent off to 4 people (so far) offering shares in the Music of Changes²⁶⁴ at $15.00 a share. It looks like Louise Crane (whose family makes the paper money is printed on, will invest (although I made it clear in the letter that it is a very poor investment)).²⁶⁵ The cost of the shares is estimated at 30 wks. work at $50 a wk. ($1500). (100 shares). I am keeping 20 for my own personal use. Perhaps you cd. get Jean + Joe to invest.

I understand Schoenberg called off his Colorado visit.

I wd. like to ask you many questions, but I am afraid I wd. get no answer. I’d love to know whether your concerts are already given or about to be given and how your work is going. Whether you played or will play the Changes, + how you feel about them. And whether you miss me and whether you will pass through NY on your way to Black Mtn.

I’ve not heard from Boulez yet; Morty + I get along very well (he’s not yet finished the Intersection—he got involved in a new “Marginal Intersection”: that is, sounds heard between 2 limits: inaudible high + inaudible low!—which are notated but will not be heard). Also he finished Jean’s music which you probably already have.²⁶⁶

Sybil Shearer gave a concert,²⁶⁷ very well attended, but for me quite uninteresting. She makes everything point to the same point + so eradicates the natural penetrative power of her movements, etc. However, she moves magnificently, and Morty is writing an uninvited piece for her which he’ll send her,—somewhat like the Cummings Songs²⁶⁸—but for piano.

One evening walking along the river, I found a pier, between here and the Manhattan Bridge which sits out on the river; it’s very pleasant and the colors on the buildings and wharves are marvelous. And the folk-dancing began last night. And the weather is cool. So all in all a good summer, except that not being with you is very sad, especially because of writing this music for you which I am always wanting to show you and because I am anxious to hear it and know what your adventures with it are.

My love to you and wishes that you are enjoying (as you say) yourself.

To Norman McLaren²⁶⁹

[Undated, likely early March 1951] | 326 Monroe St., New York City

Dear Norman:

On either the 8th or 10th of May the New Music Society will give a concert of chamber music involving all kinds of music,²⁷⁰ and we would be very happy at that time to present some of your work (if, as I have heard, you have done anything microtonal, that would be especially welcome: in other words, we are looking for what is most adventurous in what is happening in music). The concert will be given at McMillan Hall, Columbia Univ. and will be free to the public. Please let us know what we would have to get in the way of equipment to make your part of the program (circa 5 minutes) practical. Thanks by the way for the pleasure you gave Barab.

To Pierre Boulez

May 22, 1951 | [New York]

Dear Pierre:

Your second letter arrived and I hasten to reply, for it has been, naturally, on my mind to write to you for many months. The long letter you sent with the details about your work was magnificent, but I think that it is at least partly due to it that I have not written sooner, for I was concerned to write a letter worthy to be read by you, and I didn’t feel able. All this year (in particular) my way of working has been changing,²⁷¹ and together with that changing I was involved in many practical commitments (performances, etc.), and when your first letter came, it caught me in the midst of activity and at a point where my way of working was still unformed (and needing to be formed). This seems now to have happened; at least I am writing a long piano work (unprepared) which will carry me through October or November,²⁷² and I doubt whether anything radically new will enter my technique until I finish this particular piece, so that I feel free now to tell you what I have been doing, and what it was that led to this new work.

In Paris I began the String Quartet, and interrupted the writing of it to do the Calder film which you heard. The Quartet uses a gamut of sounds, some single and some aggregates, but all of them immobile, that is, staying always not only in the same register where they originally appear but on the same strings and bowed or produced in the same manner on the same instruments. There are no superpositions, the entire work being a single line. Even the tempo never changes. The continuity (what I call method) is uncontrolled and spontaneous in all except the 3rd movement, where it is strictly canonic, even though there is only one “voice.” Such ideas as the following occur: direct duration limitation with retrograde or inverse use of the gamut or vice versa. This gives some interesting results since the gamut to begin with is asymmetrical. The sound of the work is special due to the agregates and to using no vibrato. It has been performed twice and is being recorded by Columbia,²⁷³ and next Friday will be done again on a program with your 2nd Sonata and some music of Feldman.

You ask for details about the Calder music,²⁷⁴ particularly the section of noises. What I did was very simple: to record on tape noises actually produced in Calder’s studio in the course of his work. The sounds which have the regular accelerandos are produced by large flat rectangles of metal bringing themselves to balance on narrow metallic supports. With about “two hours” of tape I satisfied myself and then proceeded to choose those noises I wished and cut and scotch-tape them together. No synchronizing was attempted and what the final result is is rather due to a chance that was admired. Unfortunately I did this at the last minute (after the music for prep[ared] p[iano] had been recorded); had I done it at the beginning, I rather imagine I would have made the entire film in this way (using also sounds recorded from nature).

After finishing the String Quartet I wrote Six Melodies for Vn. + Pn²⁷⁵ which are simply a postscript to the Quartet and use the same gamut of sounds (but, naturally, with different timbres). Then I began to write the Concerto for Prep. Pn. and Chamber Orchestra (25 players). A new idea entered which is this: to arrange the aggregates not in a gamut (linearly) but rather in a chart formation. In this case the size of the chart was 14 by 16. That is to say: 14 different sounds produced by any number of instruments (sometimes only one) (and often including percussion integrally) constitute the top row of the chart and favor (quantitatively speaking) the flute. The second row in the chart favors the oboe + so on. Four rows favor the percussion divided: metal, wood, friction, + miscellaneous (characterized by mechanical means, e.g., the radio). The last four favor the strings. Each sound is minutely described in the chart: e.g., a particular tone, sul pont²⁷⁶ on the 2nd string of the first vn. with a particular flute tone and, for example, a wood block.

I then made moves on this chart of a “thematic nature” but, as you may easily see, with an “athematic” result. The entire first movement uses only 2 moves, e.g., down 2, over 3, up 4, etc. This move can be varied from a given spot on the chart by going in any of the directions. The orchestra (in the first mvt.) was thus rigorously treated, while the piano remained free, having no chart, only its preparation, which, by the way, is the most complicated I have ever effected and has as a special characteristic a bridge which is elevated from the sounding board of the piano to the strings and so positioned as to produce very small microtones. In the 2nd movement the piano has a chart provided for it having the same number of elements as that for the orchestra (which latter remains the same). This movement is nothing but an actually drawn series of circles (diminishing in size) on these charts, sometimes using the sounds of the orchestra, sometimes using the sounds of the piano. (In all of this work the rhythmic structure, with which you are familiar in my work, remains as the basis of activity.)