The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life

Copyright © 1992, 2014 by David Revill

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Second Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Revill, David, 1964–, author.

The roaring silence : John Cage: a life / David Revill.—Second edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61145-730-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Cage, John. 2. Composers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

ML410.C24R5 2014

780.92—dc23

[B]

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-396-0

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Cover photo: AP Images

Printed in the United States of America

TO WHOM THE BOOK CONCERNS

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prelude

ONE (Before 1912)

TWO (1912–1924)

THREE (1924–1930)

FOUR (1930–1935)

FIVE (1935–1938)

SIX (1938–1940)

SEVEN (1940–1943)

EIGHT (1943–1947)

NINE (1948–1950)

TEN (Zen)

ELEVEN (1950–1952)

TWELVE (1952–1956)

THIRTEEN (1957–1966)

FOURTEEN (1967–1977)

FIFTEEN (1977–1991)

SIXTEEN (To 1992)

Chronology of Musical Works

Selective Chronology of Visual Works

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

I

One day while I was bathing, the telephone rang. A man’s voice said, Is David Revill there? My mother had answered, and she thought from his unusual voice that this was one of my friends fooling around. She said, No. Can I take a message? The man’s voice said, Well, it’s not important. Just tell him John Cage rang.

An open-minded browse through a percussion textbook had taught me that there was more to art music than Beethoven; there was an innovative and thoughtful American composer named John Cage. As I heard and played his music and read his books (I was still a teenager), I was entranced. When I learned he was performing in London, I had written to ask if we could meet. Now here I was, dripping water onto the carpet as we set up our appointment. I spent half of the following Tuesday with John Cage in his friend Bonnie Bird’s London flat and at the East-West Centre on Old Street, talking about the turn-of-the-century French director Georges Méliès, anarchism and macrobiotic food and sampling mekabu soup. Cage told me, You chew very well.

That first meeting intensified my interest. He seemed a man of joyous integrity, with a rare continuity between life, work and ideas. As I heard, read and played more of Cage’s work, and we met again, the idea of this book emerged. Despite the extent of his fame and influence in twentieth-century culture, and the existence of articles, numerous interviews and several anthologies, there had up to that point been no general book length account of his life, work and thought. Whatever the value of Cage’s work and ideas, they are baffling to many people—even to many sympathetic to modern arts. At first ignored or ridiculed, Cage was by the end of his life in an even harder position: adored or ridiculed. Since the end of his life, this has become even harder, since there can be no continued activity or pronouncements on Cage’s part which might rere, however slightly, the creative misunderstandings which begin to be generated.

It is a paradox shared with many a seminal figure that Cage’s vilification or, inversely, the attribution of his huge importance, tends to be founded on a failure to understand his work and ideas. One side of the coin is laziness on the part of those who try to explain his work, including a sense of ownership some people projectively develop with important figures. The other is Cage’s own refusal to make concessions in terms of the complexity and experimentation in his work. Cage developed an art which, by exemplifying rather than expressing (as I shall explain below), was beyond the reach of customary approaches to art. My aim in this book was, and remains, to further the understanding and appreciation of Cage’s work and thought, to give an account of his life and to ground evaluation in an adequate understanding of him, with the possibility in mind that by so doing, it might prompt work which picks up from where Cage, and not our misunderstanding of him, leaves off.

My first step was to approach Cage for his blessing, and this book benefited enormously from that blessing (a word of mine which he slipped into quotation marks when writing back) and from the hours he generously gave to interviews and conversations.

The project also, perhaps, benefited from the fact that it grew organically from my engagement with Cage’s work and from knowing him personally. The effect of the former was not unlike the good fortune a rock band can have in making their first album; they have the opportunity to draw on everything they wrote up to that point, rather than the work being generated in a condensed period due to the contractual need to produce an album. The Roaring Silence was first published in 1992. As will be discussed below, publication was intended to coincide with Cage’s eightieth birthday, but he died just a couple of weeks prior to that, in a very Cageian example of the process of living overtaking our expectations for life. Twenty-two years later, this second edition represents a freer opportunity to expatiate on new information and new reflections.

II

Whether one agrees with his ideas or appreciates his art, anyone interested in the culture of the twentieth century, its philosophy, sociology and history, needs to know about John Cage.

