The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

a Communist (takes 2 wks). I’d have to have an apt. + piano—everything that I have in N.Y. Your letter just arrived saying apartment is freshly painted and I am drawn to come back as planned. What I don’t know is this: is the Marshall idea an only opportunity or is it one of many that will start coming to me? I wd. be able to do the kind of work I wanted to do in 1940 when I wrote letters + saw film people in Los Angeles.

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

      To John Cage Sr. and Lucretia Cage

       October 8, 1949 | Paris

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

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

      1. Don Sample, American poet and artist, with whom Cage cohabitated for a time in Los Angeles after his sojourn in Europe.

      2. Adolph Weiss (1891–1971), American composer and bassoonist, the first American musician to study with Arnold Schoenberg. He became Cage’s first composition teacher.

      3. American pianist Richard (Moritz) Buhlig (1880–1952) gave the first American performance of Schoenberg’s op. 11. He championed such European modernists as Ferruccio Busoni and Béla Bartók, and such American composers as Ruth Crawford and Henry Cowell.

      4. Henry Cowell (1897–1965), experimental American composer, music theorist, pianist, and publisher, one of Cage’s closest colleagues. The rhythmic and harmonic concepts in his New Musical Resources (1930) exerted profound influence on experimental composers. He was married to the American ethnographer Sidney (Robertson) Cowell (1903–1995).

      5. Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Austrian composer, music theorist, and teacher, leader of the Second Viennese School, who numbered among his European students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and among his American students Lou Harrison and John Cage. Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, which became a widely influential compositional method making use of an ordered series of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. His name is strongly associated with dodecaphony. Among his writings is Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1957). See Cage’s letter to Adolph Weiss dated [May 1935] for an account of their first meeting, page 20.

      6. (Sophie) Pauline (Gibling) Schindler (1893–1977), American writer, editor, and lecturer who specialized in architecture and the visual arts. During her marriage to the Austrian-born American architect Rudolph Schindler (1887–1953), she hosted salons at their Kings Road House in Los Angeles, which were attended by Southern California’s artistically minded, leftist intelligentsia. She was at the helm of two central California publications—The Carmelite (Carmel) and Dune Forum (Oceano Dunes)—and frequently reviewed local cultural events. Cage’s article “Counterpoint” first appeared in Dune Forum 1, no. 2 (Feb. 15, 1934). Schindler is the dedicatee of Cage’s Composition for Three Voices (1934), a chromatic work that maintains extreme distances between the repetitions of individual tones of the twenty-five tone ranges of the instruments.

      7. A total of twenty-eight letters between Cage and Schindler survive, all written while Schindler was based in Ojai and separated from her husband. See Maureen Mary, ed., “Letters: The Brief Love of John Cage for Pauline Schindler, 1934–35,” ex tempore 8, no. 1 (Summer 1996).

      8. Mark Schindler, Pauline’s twelve-year-old son.

      9. Pat O’Hara, Pauline’s lover, a reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News.

      10. Joseph Achron (1886–1943) and William Grant Still (1895–1978), American composers active in Los Angeles in the 1930s who championed the use of ethnic elements in composition.

      11. Xenia (Andreyevna) Kashevaroff (1913–1995), daughter of the archpriest of the Eastern Orthodox Russian-Greek Church of Alaska, a former art student at Reed College.

      12. Properly, Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky (1864–1941), Russian expressionist painter, a key member of the New Munich Artist’s Association, The Blue Rider, and, later, The Blue Four, championed by Galka Scheyer (see note 28). The letter reads:

      I cannot write in German or speak German, but I am very happy because I bought one of your paintings.

      Now I have it.

      I write music. You are my teacher.

      I would like to write more, but I cannot express all the things I want to say in German.

      It was number 116.

      13. Bertha McCord Knisely, music critic for the Los Angeles weekly Saturday Night and a supporter of the composer Harry Partch (see note 339).

      14. Lucretia Cage (née Harvey; 1885–1968), whose first piece for the Los Angeles Times, under the by-line Crete Cage, appeared on October 2, 1934. When her husband’s job for the U.S. Army necessitated a move to New Jersey, she resigned, her last piece appearing on February 14, 1939.

      15. Likely three of Weiss’s 7 Songs (to texts by Emily Dickinson): 2. Cemetery, 3. The Railway Train, and Mysteries, performed by Mary Bell, soprano, and the New World String Quartet. They were released on the New Music Quarterly Recordings label, an adjunct operation to Cowell’s New Music Quarterly publication, in 1934.

      16. Calista Rogers, a favorite singer among such Southern California composers as William Grant Still and Harry Partch.

      17. Wendell Hoss (1892–1980), founder of the Los Angeles Horn Club and the International Horn Society, best known for his excellent transcription of the Bach Cello Suites.

      18. Cage refers to intermittent work for his inventor father, John Milton Cage Sr. (1886–1964), whose projects over the years ranged from submarines and internal combustion engines to radio (a crystal set that could be plugged into an ordinary electric light system) and an “Invisible Ray Vision System” (for seeing in the dark).

      19. Cowell’s New Music Society advocated the work of contemporary composers across the Americas. Beginning in 1927, Cowell began publishing scores by young composers in his New Music Quarterly.

      20. Cage refers to Pro Musica, a concert series that presented Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3, op. 30, performed by the Abas Quartet.

      21. Formed in 1931 by a group of Jewish musicians and scholars in New York City and formally known as the America-Palestine Music Association of Musical Sciences. The organization became known as Mailamm, the Hebrew version (in an acronym) of its English title.

      22. Kitaro Nyokyo Tamada reportedly ran a roadside fruit stand in Cowell’s Los Angeles neighborhood. Discovering that Tamada played the shakuhachi, Cowell took up the instrument and composed The Universal Flute, which he dedicated to his new friend. Cowell organized concerts by local Japanese-American performers, many of whom would be interned during the war years. Cage organized a concert for Tamada at Cowell’s home on April 13, 1935.

      23. George Tremblay (1911–1982), Canadian-born American composer ardently devoted to Arnold Schoenberg and the twelve-tone method of composition.

      24. The Reverend Andrew Petrovich Kashevaroff (1863–1940), longtime pastor of the St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church