and sets and costumes by Charlotte Trowbridge. Featured dancers were Cunningham as the Yankee Orator, Erick Hawkins as the Indian Chingachgook, and Graham as Betsy Ross.
94. Properly, Erick Hawkins (1909–1994), American choreographer and dancer. With Cunningham, he became one of the first male dancers to join the Martha Graham Dance Company (1939). He and Graham were married from 1948 to 1954.
95. Louis Horst (1884–1964), American choreographer, composer, and pianist. He was musical director for the Denishawn company (1916–1925) before serving as musical director and dance composition teacher for Graham’s school and dance company (1926–1948).
96. Jean Erdman (b. 1916), American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. A principal in Martha Graham’s Dance Company, she was often partnered with Cunningham. Erdman formed the Jean Erdman Dance Group in 1944, and for six years presented annual concerts in New York City. Among important works were Daughters of the Lonesome Isle (1945) and Ophelia (1946), both with commissioned scores by Cage. She was married to the American mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell (1844–1987).
97. Rue Winterbotham Shaw, president of the Arts Club of Chicago from 1940 to 1979. She is best remembered for scheduling the March 1, 1942, performance by John Cage (see note 92) as one of the first events of her presidency, for persuading Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the club’s interior (gratis), and for commissioning sculptor Alexander Calder to create his standing mobile Red Petals for the Club.
98. Cage’s first letter from his and Xenia’s 550 Hudson St. apartment in New York.
99. Cage likely refers to ongoing work for his father, which occasionally included the translation of complex scientific materials, including medical articles by Spanish physicians. Curiously, Cunningham was not commonly known to be fluent in Spanish.
100. This is likely reference to the Academy of Music movie theater that opened in 1927 and that took the name of an (eponymous) opera house that had been situated across the street at E. 14th St. and Irving Place in New York City before being demolished in 1926. As Cage was married at the time of this letter, it is likely that he and Cunningham were initially clandestine in their correspondence.
101. Cage’s playful reference to his (“his little friend”) and Cunningham’s (“enigma”) penises, seen with some frequency throughout their letters of the 1940s.
102. Cunningham was in residence with the Martha Graham and Dance Company at Bennington College throughout much of 1943.
103. Welland Lathrop (1905–1981), American dancer and choreographer, from 1930 to 1934 resident at the Cornish School in Seattle. In 1946 he established the Welland Lathrop School and Dance Company, then formed, with Ann Halprin, the Halprin-Lathrop Dance Studio Theater (1948–1955).
104. The reference here is to Cage’s “prepared piano,” heard first in his Bacchanale “dance accompaniment” to a work by Syvilla Fort, a faculty member at the Cornish School, first performed in Seattle on April 28, 1940. Per Fort’s request for a work with an African “inflection,” Cage intended to write for percussion ensemble. However, because the performance space was small and Cage had only a traditional grand piano with which to work, he began experimenting with objects placed inside the piano—among and between its strings—in an effort to alter its sounds. The prepared piano became a signal instrument for Cage. In 1949, after the New York premiere of his (complete) masterpiece for the instrument, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), Cage received citations from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
105. Cage’s dissatisfaction with Euterpe (in Greek mythology the muse of music) was remedied by his later adoption in her place of Calliope (the muse presiding over eloquence and epic poetry, the “superior” muse, with Ovid speaking of her as the “chief of all muses”). Cunningham’s muse was, of course, Terpsichore, her name deriving from the Greek words “delight” and “dance.”
106. The Blue Angel, among New York City’s early supper clubs, officially opened at 152 E. 55th St. on April 14, 1943, the brainchild of Paris-born Herbert Jacoby. Its name was suggested by Marlene Dietrich’s eponymous first hit movie (1930).
107. John La Touche (1914–1956), American lyricist.
108. While undated, this letter may be synchronous with Xenia’s decision to leave her husband, moving in late February 1944 out of the Hudson St. apartment they shared and back, briefly, to Peggy Guggenheim’s mansion on Beekman Place. From all accounts, Xenia was permissive about sex; Cage was, after all, involved with Don Sample at the time of their engagement. But something about her husband’s year-long affair with Cunningham was for her irreconcilable.
109. Cage’s devotion to the work of Erik Satie expressed itself variously throughout his life. In 1944, he would undertake his first composition based on Satie’s Socrate (1919–1920) with an arrangement for solo piano of the work’s first movement, to which Cunningham contributed a choreographic aspect titled Idyllic Song. The work was presented as part of their first out-of-town performance in Richmond, Virginia, on November 18, 1944. As the manuscripts related to this work pertain only to a 1947 arrangement of the first movement scored for two pianos, Cage must have returned to it three years later. Cage and Cunningham together would revisit the work in a 1969 collaboration, Cage’s Cheap Imitation and Cunningham’s Second Hand (see notes 627 and 811), both works completing the second and third movements.
110. Cage’s Four Walls (1944) for solo piano and voice, originally used as music for the eponymous dance play by Cunningham and first performed in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on August 22, 1944. Ultimately, only scene 7 of Cage’s score includes a text by Cunningham, “Sweet love my throat is gurgling.” The dance is programmatic, its theme one of a dysfunctional family. Cage’s psychologically intense music is entirely diatonic, the structure a setting of contrasts.
111. Cage’s The Perilous Night (1943–1944) for solo prepared piano, in six untitled movements. This work was written during a period in Cage’s life that was tinged with sadness and confusion as a result of his early involvement with Cunningham and his growing estrangement from his wife. The title derives from a collection of Irish folktales; the music recounts the dangers of erotic love. It is one of Cage’s early pieces not used in conjunction with a choreographic work by Cunningham.
112. The 1942 film Kings Row, starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan, directed by Sam Wood.
113. Cage’s A Book of Music (1944) for two prepared pianos would be given its first performance at the New School for Social Research in New York by Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold (see note 126) on January 21, 1945. This was likely Cage’s first commission from professional performers.
114. Schuyler (Garrison) Chapin (1923–2009), American impresario and producer, later vice-president of Lincoln Center (1963), co-founder of its Film Society (1969), and general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (1972).
115. Oliver Smith (1918–1994), American set designer.
116. Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), American theater producer, director, and choreographer who also worked in film and television, celebrated in his lifetime with five Tony and two Academy Awards.
117. Amelita Galli-Curci (1882–1963), Italian coloratura soprano whose early twentieth-century gramophone records garnered widespread popularity.
118. Edwin (Orr) Denby (1903–1983), American dance critic, considered by both Cage and Cunningham to be the finest of his time. His partner was the Swiss-born American photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914–1999).
119.