One index of Cage’s historical significance is the company he kept. At first, musicians such as Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg were his mentors. Then his circle was one of peers, for instance (to name only musicians) those who knew him in his percussion work in the forties, such as Lou Harrison, and those with whom he worked closely in the fifties—Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, David Tudor and Earle Brown, in particular. In Europe, Cage met Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and with them he had first cordial and subsequently somewhat hostile relations. He also came to know composers such as Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono.

Then he himself began to assume the role of mentor. In the sixties, his company included composers such as Ben Johnston, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma and Robert Ashley, Lejaren Hiller and Nam June Paik, all of whom record his significance. Philip Glass said that Cage’s book Silence changed my life and the way I think. Among rock musicians, John Cale, Brian Eno and David Byrne have spoken of the influence of Cage, and he was not only a friend but also a neighbor of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

A similar change of role occurs in his associations with non-musicians. As a college dropout he worked with the architect Ernö Goldfinger, he became friendly with John Steinbeck and came to know Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim. In the fifties, his circle included not only Brown, Feldman and Wolff, but also Robert Rauschenberg and, subsequently, Jasper Johns. In the following decade he became close to Marcel Duchamp. The relationship with the deepest importance for Cage was with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham; they were for decades partners both in their art and in their private lives.

All the foregoing is simple sociology—noting Cage’s pivotal place in twentieth-century culture and, especially, in the rarefied society of the avant-garde. His influence is a different issue. His work and thought have had a major impact on every aspect of modern art. To speak of the extent of his influence encompasses its depth and its ramifications, not only in music but also in manifold cultural forms, over a protracted period. Yet these are difficult phenomena to treat. As with the work and thought of all seminal figures, its influence has—as I have hinted already—taken the form of creative (and occasionally uncreative) misunderstanding, and the more influential a person becomes, the harder it is to specify and the easier it is to oversimplify the nature of that influence. Cage’s ideas have been so assimilated, refracted and often denatured that they define the cultural climate at a level where they are everywhere and nameless. Having said that, his influence has not been at the level of specific practice (there is no Second Los Angeles School of Composers imitating his use of chance).

Cage is not only important in the sociology of modern arts and their changing ideas and strands of influence, but also for the philosophical and aesthetic questions his activities raised and still raise. What is music? Why do we make music? What is the purview of music, or musical, analysis? What is beauty? However, I do not consider Cage as primarily of interest as a thinker. If his thinking had not been in relation to activity, how useful could it be? Ideas are enjoyable for their own sake, but another set of ideas ungrounded in practice would be one set of ideas too many. Moreover, his predilection was for doing rather than thinking. I like it better, he said, when something is being done than when something is being said.¹ He insisted that everything he produced could be put to use in the way he designed it. Cage’s pragmatism, like, arguably, all disciplines for self-realization (whether psychological or spiritual), emphasizes vision and action rather than reflection and emotion: look at what is the case and at what can tangibly be done.

A fourth remarkable facet of Cage is his enormous productivity and the range of his work. When Frederic Lieberman told Cage he planned to lecture on his musical style, Cage replied, You have a problem—there are so many. This difficulty was compounded as Cage additionally became a prolific writer and visual artist. What is to be said of a figure like John Cage, ask Appleton and Perera, who is known to some as a composer, to others as a mycologist, a poet, or a graphic artist, or to still others as an influential writer on social and economic issues?² These days, after centuries of increasing specialisation that has now become destructive, to live as a Renaissance polymath meets a pressing historical need—so long, that is, that one acquires deep knowledge and authority in the various fields, rather than merely treating learning as a taster menu.

Cage’s dogged devotion to originality was striking. A journalist from Illinois once asked him to put his philosophy in a nutshell. The reply did not concern our integration into daily life or optimism about it (two likely contenders, as we will see), but was a reflexive pun: Get out of whatever cage you find yourself in.³ The implication is thus of escaping from oneself as well as external constraints, and, as advice for others, has the added flavor of if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

I’m devoted to the principle of originality. Not originality in the egoistic sense but . . . in the sense of doing something which it is necessary to do. Now, obviously, the things it is necessary to do are not the things that have been done, but the ones that have not yet been done.⁴

Cage was proposing—or noting—that each person does his or her own work, for since at least his college days, he was convinced we get more done by not doing what someone else is doing.⁵ A school was out of the question: Two people making same kind of music is one music too many.⁶ One of the pointers, for Cage, was the assimilation of his work. If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it isn’t.⁷

Apart from a special fondness for 4′33″, he insisted he preferred the one piece he had not yet written. My favorite music is the music I haven’t yet heard, Cage clarified. I don’t hear the music I write. I write, in order to hear the music I haven’t yet heard. That’s my tendency—to be interested most in what I haven’t yet done. But, if I have to be interested in what I have done—to be interested in the most recent.

