across the nation was a lively jumble of boos and hurrahs. Emboldened by the experience, Cage and Xenia moved to New York City in the summer of 1942. They lodged for a few weeks at Peggy Guggenheim’s “Hale House,” then in Montclair, New Jersey, with Cage’s parents, who themselves had moved east. He gave his first New York concert at the Museum of Modern Art in association with the League of Composers that was covered extensively in the press, including a pictorial spread in Life (March 15, 1943). And although Cage’s letter dated January 11, 1945, requesting exemption via a III-A classification from the draft hasn’t survived, we know that he avoided military service on the basis of Xenia’s (slightly exaggerated) poor health, as was reported to the Selective Service System (Local Board No. 219, Los Angeles, California) by one Ernest W. Kulka, M.D.
Gradually, Cage was turning away from composing percussion music to writing exclusively for the piano, both prepared and unprepared. Cage had long-standing interest in experimental instruments, as his many references to such composers and inventors as Luigi Russolo, Léon Theremin, and Edgard Varèse attest. His own prepared piano would bring him national attention. Inspired by Cowell’s earlier unorthodox experiments, Cage had devised his new instrument while at the Cornish School, bringing forth unusual timbres from the piano by inserting various objects (rubber washers, screws, bolts, weather stripping) between its strings. Chief among his compositions for the instrument would be his Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948); the pianist Maro Ajemian, a devotee of contemporary music, would give the first partial performance of the work on April 16, 1946, at New York’s Town Hall, which was enthusiastically reviewed in the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. As Cage worked to complete the piece, which was ultimately dedicated to Ajemian, his friend Lou Harrison, who had also moved East, suffered a nervous breakdown. To help defray the cost of Harrison’s treatment in a New York sanatorium, Cage sought and secured assistance from a composer whose music Harrison advocated passionately, Charles Ives.
Cage’s letters from the early 1940s tell us much about the onset of his relationship with Merce Cunningham. The two had met in 1938 at the Cornish School, where Cunningham, then nineteen years old to Cage’s twenty-six, was enrolled as a theater student but taking a class in modern dance which Cage sometimes served as accompanist. The two reconnected while the Cages were in Chicago, but their friendship didn’t blossom until both were resident in New York where Cunningham had earlier moved to join the Martha Graham Dance Company. Cunningham began making dances to music by Cage, and, ever more intrigued by each other’s ideas and work, the two soon became lovers. Cage’s letters reveal a stormy start to the relationship, he being by turns ecstatic and bereft. In either case, his work was clearly enlivened by the close proximity of a genuine and promising colleague. Unable to tolerate her husband’s diversion, Xenia left Cage in 1944; despite attempts to reconcile, they divorced in 1946.
Artistically, Cage’s union with Cunningham was an immediate success. Their first recital together, in April 1944, included six prepared piano pieces by Cage with solo dances by Cunningham. The reviews were glowing. Among other acclaimed early collaborations was their May 1947 performance of The Seasons at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Theater, with scenery and costumes by Isamu Noguchi.
Throughout these years Cage undertook much else. He considered composing a dance score for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” an idea proposed in 1945 by the dancer/choreographer Ruth Page and her husband, Thomas Hart Fisher. In the fall of 1946, Cage met in New York the visiting Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. The two became good friends and met several times a week over five months, exchanging ideas about Indian music and philosophy and the teachings of Arnold Schoenberg that would resonate in Cage’s life and work for decades. Cage also wrote and published articles about contemporary music, including his own, and in the winter of 1947 founded a short-lived art and literary magazine, Possibilities, with the artist Robert Motherwell.
In the summer of 1948, Cage and Cunningham were in residence at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. The director of the small, experimental school was Josef Albers, a German-born artist who had taught in the Bauhaus but fled Nazi Germany and joined the Black Mountain faculty. While Cage’s letters provide little detail, it is known that during his two visits with Cunningham, in 1948 and again in 1952, Cage played his complete Sonatas and Interludes for the first time in public and offered courses, including Structure of Music and Music for Dance. He also produced a festival devoted to the works of Erik Satie, which included an original staging of Satie’s Dada comedy The Ruse of Medusa, starring R. Buckminster Fuller as the Baron Medusa, Elaine de Kooning as his daughter Frisette, and Cunningham as Jonas, a costly mechanical monkey. Cage was enamored with Satie, and revealed his ever-widening knowledge about the French composer when writing about his works to both Yates (in 1948) and Cecil Smith (in 1950), a writer for Musical America.
Cage’s correspondence becomes unusually rich after March 23, 1949, when he and Cunningham sailed for Europe. His many letters to friends and family record a lively social, intellectual, and artistic life abroad. Cage visited Giacometti and Brancusi, played for one of Olivier Messiaen’s classes, and at least twice visited Alice B. Toklas. He delighted in knowing Maggie Nogueira, a generous Brazilian woman who provided dinner and theater invitations in Amsterdam as well as the use of her chauffeured car. Nogueira was closely connected to another of Cage’s confidantes of the period, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, an Australian composer and music critic who had acquired American citizenship and lived in New York.
Many of Cage’s friends visited him in Paris, including the composer Merton Brown and the painter Jack Heliker. Gita Sarabhai also arrived, now married and known as Gita Mayer, as did Maro Ajemian (to perform Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes), with her mother in tow; Cage recounts in a letter to his parents dated August 27, 1949, having to assist the Ajemians with all manner of logistics, which was not always appreciated. Amid seemingly constant socializing—including a visit to the home of one of the Baronesses Rothschild—Cage managed to conduct an exhaustive search for compositions by Satie, acquiring published scores and unpublished facsimiles for his own collection and that of Virgil Thomson. Ever stylish, he also managed to have new suits made while in Italy, which, he told his parents, were sorely needed.
While Cage was forging friendships with cutting-edge composers throughout Europe, the center of his musical and social life in Paris was a former student of Messiaen’s, twenty-four-year old Pierre Boulez. Cage considered Boulez’s music the best he heard in Europe, and the two became fast friends. Boulez introduced Cage around Paris and arranged for him to give numerous private concerts. Cage in turn took Boulez, with Cunningham, on a visit to Toklas and introduced him to Aaron Copland, a former student of the legendary French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who was then in Paris.
Toward the end of his travels in late 1949, and despite what he called his “wild, marvelous life” abroad, Cage began longing to return to America. He had experienced and come to disdain Europe’s commitment to the past, and his financial problems had become chronic. While in Paris he learned that he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, but he postponed using it until he returned home. He also missed the loft he had recently decorated and rented during his absence to someone who, he was told, mistreated it. Set in lower Manhattan, the large, new place had a view of the Statue of Liberty.
To the Cage Family
[Undated, ca. 1930] | Biskra, Algeria
DEAR DENVER CAGES AND THE OTHER OUTLYING CAGES:
You found it slightly queer to be writing to me in Paris, but you might have thought it still more unusual to be writing a letter to Biskra, Algeria. My letters from America now go through the most fascinating operations in post offices in three or four countries. They finally find me in some town in Northern Africa with all sorts of different color stamps on them, and I have to pay a penny or so of added postage to be given the privilege of receiving them. Sometimes I just sit down and marvel, amazed, at the envelopes so exotically decorated. They often have stamps on them as beautiful and strange as the one that I shall put on this letter.
