Leonardo

The Selected Letters of John Cage, spanning the life of legendary composer John Cage, is akin to two books running neck and neck with one another. The first is the vast cache of missives Cage wrote that reveal his hidden struggles and insights with notables the world over. For scholars of Cage’s life, it’s the ultimate treasure trove, and, for the rest of us simple admirers, a jaw-dropping read of the mundane and profound trials on the road to achieve, maintain and reconcile avant-garde fame and notoriety. The second book is much less noticeable and written in 9-point type and runs along the bottom of practically every page. It is the 1,159 meticulous and phenomenally well-researched footnotes about those letters put together by editor Laura Kuhn. It’s a heroic effort where every person’s station in life and specific relation to Cage is identified. I suspect it took more time to fact-check and collate those notes than the actual editing of the letters themselves. But without these critical signposts the book would not make as much sense. They are the key to who Cage knew, how he framed his world and how, in turn, his world framed him.

Selected Letters is full of surprises. Cage is, despite his eventual professed homosexuality, at one time in love with two women, both over twice his age. Xenia, his ex-wife who was a quarter Alutiiq, or Sugpiaq (Eskimo), had, at one point, been the lover of photographer Edward Weston. By the time Cage is 21, he is savvy enough to hit up important contacts who could further his career, including asking Adolph Weiss to be his music composition teacher. He writes touching letters to Weiss regarding his progress studying with his newest mentor—the master of 12-tone composition, Arnold Schoenberg.

In 1939 during the Depression, times were hard, and while teaching in Seattle, Cage laments to fellow composer Henry Cowell, “I had to go around and beg for money to purchase percussive instruments.” By 1940 Cage tried to establish a center for experimental music, begging anyone and everyone for funds—to no avail. He compares his found percussion instruments to “what many negro street musicians in New Orleans had done” and “defined music for myself as Organized Sound.”

Bauhaus artist Lázlo Moholy-Nagy, who was teaching at the University of Chicago, invited Cage and his group of percussion players to perform, but lack of funds prevented that excursion. He did, however, manage to bring Cage to Chicago to teach in 1941, accompanied by Xenia. She was translating Italian Futurist’s Luigi Russolo’s manifesto “The Art of Noises,” and Cage remarked it was about “the importance of the machine and of electricity” in contemporary music. It was also in Chicago, before Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham became seriously involved, that he noted “Merce has a serious inferiority complex.” Yet by 1943 that did not prevent him from writing love letters to Cunningham about his “enigma” and little friend (penises) and compare Cunningham to the muse Calliope, highest of all. Which, by 1944, caused Xenia to up and leave him.

Distraught, Cage traveled to Paris, where he met composer Pierre Boulez and introduced him to American composer Aaron Copland. Soaking up French culture, Cage dined out with the haute demimonde, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the Rothschilds. When not [End Page 540] ascending the heights of French society, he was showering at the public baths, as he was sans washing facilities in his spartan living quarters. He even wrote his mother to send him towels because he couldn’t find any decent ones in postwar Paris. Enamored of the work of composer Eric Satie, he spent days at the Bibliothèque nationale de France devouring every piece of music Satie ever wrote and penned rebuttals to critics who dared slander him. In the end, though, the City of Lights lost its allure, and Cage decamped back to New York.

He then began a legendary correspondence with Boulez, lasting from 1949 to 1954, which turned into the book The Boulez–Cage Correspondence. He wrote pianist David Tudor about how musicians and composers Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff were booed and hissed when presenting their compositions and then admits to Tudor that he loves him. In other letters he outlines, in excruciating detail, how he threw the I Ching to create his compositions, and in the next sentence complains he is constantly working at composing but just not getting paid for it. This is not just empty bitching. He is so broke he tries to sell shares in his yet uncomposed works. Eventually he manages to raise five thousand dollars from Paul Williams to create the magnetic tape piece Williams Mix. He gives advice to his friends, drops names all over the place and argues with and corrects critics like Peter Yates. In 1954 he acknowledges the controversy he has stirred up from playing the silent piece 4'33", saying, “I attempt to let sounds be themselves in a space of time.” He ponders the morphology of sound—how it begins, continues and then dies away, yet in the next breath whips out a profit-and-loss statement about his last concert.

In 1959 he writes charming letters to friends and mentors like Morton Feldman, Christian Wolfe and even Nam June Paik, whom he refers to as a “Korean living in Cologne,” and alludes to Boulez dropping their friendship because of Cage’s embrace of chance operations. By 1960 he has grown confident enough in his own fame to conduct a brisk business by unabashedly asking for money. He mentions the class he was teaching at the New School, crowing about his best pupil, Toshi Ichiyanagi, who married Yoko Ono and ignited a new movement in contemporary music in Japan. He praises his other students like Alan Kaprow, who went on to create Happenings, and Fluxus progenitor George Brecht. He refers to himself as a “decomposer,” because after 4′33″ he has already “moved on.” He also sadly reveals that he is afflicted with arthritis so painful it was keeping him up at night.

Despite outright success, he was constantly burdened by money woes, so chunks of the letters are chockablock with requests for money, access to rights, bookings and corrections on translations. His personal responsibilities mounted: First his father passed away and then he had to support his mother, who had had a stroke, and finally he had to make his never-ending alimony payments to Xenia. In 1962 he was excited to be going to the East, but in the end it was a bit of a disappointment. In a 1963 letter to Lou Harrison he complains that he can’t just live his own life but has to give lectures and play the piano despite arthritic hands that are so disfigured they can’t pick anything up anymore. He moans about returning home with no money to pay the bills. He is constantly in debt and has to borrow funds to pay his taxes. Despite issues with time management, he assumes the administrative arrangements for the Mycological Society, and those letters are fastidious with details for the society’s aims and ambitions. In 1964, always prescient about the next wave, he writes that Lejaren Hiller is beginning to compose music for the computer. In 1965, having read Philip Kapleau’s book on Zen, he remarks that he could never imagine sitting crossed-legged.

By 1967 he is taking a twice-weekly course in the survey of computer music and thrilled to find out that a program in Fortran is being written for the I Ching. He tells Yoko Ono he is not interested in her bottoms project (films of buttocks) or in cellist Charlotte Moorman’s tops (breasts) or in anyone’s projects of “fixed ideas and feelings,” which decades later caused Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown to accuse him of hiding his feelings behind his music. He talks about leasing, not owning, creative works, comparing them to cars, a very innovative approach that contemporary performance artists like Tino Sehgal now employ. He complains bitterly about having to fundraise but then turns around and writes an elegant fundraising request to a potential patron. By 1971 he has begun to perform less often, but when he does, those performances last up to five hours.

The final section of the book focuses on the last 10 years of Cage’s life (1972–1982). He catalogues his work, figuring out what collections should go where and writes that one day he will die. In 1973 he says, “As far as music goes I for one no longer need it; I find it all around me. I hear it all the time and it clicks.” In 1975 he finally got around to answering a letter, sitting around for decades, from poet Jackson Mac Low. In his lengthy response he mentions that he still uses the I Ching, but it is now computerized. He complains that he does not have enough time to accomplish anything and vows to stop listening to unsolicited manuscript cassettes. He embraced a macrobiotic diet, which helps to cure his arthritis, demanding special diets as part of his worldwide engagements. In 1997 he wrote about his exposure to one of the first computer bulletin boards (BBS). He mused endlessly about wills, foundations, requests, his health and, again, his diet. He takes great enjoyment in telling people he is 80 years old and has no time.

And then, unexpectedly, on 28 July 1992, his cranky, wondrous voice ceased. This time he is spot on: He truly and tragically has finally run out of time. [End Page 541]