The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

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