an effort to alter its sounds. The prepared piano became a signal instrument for Cage. In 1949, after the New York premiere of his (complete) masterpiece for the instrument, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), Cage received citations from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
105. Cage’s dissatisfaction with Euterpe (in Greek mythology the muse of music) was remedied by his later adoption in her place of Calliope (the muse presiding over eloquence and epic poetry, the “superior” muse, with Ovid speaking of her as the “chief of all muses”). Cunningham’s muse was, of course, Terpsichore, her name deriving from the Greek words “delight” and “dance.”
106. The Blue Angel, among New York City’s early supper clubs, officially opened at 152 E. 55th St. on April 14, 1943, the brainchild of Paris-born Herbert Jacoby. Its name was suggested by Marlene Dietrich’s eponymous first hit movie (1930).
107. John La Touche (1914–1956), American lyricist.
108. While undated, this letter may be synchronous with Xenia’s decision to leave her husband, moving in late February 1944 out of the Hudson St. apartment they shared and back, briefly, to Peggy Guggenheim’s mansion on Beekman Place. From all accounts, Xenia was permissive about sex; Cage was, after all, involved with Don Sample at the time of their engagement. But something about her husband’s year-long affair with Cunningham was for her irreconcilable.
109. Cage’s devotion to the work of Erik Satie expressed itself variously throughout his life. In 1944, he would undertake his first composition based on Satie’s Socrate (1919–1920) with an arrangement for solo piano of the work’s first movement, to which Cunningham contributed a choreographic aspect titled Idyllic Song. The work was presented as part of their first out-of-town performance in Richmond, Virginia, on November 18, 1944. As the manuscripts related to this work pertain only to a 1947 arrangement of the first movement scored for two pianos, Cage must have returned to it three years later. Cage and Cunningham together would revisit the work in a 1969 collaboration, Cage’s Cheap Imitation and Cunningham’s Second Hand (see notes 627 and 811), both works completing the second and third movements.
110. Cage’s Four Walls (1944) for solo piano and voice, originally used as music for the eponymous dance play by Cunningham and first performed in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on August 22, 1944. Ultimately, only scene 7 of Cage’s score includes a text by Cunningham, “Sweet love my throat is gurgling.” The dance is programmatic, its theme one of a dysfunctional family. Cage’s psychologically intense music is entirely diatonic, the structure a setting of contrasts.
111. Cage’s The Perilous Night (1943–1944) for solo prepared piano, in six untitled movements. This work was written during a period in Cage’s life that was tinged with sadness and confusion as a result of his early involvement with Cunningham and his growing estrangement from his wife. The title derives from a collection of Irish folktales; the music recounts the dangers of erotic love. It is one of Cage’s early pieces not used in conjunction with a choreographic work by Cunningham.
112. The 1942 film Kings Row, starring Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, and Ronald Reagan, directed by Sam Wood.
113. Cage’s A Book of Music (1944) for two prepared pianos would be given its first performance at the New School for Social Research in New York by Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold (see note 126) on January 21, 1945. This was likely Cage’s first commission from professional performers.
114. Schuyler (Garrison) Chapin (1923–2009), American impresario and producer, later vice-president of Lincoln Center (1963), co-founder of its Film Society (1969), and general manager of the Metropolitan Opera (1972).
115. Oliver Smith (1918–1994), American set designer.
116. Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), American theater producer, director, and choreographer who also worked in film and television, celebrated in his lifetime with five Tony and two Academy Awards.
117. Amelita Galli-Curci (1882–1963), Italian coloratura soprano whose early twentieth-century gramophone records garnered widespread popularity.
118. Edwin (Orr) Denby (1903–1983), American dance critic, considered by both Cage and Cunningham to be the finest of his time. His partner was the Swiss-born American photographer Rudy Burckhardt (1914–1999).
119. Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake: Unlocking James Joyce’s Masterwork (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1944).
120. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), English poet and Jesuit priest. This special edition of the Kenyon Review (1944), celebrating the poet’s centenary, comprised proceedings of a symposium on his poetry. Interestingly, it includes a piece by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (“The Analogical Mirrors”), who was unknown to Cage in 1944 but of great importance to him some twenty years later. See note 583.
121. Cage may be referring to Donald J. Pierce’s review of the book (by Brook Adams and Charles A. Beard) titled “The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History,” Political Science Quarterly 58, no. 3 (1943): 437–438.
122. Virgil Thomson’s “Expressive Percussion (John Cage) (1945),” published in the New York Herald Tribune, is an effusive, unrevealing review of a concert of Cage’s works at the New School on February 21, 1945. The program included A Book of Music (1944), premiered by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale.
123. See Mary Webb and Berton Roueche, “Prepared Pianist,” New Yorker, Feb. 24, 1945, 17, a review of the concert referenced above that mentions “five prepared pianos,” which jibes with Cage’s report (although he doesn’t specify that the pianos be prepared). No mention is made of specific works on the program, and it is possible that Cage himself performed.
124. Ruth Page (1899–1991), American ballerina and company director, one of the first ballet choreographers to employ American subject matter. She requested Cage compose the music for a ballet based on “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, but when terms could not be agreed upon, Darius Milhaud wrote the score.
125. Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), Japanese American artist, best known for his sculpture and public works. He designed several stage sets for Martha Graham productions, for Page’s The Bells (assisted by Yuji Ito), and for the Cage/Cunningham collaborative work The Seasons, which would premiere in New York on May 18, 1947.
126. Arthur Gold (1917–1990) and, properly, Robert Fizdale (1920–1995), American duo pianists, known cheerfully as “The Boys” in New York’s artistic community, who commissioned important works for two pianos in the middle of the twentieth century.
127. Thomas Hart Fisher, Chicago-based attorney and Ruth Page’s business manager and husband.
128. Learning that his Hudson St. apartment was to be converted, Cage moved to 326 Monroe St., on the lower end of Manhattan. This was a tenement neighborhood, and he dubbed his new sixth-floor walk-up loft “Bozza’s Mansion,” after the name of his landlord. He knocked out parts of the wall to put in large picture windows that faced the East River. The result was a light, airy, uncluttered space, with many plants but minimal furniture, so superb that it attracted notice in House and Garden, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue. The year 1946 brought yet another change: on October 25, Xenia sought and won a divorce from Cage, appearing alone as the plaintiff in a district court in Idaho. Cage had agreed to her complaint in advance by formal stipulation and was ordered to pay $100 per month in alimony.
129. Reference here is to Cage’s masterwork for solo prepared piano, Sonatas and Interludes (1946–1948), seventy minutes in length, the first work in which he expresses the permanent emotions of Indian tradition and his first composition using Hindu philosophy as a basis. The piano preparations are elaborate: forty-five notes, mainly screws and bolts, but also fifteen pieces of rubber, four pieces of plastic, six nuts, and one eraser. Maro Ajemian (see note 151), to whom the work is dedicated, would give its first partial performance at New York’s Town Hall on April 14, 1946; the first complete performance was likely given by Cage himself at Black Mountain College in North