(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).
120. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), English poet and Jesuit priest. This special edition of the Kenyon Review (1944), celebrating the poet’s centenary, comprised proceedings of a symposium on his poetry. Interestingly, it includes a piece by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (“The Analogical Mirrors”), who was unknown to Cage in 1944 but of great importance to him some twenty years later. See note 583.
121. Cage may be referring to Donald J. Pierce’s review of the book (by Brook Adams and Charles A. Beard) titled “The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History,” Political Science Quarterly 58, no. 3 (1943): 437–438.
122. Virgil Thomson’s “Expressive Percussion (John Cage) (1945),” published in the New York Herald Tribune, is an effusive, unrevealing review of a concert of Cage’s works at the New School on February 21, 1945. The program included A Book of Music (1944), premiered by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale.
123. See Mary Webb and Berton Roueche, “Prepared Pianist,” New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1945, 17, a review of the concert referenced above that mentions “five prepared pianos,” which jibes with Cage’s report (although he doesn’t specify that the pianos be prepared). No mention is made of specific works on the program, and it is possible that Cage himself performed.
124. Ruth Page (1899–1991), American ballerina and company director, one of the first ballet choreographers to employ American subject matter. She requested Cage compose the music for a ballet based on “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, but when terms could not be agreed upon, Darius Milhaud wrote the score.
125. Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), Japanese American artist, best known for his sculpture and public works. He designed several stage sets for Martha Graham productions, for Page’s The Bells (assisted by Yuji Ito), and for the Cage/Cunningham collaborative work The Seasons, which would premiere in New York on May 18, 1947.
126. Arthur Gold (1917–1990) and, properly, Robert Fizdale (1920–1995), American duo pianists, known cheerfully as “The Boys” in New York’s artistic community, who commissioned important works for two pianos in the middle of the twentieth century.
127. Thomas Hart Fisher, Chicago-based attorney and Ruth Page’s business manager and husband.
128. Learning that his Hudson St. apartment was to be converted, Cage moved to 326 Monroe St., on the lower end of Manhattan. This was a tenement neighborhood, and he dubbed his new sixth-floor walk-up loft “Bozza’s Mansion,” after the name of his landlord. He knocked out parts of the wall to put in large picture windows that faced the East River. The result was a light, airy, uncluttered space, with many plants but minimal furniture, so superb that it attracted notice in House and Garden, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. The year 1946 brought yet another change: on October 25, Xenia sought and won a divorce from Cage, appearing alone as the plaintiff in a district court in Idaho. Cage had agreed to her complaint in advance by formal stipulation and was ordered to pay $100 per month in alimony.
129. Reference here is to Cage’s masterwork for solo prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), seventy minutes in length, the first work in which he expresses the permanent emotions of Indian tradition and his first composition using Hindu philosophy as a basis. The piano preparations are elaborate: forty-five notes, mainly screws and bolts, but also fifteen pieces of rubber, four pieces of plastic, six nuts, and one eraser. Maro Ajemian (see note 151), to whom the work is dedicated, would give its first partial performance at New York’s Town Hall on April 14, 1946; the first complete performance was likely given by Cage himself at Black Mountain College in North Carolina on April 6, 1948.
130. Laussat, the Cage/Cunningham household cat.
131. Alan Hovhaness (b. Alan Vaness Chakmakjian; 1911–2000), Armenian-born American composer who numbered some sixty-seven symphonies among his nearly five hundred works.
132. See Lou Harrison, About Carl Ruggles (Yonkers, NY: Oscar Baradinsky, 1946).
133. Upon receipt of this letter, Ives sent $250 to Harrison to cover the cost of treatment. This sum was provided to Harrison for editing and conducting the first performance of Ives’s Third Symphony (1908–1910; New York, April 5, 1946) and was, not insignificantly, one-half of the amount Ives received upon being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1947. Harrison would be hospitalized for nine months.
134. Harmony Twitchell Ives (1876–1979), wife of Charles Ives from 1908 until his death in 1954. She was the daughter of the Reverend Joseph Twitchell, whose church services were served by her husband as organist.
135. Josef Albers (1888–1976), German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential art-education programs of the twentieth century, and his wife, Anni Albers (b. Annelise Fleischmann; 1899–1994), German-American textile artist and printmaker. With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, the two immigrated to North Carolina, where Albers became head of the new Black Mountain College, initiating summer seminars that were free of the rigors of regular academic sessions. Cage and Cunningham visited first in spring 1948 and returned together and separately until 1953, at which time Cunningham’s Dance Company was formed there.
136. Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877–1952), American artist, social reformer/suffragette, and arts patron. In January 1920, she, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray founded the Société Anonyme in Dreier’s apartment; she became its driving force. In 1941, she and Duchamp presented the Société Anonyme’s art collection to Yale University.
137. Cunningham’s students in 1947 included Dorothy Berea, Shirley Broughton, Gisela Caccialanza, Mili Churchill, Tanaquil LeClerq, Fred Danieli, Dorothy Dushock, Eleanor Goff, Sara Hamhill (the “stowaway”), Gerard Leavitt, Judith Martin, Job Sanders, and Beatrice Tompkins.
138. Richard (1915–2002) and Louise Lippold, close friends. Richard was an American sculptor, best known for his geometric constructions using wire as a medium. The Sun (1953–56), made from gold wire on commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, would be the subject of an unfinished collaborative film undertaken by Cage and Lippold in 1956. The fourteenth and fifteenth movements of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948) are subtitled “Gemini—After the Work of Richard Lippold.”
139. More fully, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (1866–1925), turn-of-the-century French composer, pianist, and writer. Between 1944 and 1992, the year of his death, Cage would compose no fewer than sixteen works inspired by or making use of Satie. See Laura Kuhn, exhibition catalog for Cage’s Satie: Composition for Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, September 28–December 30, 2012.
140. A settlement house founded Thanksgiving Day 1902 for New York’s increasing immigrant population, Greenwich House offered programs in social services, arts, and education.
141. Paul Klee (1879–1940), German-Swiss painter whose work embodied elements of expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and orientalism. His work inspired many composers, including Cage.
142. Merton Brown (1913–2001), American composer, and John (“Jack”) Heliker (1909–2000), American painter. Heliker was on faculty at Columbia University; Brown, a student of Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles, developed a system of composition known as “dissonant counterpoint.”
143. Easton Pribble (1917–2003), American painter and art instructor, long associated with the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York.
144. Frederick Goldbeck, French writer and music critic, who once described Cage as