Having said all of this, Cage’s potentially greatest, certainly most generalisable, legacy is not the most obvious one: his life was a rare lesson in the value and the power of commitment, discipline and integrity, regardless of whether one appreciates his art or agrees with his ideas. Cage could not cynically do the things that have not yet been done, since cynicism requires direction oriented toward other people’s expectations or a response to or manipulation of existing style (if only by reacting against it). Genuine originality requires integrity: the congruence of one’s actions with one’s principles, deliberately followed.

The least appreciated of Cage’s qualities is his understanding of the spiritual dimensions of life, which conditioned his whole being but is especially obvious in his seriousness of endeavor. And the loss which might most easily be forgotten was the fact, against which cultural polemics pall, that Cage was a good human being. One of his widest lessons is thus ethical—in the Ancient Greek sense described in Michel Foucault’s last works, not so much in terms of impersonal, interpersonal injunctions as of a mode of living, a technology of the self. With Foucault, particularly in the later group of volumes of the History of Sexuality, the ethics of the self is very much concerned with the imperative to tell the truth about oneself,⁸ whereas I am suggesting a more general sense which Foucault does mention but treats in less detail: a way of relating to oneself and one’s actions. Cage’s actions were consistent with his ideas, and his thinking in keeping with what he did. There was, in other words, a unity of thought and action in Cage’s life.

What has just been said raises the danger that a study of his life and thought could be mere hagiography or a Victorian exemplary biography, but that is a risk worth vigilantly taking in order to make the story of his life most—to use a term beloved of Cage which will frequently recur in these pages—useful.

III

I have not primarily written a sociological biography, art history or a study of cultural context, though these have a place (the agenda of modernism, for instance, the flowering of Eastern thought in the West, the American character or Cold War cultural policy—an example of the latter will, however, be briefly sketched below). It is neither a sceptical biography, in the sense of setting out to disprove Cage’s claims about himself, nor a sensationalist one. My main concern—it seemed the most interesting and useful focus both in writing and now in revising the book—is to describe how Cage made himself who he was, because his direction is extraordinary and exemplary. Furthermore, the question of how a person made himself who he was is of more general methodological, not to mention human, interest than the facts (fascinating though they are) that Cage developed indeterminate notations or knew Marcel Duchamp. Developing that unifying thread has produced a book of this length and, as Cage frequently said to critics of his work, do not complain you wanted a pork chop when you are offered steak.

In the remainder of this section, I will discuss more general methodological concerns and my general hope of making a modest contribution to biographical methodology; those who are less interested in such broader concerns may prefer to skip to the final section of the preface or directly to the main body of the text.

It is important for the method to match the subject. An investigation of another person might put more stress on the early years if there was, say, a trauma essential to understanding the life, or on the social and historical aspects which would be more important to a biography of, for instance, Schoenberg.

At first I was daunted and not a little bemused by the challenge of making an account of this rich life. Mere chronology did not seem enough, although it forms the backbone of the book and is augmented by broader discussions when particular events raise general points. From where do the characteristics and priorities of a person come? Does information about the early life tell us? If we have more information on the life, will we find that the life causes the art? As we are about to see, Cage’s father was an inventor, Aunt Phoebe taught the piano, Aunt Marge sang contralto, he begged for piano lessons as a small boy. Already, we hear inventing, family interest in music, an interest by the child Cage in music. The way Cage turned out can be related to these features but, having said that, retrospective awareness is what gives them significance. The same features could have been present in the childhood of someone who grew up to run a chain of doughnut shacks.

As I lay the groundwork for the book, what came through with unexpected force was the way the life, work and thought of John Cage form not an assembly of facts but a story with a unifying theme, perhaps both heuristic and apodictic: Cage clarifying, refining and reinforcing his ideas and temperamental inclinations through ever more adequate ways of transforming them into external actions, which clarify the internal in turn. What we are seeing here, to express it as a paradox and using the example of one life where it is very clear, is the way a person makes himself who he is. In connection with this we see a generalisable reciprocity: we are what we do, we do what we are.

