The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

to Boulez about the poverty of American intellectual life, he also touted the young American composers working in New York who, with him, would form the New York School. They included Brooklyn-born Morton Feldman, whose scores in graphic notation excited him; his promising young pupil Christian Wolff, whose émigré parents, Kurt and Helen, published Pantheon Books; and Earle Brown, a grocer’s son who had studied mathematics and engineering who originated vivid new musical forms.

      Indirectly through Boulez, Cage also formed one of the great relationships of his life. When Boulez sent him a copy of his extremely difficult Second Sonata (1947–1948), Cage showed it to Feldman, who told him it could be played only by a certain young pianist, David Tudor. The two met, and Cage marveled at Tudor’s stupendous technical skill. When Tudor undertook to master the Boulez piece and then gave its American premiere at Carnegie Recital Hall on December 17, 1950, Cage turned pages for him and felt, as he told Boulez, exalted. Although Cage fell deeply in love with Tudor, he tried not to interfere when Tudor took up romantically with the poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards, better known as “M.C.,” an equally close friend from Black Mountain College.

      Cage’s letters from the decade contain particularly rich descriptions of his ideas and works. Indeed, titles of his compositions appear and reappear throughout, often illuminating dramatically evolving practices. The boldest and most far-reaching of these practices involved the development of his infamous chance operations, which resulted from his adaptation to composition of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination that Cage had received as a gift from Christian Wolff. As Cage explained to Boulez, he tossed coins to select hexagrams in the book, which he then allowed to determine every aspect of his compositions—tempo, duration, notes, etc. In this way, he said, he could diminish the force of his own personality and compose a piece of music entirely by chance. He told Boulez in great detail about his painstaking work on a composition for solo piano, Music of Changes (1951), which takes not only its inspiration but its title from the I Ching (literally, the “Book of Changes”). The demanding Music of Changes, Cage’s first work composed wholly with chance operations, would be given its premiere performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village on New Year’s Day, 1952, by, inevitably, David Tudor.

      Cage’s radical artistic direction was affirmed by the classes he attended in the early 1950s at Columbia University given by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism. Suzuki had left Japan in 1936, at the age of seventy, and given a series of lectures throughout the Western world that profoundly influenced an entire generation of artists. Cage discovered through Suzuki’s teachings that like Cage’s recent music, Zen emphasized detachment, or no-mind. Cage was emboldened, and he expanded his chance techniques as he turned to composing music directly on magnetic tape. The new medium offered possibilities of sound and rhythm outside the range of traditional musical instruments. In May 1952 he worked laboriously to produce Williams Mix, named for American architect Paul Williams, whom Cage had first met at Black Mountain College. A letter to Boulez describes the intricacies involved in producing this work for eight tracks of magnetic tape, whereby Cage and various colleagues measured, cut, and spliced together more than six hundred slivers of chance-determined sounds. Premiered the following March at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Williams Mix left Cage feeling he finally had worked with the entire field of sound.

      Cage twice interrupted his labors on Williams Mix to create two no less innovative pieces. In August of 1952, he and Cunningham were again in residence at Black Mountain College, now under the direction of the poet Charles Olson. Cage had become acquainted with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, two young actor/directors whose Living Theatre productions were staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Cage organized a few concerts there, and, being exposed to new ideas in contemporary theater, became impressed by the ideas of the avantgarde French playwright Antonin Artaud, especially as outlined in The Theater and Its Double (1938). As Cage understood Artaud, all elements of the theater should be treated independently rather than subordinated to a narrative thread. At Black Mountain College, Cage produced a theater event wherein the actors played “themselves,” during chance-determined lengths of time in a makeshift performance space doing what they chose, without a script. By most accounts, Olson read poetry while perched on a ladder, Cunningham danced while being chased by a dog, and Robert Rauschenberg, the daring young Texas artist also in residence, played records on a phonograph. What Cage created came to be thought of as the first “happening,” or at least its progenitor.

      Cage’s Black Mountain “happening” moved him to undertake another audacious work. Above the heads of the Black Mountain audience had hung one of Rauschenberg’s all-white canvases, painted with ordinary house paint. This “blank” painting encouraged Cage to pursue a musical idea he’d had for nearly a decade. Using chance methods, he composed 4'33" (1952), a work in three movements wherein no sounds are to be intentionally produced by the performer. It was first performed by Tudor a few weeks after the Black Mountain “happening” at a benefit concert given at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Tudor used a stopwatch to time the three movements, whose beginnings, lore has it, he indicated by closing the keyboard lid of the piano, endings by opening it. Predictably, 4'33" brought Cage a lot of attention, much of it mocking. A letter from Helen Wolff, Christian Wolff’s mother, arrived just prior to the work’s New York City premiere, calling 4'33" an immature prank. Cage’s thoughtful reply explains that his silent “sermon” on listening is in fact full of sounds.

      Cage’s letters in the first half of the decade record that he twice changed addresses. Saddened to learn that his building in lower Manhattan would be torn down, he moved in for a while with Cunningham at 12 E. 17th Street. Then, in the summer of 1954, he left the city for the rural, 116-acre Gate Hill Cooperative being established by Paul and Vera Williams in Stony Point, New York. Hardly settled there, he accepted an invitation from Heinrich Ströbel, music director of Germany’s Southwest Radio, to appear at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Donaueschingen. He and Tudor played a new prepared-piano duet—Cage’s 31'57.9864" for a Pianist and 34'46.776" for a Pianist, both from 1954 and presented as 12'55.6078" for Two Prepared Pianos—and made a broadcast recording. Cage’s touring schedule from this point forward would increase dramatically, and he would be more often than not far away from his new Stony Point home.

      As ever, Cage’s letters reveal ongoing financial struggles. In 1955 his annual income was $1,529.00, not enough to live on. He tried to earn more, sometimes reaching far afield from composition. For $400 a month he served as a graphic arts director (in effect, an “ad man”) with a New York textile firm founded by designer/collector Jack Lenor Larson. At Virgil Thomson’s request, he undertook with Kathleen O’Donnell Hoover to write a book-length account of Thomson’s life and work. And with David Tudor he tried to market a “Package Festival” that would consist of a concert of contemporary music, a lecture, and a dance by Cunningham’s company—three programs a day for three days. Cage also took up a faculty position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Commuting from Stony Point, some forty-five miles north, he initially offered courses on the music of Virgil Thomson, the music of Erik Satie, and experimental composition.

      Although only obliquely mentioned in his letters, Cage profited from “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage” held at New York’s Town Hall on May 15, 1958, made possible through the efforts of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Emile de Antonio, who came together as Impresarios Inc. The program included the premiere of his groundbreaking Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–1958), whose piano part alone makes use of eighty-four different systems of notation. The piece represented a new phase in Cage’s musical thinking involving, significantly, indeterminacy. (A performance, as he later told German composer and musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, can involve any number of musicians on whatever instruments they choose, playing for any length of time.) The Town Hall concert showcased nearly a dozen works and was widely reviewed; it was also recorded by producer George Avakian and sold as a lavish three-LP box set that included an unprecedented number of texts, photographs, and manuscript pages. Cage’s adventurous music was thereby introduced to a new and larger audience.

      Late in 1958, Cage made an eventful six-month tour of Europe. He made stops in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Oxford, and he crisscrossed Germany,