The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

to the United Kingdom in 1954, serving for a time as chief conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

      157. Marya Freund (1876–1966), Polish (naturalized French) soprano, a champion of contemporary music. In addition to works by Schoenberg, whose Pierrot Lunaire she premiered in 1922, she performed works by Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, and Stravinsky.

      158. Wladimir Woronoff (1903–1980), Russian-born Belgian composer. From 1946 to 1948 he concentrated on twelve-tone technique, which likely piqued Cage’s interest; otherwise his compositions were mostly modal.

      159. The First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music, organized by Richard Malipiero in Milan in May 1949, was also attended by, among others, Bruno Maderna, Camillo Togni, René Leibowitz, and Hans Erich Apostel.

      160. Properly, Vic Legley (1915–1994), French-born Belgian violist and composer.

      161. Musical America, the oldest magazine in the United States reporting on classical music, founded in 1898 by John Christian Freund. Cage’s “Contemporary Music Festivals Are Held in Italy” appeared in its June 1949 issue, reprinted in John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993).

      162. Jean Mollet (1877–1964), French writer and pataphysician, dubbed “Baron” by Apollinaire, with whom he founded, in early 1903, the periodical Aesop’s Feast.

      163. Properly, Sonia (or Sonja) Sekula (1918–1963), Swiss-born American artist closely linked with the abstract expressionist movement whose works were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery. She was a resident in the Monroe St. apartment where Cage lived.

      164. John Cage, “Raison d’être de la musique modern,” Contrepoints, une revue de musique, no. 6 (Paris: Richard Masse Éditeurs, 1949): 55–61.

      165. Roberto (Sebastián Antonio) Matta (Echaurren) (1911–2002), one of Chile’s best-known painters and a seminal figure in twentieth-century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.

      166. Andor Foldes (originally Földes) (1913–1992), Hungarian pianist.

      167. (Edwin) Olin Downes (1886–1955), American music critic for the Boston Post (1906–1924) and the New York Times (1924–1955). His disparaging opinions of some of the finest composers of his time (not only Cage, but also Edward Elgar, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg) later weakened his credibility.

      168. Maurice Roche (1924–1997), French novelist, composer, and musicologist.

      169. Francis (Jean Marcel) Poulenc (1899–1963), French composer, member of Les Six; and Pierre Fournier (1906–1986), French cellist.

      170. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), French composer, organist, and ornithologist.

      171. Jean Hélion (1904–1987), French painter of modernist art whose midcareer rejection of abstraction resulted in some five decades of figurative work. Hélion’s third wife was Pegeen Vail Guggenheim, daughter of Peggy Guggenheim (see note 175).

      172. By “the 12-tone business,” Cage refers to his coverage in May 1949 of the First Congress for Dodecaphonic Music.

      173. Pierre Boulez (1925–2016), French composer, conductor, and pianist, a philosophical leader of postwar music in France. His lively exchange of letters with Cage between May 1949 and August 1954 were originally published as Pierre Boulez/John Cage: Correspondance et documents, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 1990).

      174. Aaron Copland (1900–1990), American composer, teacher, writer, and conductor, influential in forging a distinctly American style of composition.

      175. Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim (1898–1979), American art collector, bohemian, and socialite who created an extraordinary art collection in Europe and the United States between 1938 and 1946.

      176. Properly, Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), Italian fashion designer prominent between the two World Wars. Her creations, some made in collaboration with contemporary artists including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau, were influenced by her involvement in the Dada/surrealist art movements.

      177. Frank Wigglesworth (see note 515).

      178. Likely Mario Negri (1916–1987), Italian sculptor and writer.

      179. Properly, Lake Winnemucca, a dry lake bed in northwestern Nevada on the dividing line between Washoe and Pershing counties, home to several petroglyphs dated between 14,800 and 10,500 years ago.

      180. Bonnie Bird (1915–1995), American teacher and dancer, a Martha Graham protogé and Cage’s colleague at the Cornish School, where she served as head of the dance department from 1937. Among her students were Cunningham and Remy Charlip (1929–2012), who would become one of the founding members of the Merce Cunninghan Dance Company.

      181. The Ondes Martenot, also known as the Ondium Martenot, Martenot, and Ondes Musicales, an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by the French cellist and inventor Maurice Martenot (1898–1980). Similar in design to the theremin, its sonic capabilities were later expanded by the addition of timbral controls and switchable loudspeakers.

      182. Paul (Frederic) Bowles (1910–1999), American expatriate composer, author, and translator who achieved both critical and popular acclaim for his novels, beginning with his first, The Sheltering Sky (1949). His wife was the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973).

      183. John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” The Tiger’s Eye (March 1949), reprinted in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

      184. René Leibowitz (1913–1972), Polish-born French composer, conductor, music theorist, and teacher.

      185. Serge Nigg (1924–2008), French composer. His Variations for piano and ten instruments (1946) is reputedly the first dodecaphonic work composed by a French composer.

      186. Pyotr Petrovich Suvshinsky (1892–1985), later known as Pierre Souvtchinsky, Ukrainian patron and writer on music. Emigrating from Russia in 1922, he settled in Paris, where he would co-found with Boulez and Jean-Louis Barrault the Domaine musical concert series, active from 1954 to 1973.

      187. Cage’s “square-root” principle, also sometimes referred to as his “micro-macrocosmic” principle, regulated the structures of his compositions of the period, wherein the large parts of a work had the same proportion as the phrases of a single unit. For Cage, this kind of structure, often rhythmic, could be expressed with sounds, including noises, or it could be expressed as stillness and movement in dance. It guided his earliest collaborations with Cunningham, who experimented with the same technique.

      188. Suzanne Tézenas, French literary socialite close to Boulez, whom she assisted to found the Domaine musical concert series in Paris. Her unpublished “Lettre de John Cage à Suzanne Tézenas, New York, 4 fevrier 1955” is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On October 17, 1949, Cage would perform his Sonatas and Interludes at the Tézenas salon, with an introductory lecture by Boulez.

      189. Alice B(abette) Toklas (1877–1967), American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde in the early twentieth century, early on companion to the American experimental writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Cage set three of Stein’s poems to music in his youthful Three Songs (1932–1933): “Twenty years after,” “If it was to be,” and “At East and ingredients.”

      190. Boris de Schlözer (1881–1969), Russian-born French writer, musicologist, and translator, heralded for his early biography of Stravinsky (1929), and his niece, Marina Scriabin (1911–1998), Russian-born French musicologist and composer and daughter of the renowned Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915).

      191. Goodwin was subletting Cage’s Monroe St. apartment during his trip to Europe.

      192. Vittorio Rieti (1898–1994), Jewish-Italian composer who settled in the United States in 1940. Ostensibly the two composers had little in common, but in 2006 two of their works—Cage’s Chess Pieces and Rieti’s Pasticchio (Chess Serenade), both from 1944—would