The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

      131. Alan Hovhaness (b. Alan Vaness Chakmakjian; 1911–2000), Armenian-born American composer who numbered some sixty-seven symphonies among his nearly five hundred works.

      132. See Lou Harrison, About Carl Ruggles (Yonkers, NY: Oscar Baradinsky, 1946).

      133. Upon receipt of this letter, Ives sent $250 to Harrison to cover the cost of treatment. This sum was provided to Harrison for editing and conducting the first performance of Ives’s Third Symphony (1908–1910; New York, April 5, 1946) and was, not insignificantly, one-half of the amount Ives received upon being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1947. Harrison would be hospitalized for nine months.

      134. Harmony Twitchell Ives (1876–1979), wife of Charles Ives from 1908 until his death in 1954. She was the daughter of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell, whose church services were served by her husband as organist.

      135. Josef Albers (1888–1976), German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential art-education programs of the twentieth century, and his wife, Anni Albers (b. Annelise Fleischmann; 1899–1994), German-American textile artist and printmaker. With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, the two immigrated to North Carolina, where Albers became head of the new Black Mountain College, initiating summer seminars that were free of the rigors of regular academic sessions. Cage and Cunningham visited first in spring 1948 and returned together and separately until 1953, at which time Cunningham’s Dance Company was formed there.

      136. Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877–1952), American artist, social reformer/suffragette, and arts patron. In January 1920, she, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in Dreier’s apartment; she became its driving force. In 1941, she and Duchamp presented the Société Anonyme’s art collection to Yale University.

      137. Cunningham’s students in 1947 included Dorothy Berea, Shirley Broughton, Gisela Caccialanza, Mili Churchill, Tanaquil LeClerq, Fred Danieli, Dorothy Dushock, Eleanor Goff, Sara Hamhill (the “stowaway”), Gerard Leavitt, Judith Martin, Job Sanders, and Beatrice Tompkins.

      138. Richard (1915–2002) and Louise Lippold, close friends. Richard was an American sculptor, best known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium. The Sun (1953–56), made from gold wire on commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, would be the subject of an unfinished collaborative film undertaken by Cage and Lippold in 1956. The fourteenth and fifteenth movements of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948) are subtitled “Gemini—After the Work of Richard Lippold.”

      139. More fully, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866–1925), turn-of-the-century French composer, pianist, and writer. Between 1944 and 1992, the year of his death, Cage would compose no fewer than sixteen works inspired by or making use of Satie. See Laura Kuhn, exhibition catalog for Cage’s Satie: Composition for Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, September 28–December 30, 2012.

      140. A settlement house founded Thanksgiving Day 1902 for New York’s increasing immigrant population, Greenwich House offered programs in social services, arts, and education.

      141. Paul Klee (1879–1940), German-Swiss painter whose work embodied elements of expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and orientalism. His work inspired many composers, including Cage.

      142. Merton Brown (1913–2001), American composer, and John (“Jack”) Heliker (1909–2000), American painter. Heliker was on faculty at Columbia University; Brown, a student of Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles, developed a system of composition known as “dissonant counterpoint.”

      143. Easton Pribble (1917–2003), American painter and art instructor, long associated with the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.

      144. Frederick Goldbeck, French writer and music critic, who once described Cage as the “Giraudouxian of our time.”

      145. The Seasons (1947), ballet in one act for orchestra, originally used as music for the eponymous choreographic work by Cunningham, with stage decor by Isamu Noguchi, first performed in New York, May 18, 1947. This is a sweet, lyrical composition, like the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948) and String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–1950) indicative of Cage’s interest in Indian aesthetics. The orchestral version, the orchestration of which was assisted by Lou Harrison and Virgil Thomson, was preceded the same year by a version for solo piano.

      146. Eckhart von Hochheim (c.1260–c1327), commonly known as Meister Eckhart, German theologian, philosopher, and mystic.

      147. Peggy Bate (1912–1990), better known as Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Australian composer who served from 1949 to 1958 as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, overlapping for a time with Thomson. In an article for Vogue (Nov. 15, 1950), she would include Cage in her list of “Musical Explorers: Six Americans Who Are Changing the Musical Vocabulary” (others were Hovhaness, McPhee, Bowles, Harrison, and Varèse).

      148. Geeta (or Gita) Sarabhai, important Indian musician, one of the first female pakhavaj players in the world, and a member of the Ahmedabad Sarabhai textile family. She and Cage first met in 1946 when she traveled to the United States for study, concerned about the influence of Western music on the traditional music of her country. Cage taught her counterpoint, while she informed him on the subjects of Indian music and philosophy. It was from Sarabhai that Cage learned that in Indian thought the purpose of music is “to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences,” an idea he noted often. While Cage would in time befriend many in the Sarabhai family, he remained especially close to Gita and her sister, Gira.

      149. Kenneth Klein, booking agent for Carnegie Hall from 1948 to 1955. Cage refers here to concerts that took place on January 12 and 13, 1949, of his recently completed Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–1948), performed by Maro Ajemian. The piano preparations were apparently removed or tampered with after the first concert, so that the preparations for the second concert had to be hastily replaced and thus were inadequate. Cage’s complaint in item 7 is particularly interesting, given his later insistence on accommodating the sounds of the environment in the concert experience. It may be that experiences like this one at Carnegie Hall led him to change his mind.

      150. Properly, Margareda Guedos de Nogueira, a wealthy Brazilian woman employed in the diplomatic service of the Brazilian Department of Foreign Affairs. She was close to Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s troubled English-born composer/husband, Stanley Bate (1911–1959); in April 1950, upon the heels of his divorce from Peggy, he and Nogueira would be married in Rio de Janeiro. Maggie and Peggy remained close friends long after Stanley’s suicide in 1959.

      151. Maro Ajemian (1921–1978), American pianist who specialized in contemporary music. Cage dedicated his Sonatas and Interludes to her, a work she would record for the first time in 1950.

      152. Properly, the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), founded in Salzburg in 1922, an important network of members from about fifty countries devoted to the promotion and presentation of contemporary music.

      153. Cage received two unexpected honors in 1949: a prestigious National Institute of Arts and Letters award of $1,000 for “an originality of workmanship that has extended the expressive range of music,” and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, in part on the strength of a letter of recommendation from Virgil Thomson, praising Cage as “the most original composer in America, if not in the world.”

      154. Likely the home of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac (1865–1943), American patron whose music salons continued after her death under the aegis of the Singer-Polignac Foundation, which she had established with private funds in 1928. Singer was an amateur musician who commissioned many works by important French composers of her time, including Erik Satie (Socrate).

      155. Virgil Thomson had arranged for Cage to cover music festivals while in Europe as a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, thus Cage and Cunningham were in Palermo to attend the ISCM Festival, April 22–30, 1949. This was Cage’s first real experience of contemporary musical life while abroad.

      156.