Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism. Suzuki had left Japan in 1936, at the age of seventy, and given a series of lectures throughout the Western world that profoundly influenced an entire generation of artists. Cage discovered through Suzuki’s teachings that like Cage’s recent music, Zen emphasized detachment, or no-mind. Cage was emboldened, and he expanded his chance techniques as he turned to composing music directly on magnetic tape. The new medium offered possibilities of sound and rhythm outside the range of traditional musical instruments. In May 1952 he worked laboriously to produce Williams Mix, named for American architect Paul Williams, whom Cage had first met at Black Mountain College. A letter to Boulez describes the intricacies involved in producing this work for eight tracks of magnetic tape, whereby Cage and various colleagues measured, cut, and spliced together more than six hundred slivers of chance-determined sounds. Premiered the following March at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Williams Mix left Cage feeling he finally had worked with the entire field of sound.
Cage twice interrupted his labors on Williams Mix to create two no less innovative pieces. In August of 1952, he and Cunningham were again in residence at Black Mountain College, now under the direction of the poet Charles Olson. Cage had become acquainted with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, two young actor/directors whose Living Theatre productions were staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Cage organized a few concerts there, and, being exposed to new ideas in contemporary theater, became impressed by the ideas of the avantgarde French playwright Antonin Artaud, especially as outlined in The Theater and Its Double (1938). As Cage understood Artaud, all elements of the theater should be treated independently rather than subordinated to a narrative thread. At Black Mountain College, Cage produced a theater event wherein the actors played “themselves,” during chance-determined lengths of time in a makeshift performance space doing what they chose, without a script. By most accounts, Olson read poetry while perched on a ladder, Cunningham danced while being chased by a dog, and Robert Rauschenberg, the daring young Texas artist also in residence, played records on a phonograph. What Cage created came to be thought of as the first “happening,” or at least its progenitor.
Cage’s Black Mountain “happening” moved him to undertake another audacious work. Above the heads of the Black Mountain audience had hung one of Rauschenberg’s all-white canvases, painted with ordinary house paint. This “blank” painting encouraged Cage to pursue a musical idea he’d had for nearly a decade. Using chance methods, he composed 4'33" (1952), a work in three movements wherein no sounds are to be intentionally produced by the performer. It was first performed by Tudor a few weeks after the Black Mountain “happening” at a benefit concert given at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. Tudor used a stopwatch to time the three movements, whose beginnings, lore has it, he indicated by closing the keyboard lid of the piano, endings by opening it. Predictably, 4'33" brought Cage a lot of attention, much of it mocking. A letter from Helen Wolff, Christian Wolff’s mother, arrived just prior to the work’s New York City premiere, calling 4'33" an immature prank. Cage’s thoughtful reply explains that his silent “sermon” on listening is in fact full of sounds.
Cage’s letters in the first half of the decade record that he twice changed addresses. Saddened to learn that his building in lower Manhattan would be torn down, he moved in for a while with Cunningham at 12 E. 17th Street. Then, in the summer of 1954, he left the city for the rural, 116-acre Gate Hill Cooperative being established by Paul and Vera Williams in Stony Point, New York. Hardly settled there, he accepted an invitation from Heinrich Ströbel, music director of Germany’s Southwest Radio, to appear at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Donaueschingen. He and Tudor played a new prepared-piano duet—Cage’s 31'57.9864" for a Pianist and 34'46.776" for a Pianist, both from 1954 and presented as 12'55.6078" for Two Prepared Pianos—and made a broadcast recording. Cage’s touring schedule from this point forward would increase dramatically, and he would be more often than not far away from his new Stony Point home.
As ever, Cage’s letters reveal ongoing financial struggles. In 1955 his annual income was $1,529.00, not enough to live on. He tried to earn more, sometimes reaching far afield from composition. For $400 a month he served as a graphic arts director (in effect, an “ad man”) with a New York textile firm founded by designer/collector Jack Lenor Larson. At Virgil Thomson’s request, he undertook with Kathleen O’Donnell Hoover to write a book-length account of Thomson’s life and work. And with David Tudor he tried to market a “Package Festival” that would consist of a concert of contemporary music, a lecture, and a dance by Cunningham’s company—three programs a day for three days. Cage also took up a faculty position at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Commuting from Stony Point, some forty-five miles north, he initially offered courses on the music of Virgil Thomson, the music of Erik Satie, and experimental composition.
Although only obliquely mentioned in his letters, Cage profited from “The 25-Year Retrospective Concert of the Music of John Cage” held at New York’s Town Hall on May 15, 1958, made possible through the efforts of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Emile de Antonio, who came together as Impresarios Inc. The program included the premiere of his groundbreaking Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–1958), whose piano part alone makes use of eighty-four different systems of notation. The piece represented a new phase in Cage’s musical thinking involving, significantly, indeterminacy. (A performance, as he later told German composer and musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, can involve any number of musicians on whatever instruments they choose, playing for any length of time.) The Town Hall concert showcased nearly a dozen works and was widely reviewed; it was also recorded by producer George Avakian and sold as a lavish three-LP box set that included an unprecedented number of texts, photographs, and manuscript pages. Cage’s adventurous music was thereby introduced to a new and larger audience.
Late in 1958, Cage made an eventful six-month tour of Europe. He made stops in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Oxford, and he crisscrossed Germany, often performing with Tudor and Cunningham. His most eventful experiences took place in Milan, where he befriended the Italian composer Luciano Berio and his American-born wife, the brilliant mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. Berio gave Cage working space and technical assistance at the Studio di Fonologia, RAI’s facility for experimental audio research. Here, Cage created Fontana Mix (1958), named for his Italian landlady, an exciting indeterminate piece for magnetic tape that would serve as the means for composing several other works.
Cage also secured a spot as a contestant on the popular television game show Lascia o Raddoppia (colloquially, “Double or Nothing”) in the quiz category of mushrooms. Living in Stony Point, Cage had discovered within himself a deep love of nature; fascinated, he collected mushrooms, read about mushrooms, and became, as he told Peter Yates, an “amateur mycologist.” His answers to a series of increasingly difficult questions on Lascia o Raddoppia over the course of five weekly programs won him five million lire (about $8,000) and a modicum of popular fame in Italy. It also afforded him momentary respite from his usual state of penury. Returning to America in March 1959, he used part of his winnings to purchase a grand piano for his Stony Point home as well as a Volkswagen bus for use by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company when it toured. His mushroom studies invigorated, in the spring Cage augmented his offerings at the New School with a course in mushroom identification.
Cage’s thinking was beginning to influence younger composers, some of whom wrote to him for advice and support. In October 1959 he received a letter and string trio score from a twenty-five-year-old experimental composer whose imagination impressed him: La Monte Young. Born in a small Idaho dairy farming community and settled in Los Angeles, Young greatly admired Cage and as a teaching assistant at UC Berkeley had initiated performances of his works. Cage found particularly interesting Young’s use of continuous, long-lasting sounds or static drones. He took part, as he told Young, in a Living Theatre performance of his admirer’s noisy, scraping Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (1960), which he greatly enjoyed.
Cage expresses increasingly clear ideas about twentieth-century compositional trends in his letters of the period to Peter Yates. In what are often summary discussions, he describes