When we look at the areas of a person’s life over time, we see themes, which are revealed by continuity within the change. Certain inclinations constantly surface, are realized and thus clarified in varying ways, in work, interpersonal relationships, outlook and irrationalities; a person also explains the themes to themselves in different ways (this means, of course, that the explanation is not the theme). We see, furthermore, that there is a large-scale phasing to the evolution of the themes in a life. There are phases of moving forward, of antithesis and then of synthesis. In examining Cage’s specific case, we find inclinations toward asceticism, austerity, the transcendental, quiescence, a sense of wonder, a yearning for the spiritual. We will see these played out in both his actions and his ways of speaking about his work. The term I will use here for the snapshot, so to speak, of particular ways in which a person realizes—makes tangible and thereby specific—the themes in his or her life at a given moment is existential placement.

The implication of this is that essence has a meaning inasmuch as the inclinations, temperament and potentialities of a person have some independence from what he or she does or from his or her reflexive appreciation of them. It remains for a fuller consideration of these general considerations to discuss the ontological status of these themes—whether essence is a heuristic extrapolation or device introduced by the investigation, or is in the subject, or, indeed, if its status must remain suspended in paradox.

Whatever our position on this, nothing in what has been said suggests the priority a priori of any one area in which the theme can be seen. We might say, for the present, that the origin of themes and actions and opinions is something so multiply influenced and going back so far as to be unspecifiable in detail. Any priority would be relative to specific cases. When Cage observed that my activity is anti-institutional, or I work best as an individual, not as one sheep in a herd of sheep,⁹ his objection to institutions and to organisation was reasoned; it exemplified a temperamental reluctance to dirty his feet and incarnated the distaste he felt for the crowd. Which is not to deny that these observations are intellectually defensible—just that the intellectual arguments for them are not the sole, probably not the main, reason Cage believed them.¹⁰ We can neither usefully reduce them to neurotic motivation nor dignify them as purely a reasoned ethico-political stance.

Nor can we generalise by saying that ideas lead to actions or vice versa. Either can be ahead of the other. Ideas suggest actions, but actions suggest or clarify ideas. Indeed, the urge to undertake something can anticipate the understanding of why you wish to do it—and you may need to wait for some understanding before you can fulfill that urge.

When I began this book, I had a vague but strong conviction that psychoanalysis was inapplicable to biography. As I worked, I realized that certain psychoanalytic orientations, freed from doctrinal narrowness, are invaluable, provided one is realistic about their purview. When one adopts a given existential placement, one retains traces of irrelevant secondary features. If one is ascetic and transcendental, as in the case of Cage, the passions do not go away. If such secondary features are not integrated into the mainstream of a person’s life, they continue to exist as an incidental, contradictory stream; they reveal themselves not as complements, which temper the main direction, but as little fissures which alert us to something missing, like the tics of a scratched recording which stop us hearing the rest. Fissures of this kind can be found in Cage’s life: the puzzling attitude he developed toward jazz or his predilection for quantitative complexity. Interestingly, Cage’s giveaways often appear at first to be telling the whole story (his description of his courtship and marriage, for instance, or his single encounter with and subsequent dismissal of psychotherapy); then, when one examines the information, one realizes he has said next to nothing, just thrown up a brief, fairytale trompe l’oeil. Wherever such a point is made here, it is an observation and not a criticism; a fissure is not a deficiency in a pejorative sense. Rather than constituting criticism, an account of a person’s shortcomings makes him or her more fully appreciated.

At one level, then, the methodology here owes much to the mid-twentieth-century subgenre of existential biography, most prominently and successfully developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in his studies of figures such as Genet, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and, most famously (and extravagantly), Flaubert.

At another level, what is involved here is the universal necessity, especially evident for artists, of finding a place to conduct and direct one’s life between the poles of light and dark, unity and dispersion, calm and passion. These poles are characterised, in mythology, by figures such as Apollo and Dionysos, Bodhidharma and Hotei; the one for light, unity, restraint and calm, the other for darkness, dispersion, passion, excess. (This archetypal dimension will be discussed at length below.) I was surprised by how much light this shed on Cage. He was a modern artist, but at its most valuable the modern in modern art implies a historical period, a style, perhaps local concerns or problematics; there can be a basic continuity with earlier periods. As Cage once observed, I’m afraid I’m more traditional than all those traditionalists.

