The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

Maurice Grosser (1903–1986), American landscape painter and life partner of Virgil Thomson. He devised the scenario for two of Thomson’s operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947).

      194. Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod (1902–2010), Swiss singer.

      195. More fully, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of two performing rights organizations in the United States (along with Broadcast Music, Inc., or BMI) that license performances of music by its member composers.

      196. Henri Sauguet (1901–1989), French composer and music critic who shared Cage’s enthusiasm for the music of Erik Satie.

      197. Thomson composed more than 150 musical “portraits,” which were in the main charming tonal ditties on names of his closest friends. The greater majority are for piano, a few for instrumental combinations. For a complete listing and analysis, see Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1986).

      198. Editions Eschig (later Durand-Salabert-Eschig), Satie’s publisher (see note 811).

      199. Henri Michaux (1899–1984), Belgian-born French poet, writer, and painter. The collaborative opera project Cage proposes came to naught.

      200. Likely a performance of Cunningham’s Effusions Avant L’Heure (1949) paired with Cage’s A Valentine Out of Season for prepared piano (1949), premiered at Jean Hélion’s studio on June 9, 1945. LeClerq and Nichols were at the time members of Balanchine’s Ballet Society Company.

      201. Margaret (“Marge”) Harvey (and husband George), one of Cage’s four maternal aunts; the others were Sadie, Josie, and Phoebe, the last his first music teacher. Aunt Marge was a contralto whose voice Cage greatly admired, but she reputedly abandoned any idea of singing professionally upon marriage. Neither Sadie nor Josie is mentioned in the present collection, but Sadie appears several times in Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You’ll Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1973,” in X: Writings ’79–’82 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

      202. George Avakian (b.1919), American record producer known particularly for his work with Columbia Records. He produced the first live long-playing record—Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Avakian’s wife was the violinist Anahid Ajemian, sister of the pianist Maro Ajemian, who gave many fine performances of Cage’s piano works. Avakian would be the producer of “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage at Town Hall” in New York on May 15, 1958, which he recorded and released the following year. This mammoth undertaking was funded, in part, by Emile de Antonio, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg as Impresarios Inc.

      203. Cage refers here to one of his father’s many patents, his “Mist-A-Cold,” relating “generally to aspiratory devices and more particularly to an improved inhaler, suitable for oral or nasal inhalation” (patent no. 2,579,362), application made October 31, 1946, approved December 18, 1951.

      204. André Souris (1899–1970), Belgian composer, conductor, musicologist, and writer, strongly associated with the surrealist art movement.

      205. Armand Gatti (b. 1924), French playwright, poet, journalist, and filmmaker. He provided the poetry set by Boulez in his Oubli signal lapidé for twelve voices a cappella, first performed in 1952.

      206. Cage is beginning work on his String Quartet in Four Parts, which would be completed in 1950 (see note 232).

      207. Minna Lederman (later Daniel; 1896–1995), American music writer and long-time editor of Modern Music, which exerted considerable influence over the direction of pre–World War II American music. She later contributed to Saturday Review, The American Mercury, and The Nation; also edited Stravinsky in the Theater (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949). Her husband was the American artist Mell Daniel (1899–1975).

      208. Max Jacob (1876–1944), French poet, painter, writer, and critic, an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists (having befriended them all).

      209. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), French author and art critic, one of the foremost poets of the early twentieth century and credited with coining the term surrealism and with writing the first surrealist work, the play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1917).

      210. The actual quotations are “C’est dans le silence que se fait l’introspection; c’est par le silence que l’extérieur descendra en vous.” (“Silence is where introspection happens; silence is where the outside will go down into you. Who will speak in praise of silence?”, Jacob, from Conseils à un jeune poête: Suivis de Conseils à un étudient [1972]); and “Ils vous enterreront tout vivants et éveillés dans le monde nocturne et fermé des songes” (“They will bury you alive and wide awake in the nocturnal and closed world of dreams.”), Apollinaire, from L’esprit nouveau et les Poètes [1917]).

      211. Max Ernst (1891–1976), German artist and poet, a pioneer in both the Dada and surrealist movements. His third wife, from 1942 to 1946, was Peggy Guggenheim; his fourth, from 1946–1976, the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012).

      212. Colin McPhee (1900–1964), Canadian composer and musicologist known for his ethnomusicological studies of Bali. Among his compositions is Tabuh Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra (1936).

      213. Likely (Juliette) Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), French composer, conductor, and teacher who taught many leading composers of the twentieth century, including Thomson, Copland, Elliott Carter, and David Diamond.

      214. André Jolivet (1905–1974), French composer, known for his devotion to French culture and musical ideas, with particular interest in acoustics and atonality.

      215. Joan Miró (i Ferrà) (1893–1983), Catalan painter and sculptor.

      216. Alexander Calder (1898–1976), American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile; also created “stabiles,” or stationary sculptures, and wire figures, most notably for a vast miniature circus. Cage would produce music for a documentary film by Herbert Matter titled Music for “Works of Calder” (1949–1950) (see following note), which won an award for best musical score at the Woodstock Art Film Festival later the same year.

      217. Herbert Matter (1907–1984), Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer best known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. At the time of this letter he was at work on the film Works of Calder, for which Cage was to compose the score. Matter’s wife, Mercedes (née Carles; 1913–2001) was a founder of the New York Studio School.

      218. From 1948 to 1954, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and its successor, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), administered the programs of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), to help rebuild European economies after World War II.

      219. Constantin Brăncuşi (1876–1957), Romanian sculptor who made his career in France, commonly referred to as the patriarch of modern sculpture.

      220. Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (1948). Cage did not like this book, his favorites being Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie, trans. Elena and David French (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969) and virtually anything written or compiled by Ornella Volta, director of the Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie in Paris.

      PART TWO

      1950–1961

      BY THE TIME JOHN CAGE returned from Europe, he had learned enough French to correspond bilingually with Pierre Boulez. The nearly forty-five letters the two exchanged between May 1949 and August 1954 document one of the richest intellectual relationships in twentieth-century music history. Cage made clear his enormous enthusiasm for Boulez’s compositions and reported his efforts to get them performed in America. He also championed bringing the French composer to New York. Boulez replied in detailed, thoughtful letters with