The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

as curator of the Alaska State Library and Museum and wrote many articles on Alaska’s history and ethnology.

      25. Cave played for the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and, later, the short-lived Los Angeles Neophonic Orchestra.

      26. Properly, Chautauqua, an idyllic town in western New York, roughly eighty miles from Buffalo; home to the historic Chautauqua Institution.

      27. John Cage and Xenia Kashevaroff were married before the Hon. Henry C. Kelly, duly recorded by J. G. Livington, clerk of the Superior Court of the State of Arizona in and for Yuma County, on June 7, 1935. Witnesses were Anna C. Molloy and Fama E. Townsend.

      28. Galka Scheyer (b. Emelie Esther Scheyer, 1889–1945), German-American painter, art dealer, and art collector who promoted the work of The Blue Four—Lyonel Feininger, Alexei Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee—which kindled Cage’s early enthusiasm in these artists. She and Pauline Schindler co-created art exhibitions and lecture series for various art venues along the West Coast.

      29. Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), American composer and music critic. He was best known for the operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947), with libretti by Gertrude Stein, and for his film scores for The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Louisiana Story (1948), the latter winning the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune (1940–1954) and was an early champion of Cage. Although their friendship did not survive Cage’s book-length study of Thomson’s life and music, written at Thomson’s request, Cage acknowledged his debt to Thomson to the end of his life.

      30. Properly, Thomson’s Five Phrases from the Song of Solomon for soprano and percussion (1926), scored for soprano and percussion.

      31. Cage was on faculty at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington, from September 1938 through the summer of 1939, employed as both composer and accompanist for the class Creative Composition and Percussion Instruments and for classes in modern dance taught by Bonnie Bird (1914–1995). Other faculty members included Margaret Jansen and Doris Denison, both of whom played in his percussion ensemble.

      32. Johanna Beyer (1888–1944), German-American composer and pianist well represented in Cage’s early percussion programs.

      33. Lou (Silver) Harrison (1917–2003), American composer known for incorporating elements of non-Western music and exploring just intonation and microtones. He was a student of Cowell, Schoenberg, and, later, K. P. H. Notoprojo (aka K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat and Pak Cokro). Several of Harrison’s early works were written for percussion, including his Fifth Simfony (1939).

      34. The New School for Social Research in New York, founded in 1919, where Cowell early on taught a course titled Music of the World’s Peoples.

      35. H(enry) A(llan) Moe (1894–1975), American administrator and humanist; in turn the first secretary, then administrator, and finally president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1925–1963); also the first director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

      36. Cage had applied for a composer position with the Federal Music Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, but instead was given a job as a recreation counselor. He worked variously in this capacity, but usually with an emphasis on music.

      37. Properly, teponaztli, a slit drum used in Central Mexico, traditionally made out of hollow hardwood logs.

      38. Mills College in Oakland, California, where Cage worked as an accompanist, performed, and presented some of his work for the first time, including Second Construction (July 18, 1940), Dance Music for Elfrid Ide (July 27, 1941), and Fads and Fancies in the Academy (July 27, 1941). Cage’s ill-fated efforts to establish a Center for Experimental Music at Mills College are legendary.

      39. Charles (Edward) Ives (1874–1954), American modernist composer, one of the first to achieve international renown for his extreme originality. He was among the first to experiment with such techniques as polytonality, polyrhythms, tone clusters, aleatoricism, and microtonality.

      40. This concert took place on January 8, 1940, at the University of Idaho in Moscow, where the Cage Percussion Players (John Cage, Xenia Cage, Doris Denison, and Margarete Jansen) performed works by Cage (Quartet, 1935), Johanna Beyer, Ray Green, Lou Harrison, and William Russell. The same program was given at the University of Montana in Missoula (Jan. 9, 1940) and Whitman College (Jan. 11, 1940). On February 14, 1940, the ensemble presented a program at Reed College that included the premiere of Cage’s Second Construction.

      41. Peter Yates (1909–1976), long-time associate editor of Arts and Architecture (1940–1967) and founder (with his wife, Frances Mullen) of the concert series Evenings on the Roof, which took place on the roof of the Yates’s Rudolf Schindler–designed home in Los Angeles and which gave contemporary composers the opportunity to hear their works performed. Yates had long associations with many important European and American composers of his time.

      42. Living Room Music (1940), dedicated to “Xenia,” for percussion and speech quartet, in three movements, the first and third to be played on such everyday household items as magazines, a table-top, books, window frames, etc. The text of the popular second movement, “The World Is Round,” is by Gertrude Stein. Cage’s Living Room Music makes obvious reference to Erik Satie’s Musique d’ameublement, or “Furniture Music,” the term coined by Satie in 1917.

      43. Cage and Harrison composed Double Music (1941), a percussion quartet for which Cage wrote parts 1 and 3 and Harrison wrote parts 2 and 4, each working independently. Instruments used include bells, brakedrums, sistra, gongs, tam-tams, and thundersheet.

      44. Percy Grainger (1882–1961), Australian composer, pianist, and folksong collector. Grainger was one of Cowell’s most outspoken defenders during Cowell’s incarceration on a morals conviction, providing him a job upon his release from San Quentin prison in June 1940.

      45. Marian Van Tuyl (1907–1987), American dance educator and performer who founded the dance department at Mills College in Oakland, California (1938–1970). She edited and published Impulse: Annual of Contemporary Dance (1951–1970). Her best-known collaboration with Cage is Fads and Fancies in the Academy (1940), originally subtitled A Gentle Satire on Progressive Education; less known is her contribution to a short experimental film, Horror Dream (1947), directed by Hy Hirsh and Sidney Peterson, which used a score by Cage drawn from his Imaginary Landscape series.

      46. William Russell (1905–1992), American composer, among the first to integrate African, Caribbean, and Asian instruments as well as found objects and jazz elements into his compositions. Russell’s career as a composer was short, his list of works for percussion equally so: eight compositions in all, nearly all between 1932 and 1940.

      47. Lester Horton (1906–1953), American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. He formed the Horton Dance Group (1934–1944) and, with Bella Lewitzky, the Dance Theater of Los Angeles (1946–1950). His best known works are his “choreodramas,” including Salome, which occupied him for nearly twenty years (1934–1953).

      48. Gordon Webber (1909–1965), Canadian abstract artist, a student of László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus (later School of Design) in Chicago. In 1940 at Mills College in Oakland, California, Cage gave a percussion program in which dancers were replaced by moving lights created by Webber, who was also in residence.

      49. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt (1877–1948), American educator, from 1916 to 1943 president of Mills College.

      50. Rhythmicon (aka Polyrhythmophone), the first electronic drum (“rhythm”) machine, created by the Russian inventor Léon Theremin (b. Lev Sergeyevich Termen; 1896–1993), on commission from Henry Cowell. The instrument could produce up to sixteen different simultaneous rhythms—a periodic base rhythm on a selected fundamental