The Selected Letters of John Cage. John Cage
Harrison, who had also moved East, suffered a nervous breakdown. To help defray the cost of Harrison’s treatment in a New York sanatorium, Cage sought and secured assistance from a composer whose music Harrison advocated passionately, Charles Ives.
Cage’s letters from the early 1940s tell us much about the onset of his relationship with Merce Cunningham. The two had met in 1938 at the Cornish School, where Cunningham, then nineteen years old to Cage’s twenty-six, was enrolled as a theater student but taking a class in modern dance which Cage sometimes served as accompanist. The two reconnected while the Cages were in Chicago, but their friendship didn’t blossom until both were resident in New York where Cunningham had earlier moved to join the Martha Graham Dance Company. Cunningham began making dances to music by Cage, and, ever more intrigued by each other’s ideas and work, the two soon became lovers. Cage’s letters reveal a stormy start to the relationship, he being by turns ecstatic and bereft. In either case, his work was clearly enlivened by the close proximity of a genuine and promising colleague. Unable to tolerate her husband’s diversion, Xenia left Cage in 1944; despite attempts to reconcile, they divorced in 1946.
Artistically, Cage’s union with Cunningham was an immediate success. Their first recital together, in April 1944, included six prepared piano pieces by Cage with solo dances by Cunningham. The reviews were glowing. Among other acclaimed early collaborations was their May 1947 performance of The Seasons at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater, with scenery and costumes by Isamu Noguchi.
Throughout these years Cage undertook much else. He considered composing a dance score for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” an idea proposed in 1945 by the dancer/choreographer Ruth Page and her husband, Thomas Hart Fisher. In the fall of 1946, Cage met in New York the visiting Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. The two became good friends and met several times a week over five months, exchanging ideas about Indian music and philosophy and the teachings of Arnold Schoenberg that would resonate in Cage’s life and work for decades. Cage also wrote and published articles about contemporary music, including his own, and in the winter of 1947 founded a short-lived art and literary magazine, Possibilities, with the artist Robert Motherwell.
In the summer of 1948, Cage and Cunningham were in residence at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. The director of the small, experimental school was Josef Albers, a German-born artist who had taught in the Bauhaus but fled Nazi Germany and joined the Black Mountain faculty. While Cage’s letters provide little detail, it is known that during his two visits with Cunningham, in 1948 and again in 1952, Cage played his complete Sonatas and Interludes for the first time in public and offered courses, including Structure of Music and Music for Dance. He also produced a festival devoted to the works of Erik Satie, which included an original staging of Satie’s Dada comedy The Ruse of Medusa, starring R. Buckminster Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Elaine de Kooning as his daughter Frisette, and Cunningham as Jonas, a costly mechanical monkey. Cage was enamored with Satie, and revealed his ever-widening knowledge about the French composer when writing about his works to both Yates (in 1948) and Cecil Smith (in 1950), a writer for Musical America.
Cage’s correspondence becomes unusually rich after March 23, 1949, when he and Cunningham sailed for Europe. His many letters to friends and family record a lively social, intellectual, and artistic life abroad. Cage visited Giacometti and Brancusi, played for one of Olivier Messiaen’s classes, and at least twice visited Alice B. Toklas. He delighted in knowing Maggie Nogueira, a generous Brazilian woman who provided dinner and theater invitations in Amsterdam as well as the use of her chauffeured car. Nogueira was closely connected to another of Cage’s confidantes of the period, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, an Australian composer and music critic who had acquired American citizenship and lived in New York.
Many of Cage’s friends visited him in Paris, including the composer Merton Brown and the painter Jack Heliker. Gita Sarabhai also arrived, now married and known as Gita Mayer, as did Maro Ajemian (to perform Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes), with her mother in tow; Cage recounts in a letter to his parents dated August 27, 1949, having to assist the Ajemians with all manner of logistics, which was not always appreciated. Amid seemingly constant socializing—including a visit to the home of one of the Baronesses Rothschild—Cage managed to conduct an exhaustive search for compositions by Satie, acquiring published scores and unpublished facsimiles for his own collection and that of Virgil Thomson. Ever stylish, he also managed to have new suits made while in Italy, which, he told his parents, were sorely needed.
While Cage was forging friendships with cutting-edge composers throughout Europe, the center of his musical and social life in Paris was a former student of Messiaen’s, twenty-four-year old Pierre Boulez. Cage considered Boulez’s music the best he heard in Europe, and the two became fast friends. Boulez introduced Cage around Paris and arranged for him to give numerous private concerts. Cage in turn took Boulez, with Cunningham, on a visit to Toklas and introduced him to Aaron Copland, a former student of the legendary French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who was then in Paris.
Toward the end of his travels in late 1949, and despite what he called his “wild, marvelous life” abroad, Cage began longing to return to America. He had experienced and come to disdain Europe’s commitment to the past, and his financial problems had become chronic. While in Paris he learned that he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but he postponed using it until he returned home. He also missed the loft he had recently decorated and rented during his absence to someone who, he was told, mistreated it. Set in lower Manhattan, the large, new place had a view of the Statue of Liberty.
To the Cage Family
[Undated, ca. 1930] | Biskra, Algeria
DEAR DENVER CAGES AND THE OTHER OUTLYING CAGES:
You found it slightly queer to be writing to me in Paris, but you might have thought it still more unusual to be writing a letter to Biskra, Algeria. My letters from America now go through the most fascinating operations in post offices in three or four countries. They finally find me in some town in Northern Africa with all sorts of different color stamps on them, and I have to pay a penny or so of added postage to be given the privilege of receiving them. Sometimes I just sit down and marvel, amazed, at the envelopes so exotically decorated. They often have stamps on them as beautiful and strange as the one that I shall put on this letter. I wish that you could be in my place and receive letters that had been forwarded from France to Italy and different islands in the Mediterranean and different countries in Northern Africa.
I have been traveling with a chap I found in Capri.1 He comes from Pittsburgh and from Harvard College and a number of other places. He writes poetry which he refuses to have printed. And he likes to visit Europe and Africa in the same manner that I do. That is: We avoid with care the carefully swept tourist roads and we crawl into the natural, average places of the countries. I am interested especially in the people of the cities, all the people. Don is interested most in the country, the hills, lakes, etc. He feels at home at present on a sand dune, riding a camel. I am perfectly happy in a cafe watching the Arabs play dominoes and drink coffee. Or in a post office watching the Arabs send letters or receive money or find witnesses who will identify them if they don’t know how to sign their own names. Vesuvious I saw from a distance. I found Etna far more beautiful, covered with clouds and snow, and not with funiculares sliding up and down it. The best part of Naples was its fish market, which was positively thrilling. The fish were kept brilliant and striking by having water dashed on them every now and then, as though they were clothes which were being dampened before being ironed. And there were all manner of fishes. There were even baby octopuses, which people would come and inspect and approve and buy. I didn’t buy any fish. All of Naples is dirty and happy. People working sing. People sleeping in the sun in December. Across to Capri. It takes an hour and a half on the boat that goes twice a day. Over on Capri there are flowers and bells and paths in the sunlight and walks down to the sand and little boats that you go paddling in, but if you go in these little “sandalinos” you have to wear only short bathing pants, because the “sandolino” is liable to turn over and land you completely in the bay of Naples, or, at any rate, by the mere act of paddling, water will get into the boat. You can go for an hour or two, however, before you sink.
It was very kind of you to send me the money, and kinder of you