To conclude this subsection, I should say a little about how work on this book refined my understanding of understanding itself. All those years ago, I was struck for the first time by the laziness of our perception and the laxness of our categories, whether in woolly notions of common sense or the wasted complexities of philosophy. (One very important reason our categories tend to remain vague is that they tend to be used not simply to explore a topic with technical precision, but, rather, as tokens of group membership—a way to successfully pass yourself off as a member of a particular subculture.) This is most destructively true as regards comprehension—words such as understanding, motive, why and to some extent how—and volition (will is a term mentioned below). We seek to answer questions with the limits of the question undefined, making thought inefficient.

Cage, a master at asking questions, is instructive here: one seeks, he said many times, the kind of question which will produce good answers. The better-defined the query, the more productive will be our response, because it will be more attuned to the reality about which one is inquiring.

Understanding, meaning and will are much nearer the facts than is usually realized. When one asks, as we shall, "How is it that John Cage wrote 4′33″? the question most usefully concerns the way rather than the why—how is it that taken as in what fashion did." Understanding life, work and thought cannot mean causal explication. It means uncovering information, making forgivable juxtapositions, suggesting an overall shape by highlighting themes.

The themes of a person’s life are not in some secret chamber; they are present in every way a person appears. The key to understanding is to look. Provided our own desires and preconceptions are not distorting perception—which returns us again to psychoanalysis—everything is there: what Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) dubbed the mystery in broad daylight.

Although, as Cage said, everything we come across is to the point, to put it in more theoretical language, a person discloses themselves in every action or self-presentation, so nothing is irrelevant—we can never be exhaustive. Otherwise, biography becomes comparable to the map described by Jorge Luis Borges, drawn to such accuracy that it exactly covered the country it charted. As Cage was aware, any account is a fabulation.

I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, You have to invent it. When I wish, as now, to tell of critical incidents, persons and events which have influenced my life and work, the true answer is—all of the incidents were critical. All of the people influenced me. Everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.¹¹

This is an additional reason why I have pursued a story of Cage’s inner life, how Cage made himself who he was, rather than the social and historical aspects. The way Cage tells the story, much as in some cases his memory of what happened was not what happened, is as much a part of his self-disclosure as the events described. As he himself observed, I had faith that stories out of my personal experience would be related to one another because I recounted them even if they seemed on the surface to have very little to do with each other or with music.¹²

Though the following pages tell a story, I am not writing fiction.

With the exception, perhaps, of this theoretically dense subsection, I have tried to make this book as light as possible, building from contiguities and not connections, providing information but few directions. An incidental effect, I feel, of this approach is that it can give a sense of the buoyant amusement which Cage tended to present at his own observations. My only recurring exception has been to describe as interesting points which I feel to be revealing, often in multifaceted ways—a sly way to draw attention to this kind of self-disclosure.

IV

While writing the first edition of this book, I recalled Cage’s response when once I told him I was wary of churning out material: I think you have to do a bit of churning. Studying a figure like Cage could easily become an interminable task; for this reason, I was fortunate to have had the goal in mind, much as it turned out to be a vanishing goal, of completing The Roaring Silence in time to celebrate his eightieth birthday.

So, why a new edition so close to the centenary of his birth? I came to realize that the first edition contained a handful of errors, hard to avoid in a book of this scope—above all, when it is the first of its kind—but, although none of them in any way compromised the overall theses of the book, they were nevertheless to be regretted and in need of correction. More positively, much useful work on specific aspects of Cage’s life and art has been carried out since 1992, and pointing the reader towards some of it could increase the utility of this volume.

The most subject-appropriate reason for a new edition of Roaring Silence, however, is that it was out of date as soon as it appeared, ending, as it did, with Cage in the midst of life, looking forward to projects it turned out he would never see. In this way, if the discipline of the drafting process for the original was an external structure reminiscent of Cage’s work on Roaratorio—in which, as we shall see, there was one range of time to record sounds, one range of time to work with them in the studio, and the work was simply deemed completed when those ranges of time were over—and of Cage’s associated image of the Venus de Milo which manages quite well without her arms, this second edition is a chance to give her some arms.

And what has changed since 1992? As mentioned above, Cage’s passing necessarily means there is no continuing action on his part to serve as a corrective, however slight, to the creative misunderstandings which begin to be generated. It also leaves uncorrected the proprietary sense some people project as part of their identification with a prominent figure. (Cage’s is far from the most dramatic example of this but his openness while alive makes for a stronger contrast with the possessive identifications.) The intellectual property has sclerosed too; without the living person present to make individual, perhaps exceptional, choices as to who is given or has access to what, means a hardening of the material into ownership and control by archives and trusts. However well those so charged may try to do such a job, they are working in a very different landscape to when the originator of the material was alive.

