The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

September 9, 1948 | Location not indicated

      Dear Peter:

      Was awfully busy this summer teaching but finally got through the mss., which I found very interesting, and liked very much although you’re probably more interested in “constructive criticism.” So:

      Your information about Satie,¹³⁹ whom I know a good deal about (having spent the summer going through his life + works at Black Mtn. College), is not accurate: e.g., the Messe des Pauvres is an early work (circa 1898), and you give the impression of its being a late work. You leave out mention of most of his important works and in no sense give him the importance due him, which is, I believe, to have consistently structured his music on lengths of time rather than harmonic relations. I’m sure he was aware of doing this but I doubt whether he knew its real importance, which is real: liberation from the Beethoven yoke, far more real than that granted by S[choenberg] with the 12-tone row.

      Your inaccuracies about Satie make me skeptical about the rest of the factual information. Is it accurate?

      How on earth can you call him a dilettante?

      With Webern he is, from my point of view, the 20th century.

      However, I really enjoyed the mss. + don’t mean to give another impression.

      It looks like we’re coming on another tour in January + February this time. Maybe you can arrange something?

      It would be fun to live in the same town + talk the book in detail.

      To Peter Yates

       [Undated, ca. mid 1948] | Location not indicated

      Dear Peter:

      The breathlessness is here in New York and it is very easy to fall into it.

      Lou has returned here and I spent a long time with him yesterday. He seems to me in very good condition. He is not married. But he has, at least it seemed to me, an inner security and general peaceful well-being about him which was very comforting. The breathlessness mentioned above he felt as he came near Chicago, and so he looks forward to a teaching job in San Francisco which he hopes to get for next summer. This year he will teach composition at the Greenwich School Music House.¹⁴⁰ For the first time in about a year and a half we talked about music in the way we used to.

      I do not know whether I am being rabid about Satie or not. However I give him first place with Webern and I fight for them both. So that when you ask for a list of his major works, I am baffled and would find it much easier to list his inconsequential works, for they are so few in number. He himself did not like Genevieve de Brabant and the Jack in the Box: he dropped them behind a piano and told people who asked for them that he had lost them on a bus. They are not very good works. Also I don’t find the 5 Grimaces very interesting. However, one of them is a brilliant piece: the fourth one, and very important from my own point of view because it is written in the same rhythmic structure that I have employed in all my work since 1938.

      The Messe des Pauvres is certainly an early work, since around 1900 Satie said, I will no longer compose on my knees (my information all comes from a biography, Erik Satie, by [Pierre-Daniel] Templier, which people who knew Satie accept as authoritative). It is technically and commentarily part and parcel of the other early works: I know the Sarabandes, Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes, Fils de Etoiles, Porte Heroique du Ciel, 4 Preludes, Danses Gothiques, and a few others. The maturity of the commentary here is because it is in agreement with the perennial philosophy which Satie devoted himself to in his early life, through the Rosicrucians, and through the establishing of his own church. What seems to me as being in even greater maturity is the commentary later in the Third Nocturne (circa 1920) (after Socrate), “avec serenite,” the word serenity never having been used by him before or elsewhere.

      After the first period, religious and mystical, there are the cafe chantant works; then the Trois Morceaux, which combines aspects of the mystical with aspects of the charming and the vulgar. Then the study of counterpoint for the second time (he had gone through the Conservatory earlier) in the Schola Cantorum and the resultant works: En Habit de Cheval, Apercues desagreeables, which, it seems to me, see and then renounce neo-classicism. Following this comes the period of commonly-called “satirical pieces”; they are not properly so-thought-of: they are parallel to the work of Paul Klee,¹⁴¹ and conserve their fantasy and magic waiting patiently to glow any time anyone lets them. Of these: Embryons, Croquis, 3 Valses, Descriptions, Avant-dernieres pensees, Sports et Divertissements, Enfantines, Trois preludes, etc., etc. I particularly am devoted to the Enfantines and the Sports, although when I say that, I feel unfaithful to the others. The Enfantines surpass all other children’s pieces of this century, easily and surely. Then comes Parade, before came the violin piece, some songs, beauties: Trois melodies, Trois poemes, Quatre melodies, Ludions, then the Socrate, the Nocturnes, Mercure and finally Relache with its incredible Entr’acte. I have missed many but Templier is not at hand nor the music nor the time; for instance I miss the play, Le Piege de Meduse, and its music.

      As I see music there are four departments of it inviting thought and action: structure (which is the division into parts of a composition); form (which is morphology-content); method (which is note to note or instant to instant procedure); and material (which is actual sound and silence). Schoenberg’s contribution is in the minor area of method. Satie’s is in the major area of structure. So is Webern’s; his pre-12-tone works are structured according to phraseology instead of harmony, as are Satie’s, as are mine. Schoenberg still thinks as Beethoven but new-fangles it through new method. Stravinsky is seductive, via sound, and confesses intellectual poverty by exploiting music of the past. The pre-eminence of Webern is confessed by the 12-tone composers of contemporary Europe. Webern and Satie are distinctly the composers of the century who V out instead of V’ing in: I mean they open the doors, they do not focus in to deadness. Shall I go on? Let me know.

      I look all the time for the Variations of Webern. I can’t find them. I have given my copy away so that a pianist will play it.

      Form is the area of music that anybody goes into freely: the 19th-century error was to imitate Beetoven’s form-feeling, which in terms of the neurosis is what Schoenberg mostly does. Satie and Webern are free and original in their form, besides being so in their structure. The method of Satie, which is frequently banal, is what disguises his riches and prevents serious people from taking him seriously. They, however, have misplaced their seriousness.

      However, I realize that it is probably silly to send you these ideas because they relate to a body of ideas that I find useful, and your ideas relate to what you find useful; however, one often makes the questionable act of thinking that his ideas and actions are generally applicable.

      For many reasons, I would prefer to offer again this year the Sonatas and Interludes, and without other music on the program. In the first place I find “programs” no longer useful, because they stand in the way of the proper use of music which is to quiet and concentrate the mind, and not to giddify it with entertainment, no matter how intellectual. In relation to the shakuhachi music, which is so marvelous, there must be no other music. It is against proper being, unnatural. The same is true of these pieces of mine, and I say it in no spirit of self-praise, but simply in simple thought about what music is and does. I am not interested in success but simply in music. I am fairly certain however that there are a number of people in Los Angeles who have not heard the Sonatas, but heard of them, who would like to hear them. I intend to resist recording these pieces and yet I want to offer them to be heard and used. Having heard them once is a very good beginning for hearing them again. I myself have heard them countless times, and I find them more and more useful, rather than less and less so.

      My other reasons are less important but to do with practicality. I have no new music, having spent the whole summer with Satie and teaching. The two piano works which I have demand extreme virtuosity and long work with the mutes in the piano which would not be possible. It would also require for the single concert 5 pianos, and no end of nervous arrangements, since I am necessarily in Los Angeles only a short time.