The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

experiences took place in Milan, where he befriended the Italian composer Luciano Berio and his American-born wife, the brilliant mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Berio gave Cage working space and technical assistance at the Studio di Fonologia, RAI’s facility for experimental audio research. Here, Cage created Fontana Mix (1958), named for his Italian landlady, an exciting indeterminate piece for magnetic tape that would serve as the means for composing several other works.

      Cage also secured a spot as a contestant on the popular television game show Lascia o Raddoppia (colloquially, “Double or Nothing”) in the quiz category of mushrooms. Living in Stony Point, Cage had discovered within himself a deep love of nature; fascinated, he collected mushrooms, read about mushrooms, and became, as he told Peter Yates, an “amateur mycologist.” His answers to a series of increasingly difficult questions on Lascia o Raddoppia over the course of five weekly programs won him five million lire (about $8,000) and a modicum of popular fame in Italy. It also afforded him momentary respite from his usual state of penury. Returning to America in March 1959, he used part of his winnings to purchase a grand piano for his Stony Point home as well as a Volkswagen bus for use by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company when it toured. His mushroom studies invigorated, in the spring Cage augmented his offerings at the New School with a course in mushroom identification.

      Cage’s thinking was beginning to influence younger composers, some of whom wrote to him for advice and support. In October 1959 he received a letter and string trio score from a twenty-five-year-old experimental composer whose imagination impressed him: La Monte Young. Born in a small Idaho dairy farming community and settled in Los Angeles, Young greatly admired Cage and as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley had initiated performances of his works. Cage found particularly interesting Young’s use of continuous, long-lasting sounds or static drones. He took part, as he told Young, in a Living Theatre performance of his admirer’s noisy, scraping Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (1960), which he greatly enjoyed.

      Cage expresses increasingly clear ideas about twentieth-century compositional trends in his letters of the period to Peter Yates. In what are often summary discussions, he describes how his contemporaries—both elders and peers—were changing the landscape of American music. By 1960, he identifies what were for him the key aspects of experimental music, most of which were reflected in his own compositions of the time.

      Critical of the distribution system of experimental music in America, Cage wrote to John Edmunds, curator of the Americana Collection of the Music Division of the New York Public Library, about possible remedies. He had become anxious to publish his own music and collect in book form some of his many articles and lectures. In late 1959 he met Walter Hinrichsen, founder in 1948 of C. F. Peters Corporation in New York. By an agreement signed in June 1960, Hinrichsen launched his role as Cage’s sole music publisher with an aesthetic blast. Like many others, he found Cage’s handwritten notation to be quite beautiful, so he began by publishing, probably early in 1961, a four-volume facsimile edition of Cage’s complex, chance-determined Music of Changes.

      At about the same time, Cage also realized his hope of having some of his published writings appear in book form. He had sent a stack of writings and a possible table of contents to Richard Winslow, director of the music department at Wesleyan University, who subsequently “inspired” the university’s press to publish the volume. Cage’s 275-page collection appeared in October 1961. Titled Silence: Lectures and Writings, it recorded Cage’s evolving understanding of music since 1937 and was prominently and mostly enthusiastically reviewed. Cage also accepted an invitation to serve as a fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies, where his one-term appointment was extended to two so that he remained at the center from October 1960 to June 1961. Although he rekindled his hope to start his Center for Experimental Music, this time at Wesleyan, it was again not to be.

      Letters from the late 1950s show Cage beginning to assemble the electronic theater/music event Atlas Eclipticalis (1961), which he titled after a Czechoslovakian book of star maps he’d used in its composition. He discussed the nature of this piece in some detail in a letter to Yates dated August 17, 1961, noting its basis in his theory of indeterminate composition, his reliance upon celestial maps, his use of contact microphones to amplify the instruments, and his emphasis on short, soft sounds. He addressed some of the problems he’d encountered in producing the work in a letter to Lawrence Morton, director of the Monday Evening Concerts (the successor to Yates’s Evenings on the Roof) in Los Angeles, who had written to him about scheduling a performance.

      Even for Cage, Atlas Eclipticalis is unusually, even epically, adventurous. Often paired with his Winter Music (1957), a full performance calls for twenty pianists and eighty-six other instruments, all in effect playing as soloists. But Cage was beginning to understand the limitations of his players and presenters, and his works, now often scored for variable instrumentation, were becoming naturally open to negotiation. The Los Angeles performance went on with fourteen instrumentalists, in March 1962.

      To Pierre Boulez²²¹

       January 17 [1950] | Location not indicated

      My dear Pierre,

      Your letter has just arrived here at home. I cannot tell you how overjoyed I was to get it. Without news of you I am without news of music, and you know I love music with all my heart.

      You write English admirably. (Thanks)

      The trip to South America must be marvelous! Now it must be made even better by coming down to New York. I shall try to arrange concerts, lectures (I can talk to Copland about Tanglewood, etc.); and you can stay at home here and I can make use of an un-nailed piano(!).²²² Everyone here is talking about you (pronouncing the Z) but no one has heard your music (exceptions: Copland, Thomson). The musical atmosphere is ready—everyone full of desire. We even really need the vitality which you could give. Because our musical life is not very lively at present. We have some Schoenberg (Serenade, conducted by Mitropoulos, etc.) and there are some “young ones” who are taking up the Stravinsky question again (Mavra, etc.). But the date is now 1950, I believe. There is Jolivet, but not for me (I heard the recording in Paris, and the work doesn’t interest me). Messiaen was here;—I love him for his ideas about rhythm. Almost everyone was against him because of his half-religious half-Hollywood spirit. I invited him here (big reception, dinner, and music), and he explained his Turangalila score to some composers.

      Since knowing you, our music sounds feeble to me. In truth, it is only you who interests me. I have heard Stefan Wolpe’s Sonata (violin and piano)²²³ and some of BEN WEBER’s works.²²⁴ That’s all; and both tend towards Berg rather than Webern. And what is amazing, we have two composers writing pentatonic music! Poor Merton Brown is beginning to see psychoanalysts. People talk about a Kirchner (Leon).²²⁵ One of these days I am going to hear the music of MILTON BABBITT,²²⁶ who is the most Webernian. He has talked to me about rhythmic inversions. He takes a duration, and he inverts the fractions (corresponding to the octave and interval inversion). But he looks like a musicologist.

      William Masselos is going to play your Sonata (2nd piano) but he has asked for a year to work on it.²²⁷ He is very busy. Two quartets now want to play your quartet.²²⁸ I have said two years to work on it (to put some fear into them, which is good for the health).

      I have just finished recording my cinema music.²²⁹ I started that piece of work in a dream: I wanted to write without musical ideas (unrelated sounds) and record the results 4 times, changing the position of the nails each time. That way, I wanted to get subtle changes of frequency (mobility), timbre, duration (by writing notes too difficult to play exactly) and amplitude (electronically altered each time). But I found musical ideas all about me, and the result will be (I mean “would have been”) no more than simple or perhaps Japanese canons. I abandoned the dream and I wrote some music. Also the adventure was halted by machines which are too perfect nowadays. They are stupid. Even so I had fun in the 2nd part by recording noises synthetically (without performers). Chance comes in here to give us the unknown. Apparently the film will be seen in Paris (as soon as I know the date, I’ll let you know).

      Cunningham gave his dance concert on the