At a simpler level, one thing that has changed is that so many of the principals are no longer with us—a very different complexion to 1992, when most were alive. Not only Cage himself, but Merce Cunningham is no longer with us, nor Cage’s wife Xenia, Earle Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, Jackson Mac Low, Norman O. Brown, Gita Sarabhai, David Tudor. Even the hospital where Cage died has closed.

Finally, everything connected with music has changed. Cage lived through a time when the avant-garde meant what it said. With the coming the twenty-first century, there was no avant-garde of which to speak: paradoxically, the term came to refer to a mid-century movement, not to each successive advance on received artistic wisdom. Indeed, arguably, the times since the nineteen eighties have been largely recuperative rather than revolutionary. Along with this, the time in the West when there was support for the arts, whether from the state or to any significant extent from private patrons and benefactors, disappears into increasingly distant memory. Already, Cage lived in a very different world. However, today’s new music has to, and will, find a way, as creativity always does.

In Cage’s view, the future of music is open-ended and diverse. In keeping with his respect for other centres, he celebrated the variety this entails. He predicted in the sixties an increase in the amount and kinds of art which will be both bewildering and productive of joy.¹³ He said that when he was a young man, there were only two serious directions available for a musician: Schoenberg or Stravinsky, but [Today] the main stream has gone into delta. And beyond that into ocean. Now you can go in any direction at all, even your own.¹⁴ He suggested that music, instead of going in one direction, is going in many unpredictable directions. There are more people composing and more ways of composing. They seem to me to be increasing in number. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t know what’s happening. Now I think it’s more like a French pastry situation—you don’t know which way to go.

Regardless of whether it is going somewhere, art will continue to change. History will be a cycle of changes, proposed Cage. I like to think of history as remaining the same all the time. Having a richness of differences in it—all of the time. One can find, in recuperative times, a certain lack of integrity and engagement among some artists, which leads to partial and rather cosmetic syntheses; despite this, flashes of clarity and originality continue to appear. Cage has arguably exhausted the mines of non-intentional art; maybe he has not. He both shows and proposes that each person proceeds with his or her work as they see fit. Whatever happens, it will not be what we expect, the ineluctable necessity, which is difficult for most of us to deal with, but simultaneously—and here Cage’s example is supremely useful—why life can be so enjoyable.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the late John Cage for his interest in my work,* for his cooperation, his time and his example. There are many other people whose help I would like to acknowledge. The guiding theme of my book crystallized in the first place largely due to the intervention of Norman O. Brown and a few cuppas with Gordon Mumma. I am much indebted to Earle Brown and Jasper Johns for rewarding and enjoyable conversations, and to the hospitality and advice of Margaret Leng Tan, Kathan Brown, Tom Marioni, Margarete Roeder, Mimi Johnson, James Pritchett, Richard Swift, Debbie Campana and Rita Bottoms; Stanley Lunetta, Paul Hillier, Robert Black and Richard Bernas; concerning Ernö Goldfinger, Peter Goldfinger and James Dunnett; at WGBH in Boston, Joel Gordon, Ellen Kushner and Michelle Sweet; and the long distance interventions of Ray Kass, Lilah Toland, Francine Seders and my detective at the J. Walter Thompson Company, Laura Cheshire, and to the JWT archivist at Duke, Ellen Gartrell. Invaluable help came from Victoria Pope and Fiona Flower of Peters Edition, London, and from Don Gillespie in New York.

Others whose assistance I recall with gratitude and pleasure include, at Columbia, Alice Rwabazaire, Hollee Haswell, Ken Lohf and Corinne Rieder, and, for inside information on Suzuki’s classes, Ted de Bary, Miwa Kai and Philip Yampolsky; at Harvard, Millard Irion and the staff of the archive; at WGBH, Frank Lane; Jasper John’s assistant, Sarah Taggart; at the Crown Point Press, Constance Lewellen and Karin Victoria; at KNX, Ed Pyle; at the University of California, Davis, Jerome Rosen, Una McDaniel, D. A. Rohde, John Skarstad and Don Kunitz, the librarian who knew everything; Robert Worby; Maria Sansalone for translations from Italian; Gerard Pape; at Universal Edition, London, Eric Forder. Thanks to mine hosts Alex Madonik and Eve Sweetser, and, for their hospitality, Narrye Caldwell and the highly cybersonic Gordon Mumma. For comments on drafts of the original version, Laurie Taylor, Brian Morton and in particular Mark Doran; Ann Halliday’s help was inestimable. With respect to this second edition, my editor, Cal Barksdale, has made the potentially painful task of editing a project on this scale a pleasure, and his literary sensitivity and precision have been peerless. The value of Dr. Aaron Esterson’s insights and his lessons in clarity cannot be overstated. Two other people deserve mention, without whom and so on: Sharon, and my mother, Anne.

