In 2002, with the loss of rent stabilization in our West Village building and with alternative affordable real estate in short supply in Manhattan, the John Cage Trust became nomadic. In 2007, it joined the ranks of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, under the wing of its honored president, Leon Botstein. This has been its home since. The John Cage Trust has evolved over its twenty-plus years of existence, peripatetic but in one way constant: that it always be responsive to the world at its door, guided at every step not so much by what Cage had done but, rather, by what Cage is doing now.
From the onset of work on the present collection, I knew my efforts would be of use. Inquiries are frequent at the John Cage Trust about whether Cage wrote to a particular individual or addressed a particular topic or composition in his correspondence. Work began with the research that had been conducted into the John Cage Correspondence Collection at Northwestern University by Kenneth Silverman, author of Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2010). Our initial criteria for inclusion held fast as we sought other collections: that the letters collectively reflect Cage’s wide and egalitarian reach; that they reveal Cage’s preoccupation with particularly complex compositions and ideas; that the various periods of Cage’s life be covered; and that the whole reflect the incredible range of Cage’s activities over some six decades. There was no shortage of letters to choose from, and possibilities came from all points on the globe. This was particularly true in Cage’s later years, when he received a remarkable number of unsolicited letters from perfect strangers: inquiries about his music, accounts of dreams about him, requests for his opinion on artistic endeavors, challenges to his philosophy, and requests for autographs, endorsements, and recommendations. It is our good fortune that Cage felt duty bound to reply to them all.
What I didn’t foresee is the kind of story Cage’s letters would tell: a quiet, steady saga of near epic proportion about the singular life of a twentieth-century experimental American composer. Cage’s earliest letters to family, friends, and teachers reflect an earnest search for identity, direction, and place. He early on waffled in his choice of profession, by turns aspiring to become a minister, a writer, an artist, a poet, a composer. Settling on modern music composition, Cage set a steady if meandering course to the “head of the company,” the celebrated Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who had settled in Los Angeles. His confidence was buoyed by his studies, and then by his teaching, performing, and composing activities at the Cornish School in Seattle. By his late thirties, Cage is writing with ease and fluency to his intellectual peers: Pierre Boulez and David Tudor, especially, on technical matters of composition and performance, and Peter Yates, on matters of aesthetics, music history, and style.
While the selected letters reveal in the main Cage’s concerns as a composer, they do so in the context of a remarkable breadth of subject matter—composition and performance, to be sure, but also mycology, travel, philosophy, chess, food, religion, and art. And while they inform us about the remarkable range of Cage’s activities, they also reveal something of his inner life. This in spite of the fact that with the exception of Cage’s letters to Merce Cunningham throughout the early 1940s, chronicling a rather rocky start to their personal relationship, few letters to his most intimate colleagues exist: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, for example, largely are absent. Likewise, Cage is mostly mute on the subjects of desire and love, with but three notable exceptions: his letters to Pauline Schindler (with Xenia, one of the two objects of his ardor in the 1930s), his aforementioned letters to Cunningham (overlapping with the last years of his marriage to Xenia, in the 1940s), and his letters to David Tudor (who captured his attention and heart in the 1950s). His relationship with Schindler clearly was consummated, his relationship with Tudor likely not. His relationship with Cunningham, both personal and professional, would endure for some fifty years.
The introductions to the five parts of this collection were originally written jointly with Silverman, although they’ve since gone through countless revisions. Taken as a whole, they do not suggest a biography; rather, placed singly at the start of what are roughly decades of Cage’s life, they serve as guides to the letters that follow, identifying correspondents and providing context for and editorial comment upon matters discussed. If one gleans a biographical arc, it appears without a single, overriding descriptor: Cage is by turns enthusiastic, intelligent, consistent, and caring, as well as unwavering, repetitious, and dogmatic. A single creative idea might occupy him for years, through many compositions. One thing that does become clear is that John Cage began life as John Cage and finished life as John Cage. In the end, with his midlife adoption of Zen philosophy and his adaptation of the I Ching to chance operations, his feet, as Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki might have put it, were a little bit off the ground.
Reproducing the letters as Cage wrote them, I have opted to regularize his paragraphing, which in reality varies from letter to letter, and is often inconsistent within a single letter. I have not distinguished between letters that are written by hand or typewritten, or between those composed on simple bond paper or on “Note-O-Grams,” those quirky carriers of communication in carbon copy triplicate that Cage favored in the last decades of his life. More often than not, a late date, brevity, and the absence of an opening salutation imply the latter. I have corrected evident typos and erratic punctuation, but preserved his sometimes eccentric spelling and grammar, such as his habitual use of “therefor” and “correspondance,” and his frequent use of the word “which,” when, at least for the American reader, he really means “that.” Erratic capitalizations have been removed. I have noted his occasional misspellings of correspondents’ names, and when I have been unable to determine a correspondent’s identity, I have simply provided detail drawn from the letter that prompted Cage’s response. Date and place of each letter is provided when known, an approximate date suggested when not. Titles of works have been made complete and italicized for easy recognition, and Cage’s largely unremarkable closings to letters have been omitted. An appendix to the volume identifies the various sources of the selected letters, both public and private.
The Selected Letters of John Cage is made possible through the diligence and generosity of many, and gratitude is in order. We thank first John Cage, who religiously cared for and finally placed his extensive accumulated correspondence at the Northwestern University Library, from 1969 under the care and guidance of Don Roberts and, later, Deborah Campana, who became the point person for researchers around the world. Northwestern’s present staff—D. J. Hoek at the helm, with able assistance from Gregory MacAyeal and Alan Akers—supported the present editor’s frequent and sustained visits; they also conducted long-distance research and fact checking on her behalf, often at the drop of a hat. Thanks is also extended to Kenneth Silverman, whose initial research provided a strong start to our work, and to the innumerable individuals who have guarded their correspondence with Cage like gold.
Lastly, we thank Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief at Wesleyan University Press, John Cage’s principal publisher. It was she in 2012, Cage’s centennial year, who shepherded the Press’s worldwide celebration of fifty years of engagement with his literary works. She also brought us the estimable Bronwyn Becker, a project editor from the University Press of New England, who tackled an almost impossible job.
Much, much applause to all!
Laura Kuhn
New York, 2015