et documents, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Winterthur, Switzerland: Amadeus Verlag, 1990).
174. Aaron Copland (1900–1990), American composer, teacher, writer, and conductor, influential in forging a distinctly American style of composition.
175. Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim (1898–1979), American art collector, bohemian, and socialite who created an extraordinary art collection in Europe and the United States between 1938 and 1946.
176. Properly, Elsa Schiaparelli (1890–1973), Italian fashion designer prominent between the two World Wars. Her creations, some made in collaboration with contemporary artists including Salvador Dalí and Jean Cocteau, were influenced by her involvement in the Dada/surrealist art movements.
177. Frank Wigglesworth (see note 515).
178. Likely Mario Negri (1916–1987), Italian sculptor and writer.
179. Properly, Lake Winnemucca, a dry lake bed in northwestern Nevada on the dividing line between Washoe and Pershing counties, home to several petroglyphs dated between 14,800 and 10,500 years ago.
180. Bonnie Bird (1915–1995), American teacher and dancer, a Martha Graham protogé and Cage’s colleague at the Cornish School, where she served as head of the dance department from 1937. Among her students were Cunningham and Remy Charlip (1929–2012), who would become one of the founding members of the Merce Cunninghan Dance Company.
181. The Ondes Martenot, also known as the Ondium Martenot, Martenot, and Ondes Musicales, an early electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by the French cellist and inventor Maurice Martenot (1898–1980). Similar in design to the theremin, its sonic capabilities were later expanded by the addition of timbral controls and switchable loudspeakers.
182. Paul (Frederic) Bowles (1910–1999), American expatriate composer, author, and translator who achieved both critical and popular acclaim for his novels, beginning with his first, The Sheltering Sky (1949). His wife was the writer Jane Bowles (1917–1973).
183. John Cage, “Forerunners of Modern Music,” The Tiger’s Eye (March 1949), reprinted in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
184. René Leibowitz (1913–1972), Polish-born French composer, conductor, music theorist, and teacher.
185. Serge Nigg (1924–2008), French composer. His Variations for piano and ten instruments (1946) is reputedly the first dodecaphonic work composed by a French composer.
186. Pyotr Petrovich Suvshinsky (1892–1985), later known as Pierre Souvtchinsky, Ukrainian patron and writer on music. Emigrating from Russia in 1922, he settled in Paris, where he would co-found with Boulez and Jean-Louis Barrault the Domaine musical concert series, active from 1954 to 1973.
187. Cage’s “square-root” principle, also sometimes referred to as his “micro-macrocosmic” principle, regulated the structures of his compositions of the period, wherein the large parts of a work had the same proportion as the phrases of a single unit. For Cage, this kind of structure, often rhythmic, could be expressed with sounds, including noises, or it could be expressed as stillness and movement in dance. It guided his earliest collaborations with Cunningham, who experimented with the same technique.
188. Suzanne Tézenas, French literary socialite close to Boulez, whom she assisted to found the Domaine musical concert series in Paris. Her unpublished “Lettre de John Cage à Suzanne Tézenas, New York, 4 fevrier 1955” is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On October 17, 1949, Cage would perform his Sonatas and Interludes at the Tézenas salon, with an introductory lecture by Boulez.
189. Alice B(abette) Toklas (1877–1967), American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde in the early twentieth century, early on companion to the American experimental writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946). Cage set three of Stein’s poems to music in his youthful Three Songs (1932–1933): “Twenty years after,” “If it was to be,” and “At East and ingredients.”
190. Boris de Schlözer (1881–1969), Russian-born French writer, musicologist, and translator, heralded for his early biography of Stravinsky (1929), and his niece, Marina Scriabin (1911–1998), Russian-born French musicologist and composer and daughter of the renowned Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915).
191. Goodwin was subletting Cage’s Monroe St. apartment during his trip to Europe.
192. Vittorio Rieti (1898–1994), Jewish-Italian composer who settled in the United States in 1940. Ostensibly the two composers had little in common, but in 2006 two of their works—Cage’s Chess Pieces and Rieti’s Pasticchio (Chess Serenade), both from 1944—would come together in a Mode Records CD/DVD (The Complete John Cage Edition, vol. 34, The Piano Works 7), a first recording for both pieces.
193. Maurice Grosser (1903–1986), American landscape painter and life partner of Virgil Thomson. He devised the scenario for two of Thomson’s operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947).
194. Hugues-Adhémar Cuénod (1902–2010), Swiss singer.
195. More fully, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), one of two performing rights organizations in the United States (along with Broadcast Music, Inc., or BMI) that license performances of music by its member composers.
196. Henri Sauguet (1901–1989), French composer and music critic who shared Cage’s enthusiasm for the music of Erik Satie.
197. Thomson composed more than 150 musical “portraits,” which were in the main charming tonal ditties on names of his closest friends. The greater majority are for piano, a few for instrumental combinations. For a complete listing and analysis, see Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson’s Musical Portraits (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 1986).
198. Editions Eschig (later Durand-Salabert-Eschig), Satie’s publisher (see note 811).
199. Henri Michaux (1899–1984), Belgian-born French poet, writer, and painter. The collaborative opera project Cage proposes came to naught.
200. Likely a performance of Cunningham’s Effusions Avant L’Heure (1949) paired with Cage’s A Valentine Out of Season for prepared piano (1949), premiered at Jean Hélion’s studio on June 9, 1945. LeClerq and Nichols were at the time members of Balanchine’s Ballet Society Company.
201. Margaret (“Marge”) Harvey (and husband George), one of Cage’s four maternal aunts; the others were Sadie, Josie, and Phoebe, the last his first music teacher. Aunt Marge was a contralto whose voice Cage greatly admired, but she reputedly abandoned any idea of singing professionally upon marriage. Neither Sadie nor Josie is mentioned in the present collection, but Sadie appears several times in Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You’ll Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1973,” in X: Writings ’79–’82 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983).
202. George Avakian (b.1919), American record producer known particularly for his work with Columbia Records. He produced the first live long-playing record—Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall concert. Avakian’s wife was the violinist Anahid Ajemian, sister of the pianist Maro Ajemian, who gave many fine performances of Cage’s piano works. Avakian would be the producer of “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage at Town Hall” in New York on May 15, 1958, which he recorded and released the following year. This mammoth undertaking was funded, in part, by Emile de Antonio, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg as
