The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage

      I am going to have lunch with Nicole Henriot²³⁰ on the 18th. We will talk about you which will be a great pleasure to me.

      (Whilst you are in Brazil, get some cotton for your ears so that you are not Milhauded.²³¹)

      Tomorrow I have to play the Sonatas and Interludes for Henry Cowell’s pupils. The class is going to come to my place. I should rather remain alone and quiet working on the quartet which I began in Paris and which (I want to say, which I didn’t have the courage to show you).²³²

      Virgil Thomson liked your article in Polyphonie, “Propositions,” a lot. He told me he is going to write an article on your ideas about rhythm.”²³³

      Now something about the Construction in Metal.²³⁴ The rhythmic structure is 4, 3, 2, 3, 4. (16 × 16). You can see that the first number (4) equals the number of figures that follow it. This first number is divided 1, 1, 1, 1, and first I present the ideas that are developed in the 3, then those in the 2, etc. Regarding the method: there are 16 rhythmic motives divided 4, 4, 4, 4, conceived as circular series

      When you are on 1, you can go 1 2 3 4 1 or retrograde. You can repeat (e.g., 1122344322 etc.). But you cannot 2⇒4 or 1⇒3. When you are on 2, you can not only use the same idea but you can go back to 1 using the “doorways” 1 or 4. (Very simple games.) Equally there are 16 instruments for each player. (Fixation with the figure 16.) But (funnily enough) there are only 6 players! I don’t know why (perhaps I only had 6 players at the time). And the relationships between the instruments (in the method) are similar to those between rhythms (circle-series), according to which the work is written in (four measures, 3 measures, 2 measures, 3 measures, 4 measures, the whole lot 16 times). The score isn’t here at home but I shall now try to give you the names of the instruments. (in English)

1st performer	Thundersheet, orchestral bells
2nd "	Piano (The pianist has an assistant who uses metal cylinders on the strings; the pianist plays trills; the assistant turns them into glissandi.)
3rd "	12 graduated Sleigh or oxen bells, suspended sleigh bells, thundersheet.
4th "	4 Brake drums (from the wheels of automobiles)8 cowbells3 Japanese Temple gongs, Thundersheet
5th "	Thundersheet, 4 Turkish cymbals8 anvils or pipe lengths4 Chinese cymbals
6th "	Thundersheet, 4 muted gongs1 suspended "water gongTam Tam

      The number 16 occurs in some cases in considering changing the method of striking (difference of sonority).

      You know that with exposition and development (without recapitulation) and with the form (climax, apotheosis (?)), etc., this Construction is 19th century. Your ideas for the lectures are very good. I have nothing to add. Suzuki’s works on Zen Buddhism are about to be published.²³⁵ I seem a bit empty. I have come from the film work and the Cunningham concert and I have to play the Sonatas tomorrow morning, and I am still not properly started as far as the Quartet goes. And I am tired.

      English part:

      [Armand] Gatti’s letter was marvelous and by now there must be a new Gatti. Give my love to them all and say I am writing to him tomorrow. I think of you all almost every day and I miss you deeply. Tell Saby²³⁶ that I am very fond of his drawing that he gave me.

      The great trouble with our life here is the absence of an intellectual life. No one has an idea. And should one by accident get one, no one would have the time to consider it. That must account for the pentatonic music.

      I know you will enjoy travelling to South America; it must be very beautiful. I have never been there. Please keep me well-informed about your plans so that should the Tanglewood idea go through, you could always be reached.

      I forgot to mention that the New Music Edition is publishing one of Woronow’s pieces (the Sonnet to Dallapiccola). I must write and tell him so.

      I am starting a society called “Capitalists Inc.” (so that we will not be accused of being Communists); everyone who joins has to show that he has destroyed not less than 100 disks of music or one sound recording device; also everyone who joins automatically becomes President. We will have connections with 2 other organizations, that for the implementation of nonsense (anyone wanting to do something absurd will be financed to do it) and that Against Progress. If the American influence gets too strong in France I am sure you will want to join.

      To Cecil Smith²³⁷

       November 22, 1950 | 326 Monroe St., New York City

      Dear Cecil Smith:

      Over and over again in Satie-criticism, the complaint is filed that humor was used as a mask behind which to hide an inability to write music. (Equally outrageously, one might imagine that St. Francis sermonized to birds because of an inability to convey ideas to other animate beings.) Your last issue of Musical America contains an example: “Erik Satie” by Abraham Skulsky. It seems not to have occurred to Mr. Skulsky, nor to Mr. Rollo Myers in his recent book, Erik Satie, that Satie may not have been forced but may, on the contrary, have been free to laugh.

      When one takes oneself, one’s gains and losses, one’s popularity and disfavor, seriously, it is quite impossible to laugh (except forcedly, or at someone). Satie, however, was disinterested, and was thus able to laugh or weep as he chose. He knew in his loneliness and in his courage where his center was: in himself and in his nature of loving music. There is no great difference between hearing “Consider the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin” and a piece by Erik Satie.

      Forced, nervous laughter takes place when someone is trying to impress somebody for purposes of getting somewhere. Satie, free of such interest, entitled his first pieces commissioned by a publisher Three Flabby Preludes for a Dog. It being fairly clear who is referred to by the word dog, giving that title was evidently a social act militant in nature, not nonsensical as Mr. Skulsky would have it.

      Mr. Skulsky records that all of Satie’s music is humorous excepting the Gymnopedies, the Sarabandes, and Socrate. This is simply not true. Think, for instance, of the Nocturnes, the Quatre Melodies, the Danses Gothiques, the other posthumous works, and of Sylvie (which, contrary to Mr. Myers’ information, has not disappeared, and contrary to Mr. Skulsky’s judgment re the Gymnopedies is the first work of the composer to bear the stamp of his originality). In fact, if one tries to think of a funny piece by Satie it’s really tough: Les Courses, perhaps the Embryons Desseches, and, certainly, La Belle Excentrique. When Satie used words (cf. T. S. Eliot’s: “I gotta use words when I talk to you”), his expression was often humorous, always brilliantly imaginative. When he wrote music, he was unexceptionally the art’s most serious servant: he performed his tasks simply and unpretentiously. He wrote more often than not short pieces, as did Scarlatti and [François] Couperin and, as will, let’s hope, etc. (cf. Paul Klee, who said something about wanting to ignore Europe and about needing to make things small like seeds).

      (It appears we have reached the second complaint filed by critics against Satie: he wrote no big works with the exception of Socrate.)

      The length of a work, however, is no measure of its quality or beauty, most of post-Renaissance art-propaganda to the contrary. If we glance momentarily at R. H. Blythe’s book on haiku (the Japanese poetic structure: 5, 7, 5 syllables), we read (pg. 272): “Haiku thus make the greatest demand upon our internal poverty. Shakespeare (cf. Beethoven) pours out his universal soul, and we are abased before his omniscience and overflowing power. Haiku require of us that our soul should find its own infinity within the limits of some finite thing.” My mind runs now to Satie’s Vexations,²³⁸ a short piece to be played 840 times in a row. A performance of this piece would be a measure, accurate as a mirror, of one’s “poverty of spirit” without which, incidentally, one loses the kingdom of heaven.

      More and more it seems