many patents, his “Mist-A-Cold,” relating “generally to aspiratory devices and more particularly to an improved inhaler, suitable for oral or nasal inhalation” (patent no. 2,579,362), application made October 31, 1946, approved December 18, 1951.
204. André Souris (1899–1970), Belgian composer, conductor, musicologist, and writer, strongly associated with the surrealist art movement.
205. Armand Gatti (b. 1924), French playwright, poet, journalist, and filmmaker. He provided the poetry set by Boulez in his Oubli signal lapidé for twelve voices a cappella, first performed in 1952.
206. Cage is beginning work on his String Quartet in Four Parts, which would be completed in 1950 (see note 232).
207. Minna Lederman (later Daniel; 1896–1995), American music writer and long-time editor of Modern Music, which exerted considerable influence over the direction of pre–World War II American music. She later contributed to Saturday Review, The American Mercury, and The Nation; also edited Stravinsky in the Theater (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949). Her husband was the American artist Mell Daniel (1899–1975).
208. Max Jacob (1876–1944), French poet, painter, writer, and critic, an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists (having befriended them all).
209. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), French author and art critic, one of the foremost poets of the early twentieth century and credited with coining the term surrealism and with writing the first surrealist work, the play Les mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias, 1917).
210. The actual quotations are “C’est dans le silence que se fait l’introspection; c’est par le silence que l’extérieur descendra en vous.” (“Silence is where introspection happens; silence is where the outside will go down into you. Who will speak in praise of silence?”, Jacob, from Conseils à un jeune poête: Suivis de Conseils à un étudient [1972]); and “Ils vous enterreront tout vivants et éveillés dans le monde nocturne et fermé des songes” (“They will bury you alive and wide awake in the nocturnal and closed world of dreams.”), Apollinaire, from L’esprit nouveau et les Poètes [1917]).
211. Max Ernst (1891–1976), German artist and poet, a pioneer in both the Dada and surrealist movements. His third wife, from 1942 to 1946, was Peggy Guggenheim; his fourth, from 1946–1976, the American artist and writer Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012).
212. Colin McPhee (1900–1964), Canadian composer and musicologist known for his ethnomusicological studies of Bali. Among his compositions is Tabuh Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra (1936).
213. Likely (Juliette) Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), French composer, conductor, and teacher who taught many leading composers of the twentieth century, including Thomson, Copland, Elliott Carter, and David Diamond.
214. André Jolivet (1905–1974), French composer, known for his devotion to French culture and musical ideas, with particular interest in acoustics and atonality.
215. Joan Miró (i Ferrà) (1893–1983), Catalan painter and sculptor.
216. Alexander Calder (1898–1976), American sculptor known as the originator of the mobile; also created “stabiles,” or stationary sculptures, and wire figures, most notably for a vast miniature circus. Cage would produce music for a documentary film by Herbert Matter titled Music for “Works of Calder” (1949–1950) (see following note), which won an award for best musical score at the Woodstock Art Film Festival later the same year.
217. Herbert Matter (1907–1984), Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer best known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. At the time of this letter he was at work on the film Works of Calder, for which Cage was to compose the score. Matter’s wife, Mercedes (née Carles; 1913–2001) was a founder of the New York Studio School.
218. From 1948 to 1954, the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and its successor, the Mutual Security Agency (MSA), administered the programs of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan), to help rebuild European economies after World War II.
219. Constantin Brăncuşi (1876–1957), Romanian sculptor who made his career in France, commonly referred to as the patriarch of modern sculpture.
220. Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie (1948). Cage did not like this book, his favorites being Pierre-Daniel Templier, Erik Satie, trans. Elena and David French (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969) and virtually anything written or compiled by Ornella Volta, director of the Archives de la Fondation Erik Satie in Paris.
PART TWO
1950–1961
BY THE TIME JOHN CAGE returned from Europe, he had learned enough French to correspond bilingually with Pierre Boulez. The nearly forty-five letters the two exchanged between May 1949 and August 1954 document one of the richest intellectual relationships in twentieth-century music history. Cage made clear his enormous enthusiasm for Boulez’s compositions and reported his efforts to get them performed in America. He also championed bringing the French composer to New York. Boulez replied in detailed, thoughtful letters with musical examples, some of essay length.
While Cage sometimes complained to Boulez about the poverty of American intellectual life, he also touted the young American composers working in New York who, with him, would form the New York School. They included Brooklyn-born Morton Feldman, whose scores in graphic notation excited him; his promising young pupil Christian Wolff, whose émigré parents, Kurt and Helen, published Pantheon Books; and Earle Brown, a grocer’s son who had studied mathematics and engineering who originated vivid new musical forms.
Indirectly through Boulez, Cage also formed one of the great relationships of his life. When Boulez sent him a copy of his extremely difficult Second Sonata (1947–1948), Cage showed it to Feldman, who told him it could be played only by a certain young pianist, David Tudor. The two met, and Cage marveled at Tudor’s stupendous technical skill. When Tudor undertook to master the Boulez piece and then gave its American premiere at Carnegie Recital Hall on December 17, 1950, Cage turned pages for him and felt, as he told Boulez, exalted. Although Cage fell deeply in love with Tudor, he tried not to interfere when Tudor took up romantically with the poet and potter Mary Caroline Richards, better known as “M.C.,” an equally close friend from Black Mountain College.
Cage’s letters from the decade contain particularly rich descriptions of his ideas and works. Indeed, titles of his compositions appear and reappear throughout, often illuminating dramatically evolving practices. The boldest and most far-reaching of these practices involved the development of his infamous chance operations, which resulted from his adaptation to composition of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of divination that Cage had received as a gift from Christian Wolff. As Cage explained to Boulez, he tossed coins to select hexagrams in the book, which he then allowed to determine every aspect of his compositions—tempo, duration, notes, etc. In this way, he said, he could diminish the force of his own personality and compose a piece of music entirely by chance. He told Boulez in great detail about his painstaking work on a composition for solo piano, Music of Changes (1951), which takes not only its inspiration but its title from the I Ching (literally, the “Book of Changes”). The demanding Music of Changes, Cage’s first work composed wholly with chance operations, would be given its premiere performance at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York’s Greenwich Village on New Year’s Day, 1952, by, inevitably, David Tudor.
Cage’s radical artistic
