51. László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1968), Hungarian painter and photographer who advocated integrating technology and the arts. Director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937–1938), he maintained his position when its name was changed in 1939 to the School of Design, where Cage taught in 1941–1942.
52. Lucille (“Lucie”) Bigelow Rosen (1891–1968), one of Léon Theremin’s U.S. supporters who became an adept thereminist and gave performances throughout the United States and Europe. She named an instrument Theremin constructed for her the September Theremin because it was in September (1938) that he was mysteriously whisked back to Russia and interred in a Siberian labor camp. The September Theremin was the most advanced instrument Theremin had built to date and is today on display at Caramoor’s Rosen House, alongside a Moog Music Etherwave Theremin.
53. Edgard (or Edgar) Varèse (1883–1965), French-born composer known as the father of electronic music for his use of new instruments and electronic resources. He emphasized timbre and rhythm over melody and harmony and invented the term “organized sound,” by which he meant that timbres and rhythms could be grouped together, subliminating into a wholly new definition of music.
54. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (1864–1953), American pianist and music patron, especially devoted to chamber works. Among her lasting achievements was the Berkshire Music Festival in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, out of which grew the Berkshire Symphonic Festival at Tanglewood.
55. Luigi Russolo (1883–1947), Italian Futurist painter and composer, author of the manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). His “noise concerts” in 1913 and after World War I established him as one of the first “noise” music experimenters and a theorist of electronic music. Arguing that the Industrial Revolution had given men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds, he developed a taxonomy of “noise-sounds” and designed noise-generating devices he called Intonarumori.
56. Harold Burris-Meyer (1902–1984), American researcher who advocated for the dramatic possibilities of pyschoacoustics in the theater. In addition to his work at the Stevens Institute and Bell Laboratories, he served as a tactical and strategic planner for unconventional warfare during World War II, investigating the use of sound as a weapon. With colleagues at the Muzak Corporation and the Magnetic Resources Corporation, he also created the first stereophonic recording.
57. George Antheil (1900–1959), American avant-garde composer active from the 1930s composing music for film and television in a more tonal style than his beginnings might have suggested. He wrote the autobiography Bad Boy of Music (New York: Doubleday, 1945).
58. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), prominent Mexican painter, husband of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). A retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1931.
59. Leopold (Anthony) Stokowski (1882–1977), British orchestral conductor, well known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
60. Carl Emil Seashore (1866–1949), American psychologist whose interests included audiology and measuring motivation and scholastic aptitude. A version of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability (1919) was long used in American schools, and his Psychology of Music (1938) long served as an essential college text.
61. The Edwin A. Fleischer Collection of Orchestral Music, the world’s largest lending library of orchestral performance material, housed within the Free Library of Philadelphia.
62. Bland L. Stradley, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University.
63. Nicolas Slonimsky (1894–1995), Russian-born American composer, conductor, musician, and lexicographer whose widely read Music Since 1900 provided a daily chronicle over six editions (1937–2001) of important musical events around the world. He was a great champion of contemporary composers, most notably Ives and Varèse.
64. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), prolific French composer and teacher, a member of Les Six. His works were influenced by jazz and made use of polytonality.
65. Ernst Toch (1887–1964), Austrian composer of classical works and film scores. Toch’s “Gesprochene Musik” was an idiom of his own invention for spoken chorus, and his most performed work in this vein was Geographical Fugue (Fuge aus der Geographie, 1930). According to Dorothy Lamb Crawford, it was in large part Cage’s enthusiasm for this work that led to Toch’s 1961 composition of a companion piece, Valse (see A Windfall of Musicians [Yale University Press, 2009]).
66. A monophonic electronic instrument invented c.1929 by Friedrich Trautwein (1888–1956) in Berlin. Sound is produced not on a keyboard but by depressing a wire over a metal plate, with volume controlled by finger pressure. The most famous use of the instrument is heard in Oskar Sala’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Birds (1963).
67. Leopold Stokowski, “New Horizons in Music,” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 4, no. 1A (1932): 11–19. In his talk at the Bell Telephone Laboratories before the Acoustic Society of America annual meeting on May 2, 1932, Stokowski proposed a novel use for the phonograph in his “synthetic opera”: having the singers’ voices recorded and heard offstage, replacing the performers onstage with “venuses who really look the part.”
68. John Mills, A Fugue in Cycles and Bels (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1935).
69. Modern Music (1924–1946), the first music review magazine for the League of Composers. Its original name, The League of Composers’ Review, was changed in 1925. With wide coverage and esteemed contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, the magazine significantly shaped pre–World War II American music.
70. Properly, Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (1900–1967), German-American filmmaker and painter, notable for his abstract musical animations. Cage worked briefly with Fischinger in the summer of 1937 and was impressed with Fischinger’s idea that a spirit dwells inside every object. Their working relationship was ill-fated, however. While working on Fischinger’s short film Optical Poem, Cage, noticing that Fischinger had nodded off and that the ash from his lit cigar had ignited some paper and rags on the floor, inadvertently splashed water on Fischinger’s camera. See Cage’s mesostic titled “forgive me,” to Elfriede Fischinger and dated May 8, 1980.
71. Properly, Bennington College, a liberal arts college founded in Bennington, Vermont, in 1932. Its School of Dance summer program was instituted in 1934 by Martha Hill, who brought in stellar teachers including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Charles Weidman. On August 1, 1942, Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman would give a joint program of their own works there, which they repeated at the Humphrey-Weidman Studio Theatre in New York City later that year, adding Totem Ancestor (1942), another solo for Cunningham, with music by Cage.
72. Solovox, a monophonic keyboard attachment instrument intended to accompany the piano with organ-type lead voices, manufactured by the Hammond Organ Company.
73. See Edgard Varèse, “Organized Sound for the Sound Film,” Commonweal 33, no. 8 (Dec. 13, 1940).
74. John (Ernst) Steinbeck Jr. (1902–1968), American writer, who likely first met Cage in 1938 through Ed Ricketts (1897–1948), a marine biologist who hosted a casual salon at his laboratory on Cannery Row in Monterey, California.
75. Properly, Doris Denison and Margaret Jansen, two of the three “literate amateur musicians” (with Xenia Cage) who played in Cage’s percussion ensemble at the Cornish School, where both taught. Little is known about Jansen, other than that she was a pianist; Denison was a percussionist in Cage’s ensemble who became closely affiliated with the dance department at Mills College.
76. The Cages moved to Chicago in September 1941 on an invitation from Moholy-Nagy for Cage to teach in his School of Design. While there, Cage taught also at the University of Chicago, accompanying dance classes led by Kay Manning, and gave important performances at both the University of Chicago and at the Arts Club of Chicago.
77. The Humphrey-Weidman Group originated in 1928 when Doris Humphrey (1895–1958) and Charles Weidman (1901–1975) broke away from the Denishawn