THE SELECTED LETTERS of

JOHN CAGE

publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

THE SELECTED LETTERS of

JOHN CAGE

Edited by Laura Kuhn

Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2016 John Cage Trust

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Eric M. Brooks

Typeset in Albertina by Passumpsic Publishing

publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cage, John. | Kuhn, Laura Diane.

Title: The selected letters of John Cage / edited by Laura Kuhn.

Description: Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041918 |

ISBN 9780819575913 (cloth: alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780819575920 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Cage, John—Correspondence. |

Composers—Correspondence.

Classification: LCC ML410.C24 A4 2016 | DDC 780.92—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041918

5 4 3 2 1

Cover photo: James Klosty. The Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (1970).

for RALPH

CONTENTS

PREFACE | xi

PART ONE

1930–1949 | 1

PART TWO

1950–1961 | 125

PART THREE

1962–1971 | 255

PART FOUR

1972–1982 | 409

PART FIVE

1983–1992 | 519

APPENDIX

Cage’s Correspondents, with Sources of His Letters | 593

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS | 599

INDEX | 601

PREFACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much, much applause to all!

Laura Kuhn

New York, 2015

PART ONE

1930–1949

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Cage Family

[Undated, ca. 1930] | Biskra, Algeria

DEAR DENVER CAGES AND THE OTHER OUTLYING CAGES:

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

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

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

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

To Adolph Weiss

²

[Spring 1933?] | Carmel, California

Dear Mr. Weiss,

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

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

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

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

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

References: Richard Buhlig

102 S. Carondolet

Los Angeles, California

Henry Cowell

Menlo Park, California

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

J.C.

Box 1111, Carmel, Calif

To Henry Cowell

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

Dear Mr. Cowell,

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

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

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

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

To Pauline Schindler

⁶

11 December 1934 | Location not indicated

Dearest Pauline:⁷

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

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

To Adolph Weiss

[Winter, 1934?] | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Weiss:

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

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

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

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

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

To Herr Jawlinski

¹²

[ca. 1935] | 1207 Miramar, Los Angeles

Herr Jawlinski

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

Ich schreibe Musik. Sie sind mein Lehrer.

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

Es war #116

To Mrs. Adolph Weiss

January 3, 1935 | 1207 Miramar, Los Angeles

My dear Mrs. Weiss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Pauline Schindler

January 11, 1935 | Los Angeles

Dearest Pauline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Pauline Schindler

January 18, 1935 | Location not indicated

Dearest,

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

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

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

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

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

To Henry Cowell

[ca. 1935] | Location not indicated

Dear Henry,

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Pauline Schindler

February 22, 1935 | Los Angeles

Dearest Pauline:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love you. Oh that I were with you.

To Adolph Weiss

[March 30, 1935?] | Location not indicated

Dear Mr. Weiss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your devoted pupil

To Adolph Weiss

[May 1935] | Location not indicated

My dear Mr. Weiss:

Perhaps you are wondering why I have not answered your letter. I have certainly wanted to. But, following the suggestion you gave in your letter immediately before, I did my best to get closer to Schoenberg. He had, in between your two letters, asked me to come and see