*All of it—it was only on the day after his death, for instance, that I learned how he had encouraged a festival in Germany to commission a piece from me soon after our first meeting.

PRELUDE

On Friday, August 29, 1952, beginning at a quarter past eight, a benefit concert for the Artists’ Welfare Fund was given at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, by John Cage, composer, and David Tudor, pianist. Composers featured on the program included Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Henry Cowell, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff. There were two pieces by Cage. The first, taking its title on this occasion from the date of performance, was a somewhat theatrical piece the composer had finished earlier in the year, which we know as Water Music. The other, the penultimate item of the evening, was scheduled innocuously, and inaccurately, as Four Pieces. After everything that had gone before, the listeners might have been forgiven for expecting, whether with relish or reluctance, more effusive experimental fireworks.

David Tudor set off a stopwatch, just as he had for Water Music. He sat down and closed the piano lid. He timed three movements. Nothing for thirty seconds. Then for two minutes twenty-three seconds; then one minute forty seconds. Tudor raised the piano lid and stood up. 4′33″, of silence.

Why did a man just turning forty write a piece of music with no sounds in it? Was he a composer? A musician? A mystic? Was he a Dadaist? A Zen Buddhist? Was he making fun, pulling off a stunt? How is it that John Cage wrote 4′33″?

ONE

I’m an Englishman. I have a little French blood and a little Scottish blood. I would love to have some Irish blood, but I don’t. Maybe if I were ill and had to have a transfusion in Dublin, I could have some Irish blood.¹

In Virginia, around 1740, an English colonel called William Cage was named a trustee in the will of Lady Fairfax,² thereby becoming embroiled in the dispute over her local estate. Into the next generation was born a John Cage who, as an adult, was to help George Washington survey the state and, in the Revolutionary War, fought in the Eighth Virginia Regiment³ on the Continental Line.

The story of the Cages we seek begins with a man of the same generation in the same state, William Cage, born in 1745. He met and married Elizabeth Douglass, third child of Colonel Edward Douglass and Sarah George of Fauquier County. William and Elizabeth had ten children; William was to marry again later in life and produce, with Ann Morgan, another six, one of whom was to marry Jack Hays, the Texas Ranger. At the age of forty, William moved his family to Sumner County, Tennessee; his home (subsequently covered by the water of a Tennessee Valley Authority reservoir) became known as Cage’s Bend. His in-laws moved too, settling at Station Camp Creek, just north of Gallatin.

William Cage fought in the war, with the rank of major. When the Territorial Government was set up in 1790, Governor Blount made Cage county sheriff. He served in that post for six years, to be succeeded by his son Reuben and then, from 1800, another son James; he died at Cage’s Bend on March 12, 1811.

Wilson Cage, the second child of William and Elizabeth, married a local girl, Polly Dillard, and she gave birth to a dozen. Their penultimate child, Adolphus (1819–1905), farmed in western Tennessee for many years, and preached at the Methodist Episcopal Church at Wouth—to both white and black, he was proud to say, despite, as one could expect, owning some of the latter as slaves. Shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, at the age of fifty-three, he set off west with two of his brothers. One brother then moved south and was never heard of again; the other, Wilson junior, settled in Dent County, Missouri, where he died in 1876 at the age of seventy-two, leaving a profusion of offspring. Adolphus moved on to Colorado, becoming an early settler of the Greeley colony (a planned community promoting temperance and other Methodist values), preaching for the church and investing thousands in developing irrigation for the district.

Adolphus married a Miss Boyd and, short-changed at two children, Charlotte Anna Green (1825–91). The third of their five children, Gustavus Adolphus Williamson Cage, would be the grandfather of John Cage. Gustavus was in the first graduating class at the State University at Boulder, then took a postgraduate course at Denver University. Making a profession of his father’s devotions, he became an itinerant preacher for the Methodist Episcopalian Church. In 1882, Gustavus married Mary Lou Newsom, who came from Nashville, Tennessee. The couple spent some time in California and began their family: Mary Lou and Willis Green. In Los Angeles in 1886, Mary Lou senior gave birth to John Milton Cage. They were to have one other child, Rebecca, who died in infancy.

The course of Gustavus’s career can be followed in the conference yearbooks of the church. After preaching ineffectually against Mormonism (and specifically the practice of polygamy) in Utah, he came in 1890 to Denver, where, his grandson stated in interviews, he established the church, although it appears to have already been in existence. He was sent that year as a missionary to Rawlins, Wyoming, and was ordained as an elder by Isaac Joyce at Laramie on June 18. At the Church’s conference in 1894, Gustavus was one of four assistant treasurers and was an elder at Erie, back in Greeley, which had ninety full members at the time. That year he married again—Fannie Davis, who came from Weldon, Iowa. They were to have three children—Amasa Adolphus, who died in infancy, Arthur Edgar and Lucile Elizabeth.

The following year Gustavus endorsed the activities of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. A tantalizing yearbook note records that his case was referred to the presiding Elder for investigation. In 1896 he worked at Bald Mountain, Greeley; that year, the minutes state: The case of G A W Cage, in view of rumors affecting his character, was referred to the Committee on Conference Relations. The next day the Committee resolved that we find nothing in the new evidence submitted to change the verdict formerly rendered in his case.

John Cage remembered Gustavus as a man of extraordinary puritanical righteousness, who would get very angry with people who didn’t agree with him.⁴ He was wary of music, considering the violin an instrument of the devil. His son, John Milton Cage, grew up in Colorado, due to his father’s missionary work, and was considered the black sheep of the family, running away from home whenever the opportunity presented itself.

The pianist at the First Methodist Episcopalian Church was Lucretia Harvey. A year older than John Milton, Lucretia—Crete to friends and family—became his wife. She was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1885, daughter of James Carey and Minnie Harvey. Her family, too, was suspicious of learning; only Shakespeare and the Bible were allowed at home, though Crete concealed some other books in her room. She had one brother and four sisters, Sadie,⁵ Josie, Phoebe and Marge.

Crete had already been married twice before marrying Cage’s father. John Cage did not know this of his mother until adulthood when his Aunt Marge told him at least part of the story. Then, after his father’s death, Cage was filling out forms to increase his mother’s social security and Crete said, There’s something I’ve never told you. I know, Cage interrupted. Aunt Marge told me you were married before marrying Dad. That’s not all, she returned. I was married twice before that. What was your first husband’s name? asked Cage. You know? I’ve tried and tried, Crete answered, but I’ve never been able to remember.⁶

The attempts of John Milton and Crete to produce children initially met with little success. Their first child, Gustavus Adolphus Williamson III, was stillborn. Gustavus Adolphus Williamson IV, their second son, was born deformed, with a head larger than his body, and died at two weeks. (Cage grew up believing that they had each borne his name, not that of his grandfather.)

Then in Los Angeles’ Good Samaritan Hospital, at five o’clock in the morning of September 5, 1912, John Milton Cage, junior was born.

TWO

I

On Friday the thirteenth in the year his son was born, John Milton Cage sent a crew of thirteen men underwater in a submarine boat of his design. After thirteen hours, the vessel resurfaced and the crew scrambled from the conning tower, gasping for breath.

Gustavus Cage had been something of an inventor—in 1909, he patented a touch-key finder for typewriters.¹ For John Cage senior, however, inventing was a life’s work, and over the course of his career (his first patent was recorded in 1906, his last in 1957²) his innovations were wide-ranging. After building the submarine, he was involved with related technology for some time. From 1916 to 1921, he worked with Hugh Keller, a professor at the University of Michigan, on adapting the gasoline engine for use in submarines; he patented a steering and propulsion system in 1918; during the First World War he devised a hydrophone for submarine detection, which he demonstrated in London—it was used in the English Channel against U-boats. From 1919 until the end of the twenties, he designed improvements to the internal combustion engine, producing a six-stroke, three-phase engine in 1921 and a sleeve-valve engine five years later.

In Massachusetts in the forties, John senior worked on tire vulcanizing processes. He invented the first radio powered by alternating current,³ so that it could be plugged into the electric light system, and devised an inhaler for treating colds (his son swore by it for skin problems and dandruff too), mixing menthol and thymol in an