Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

7. Fractures

7 · FRACTURES ca. 1962–1964 Tokyo; Ono and Ichiyanagi AS THE NATIONAL Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun headlined John Cage’s arrival in Tokyo, “Geijutsu Ha Mattaku Henka Shita”— “Art Has Changed Entirely.” Cage had never been to the East. His music was not well-known in Japan, although a decade earlier he had corresponded with members of Jikken Kōbō, an experimental workshop. Now David Tudor accompanied him on a thirty-day tour sponsored by the Sogetsu Art Center. Founded in 1959, the center brought together artists working in different media. It housed a studio for electronic music, a movie theater, and exhibition halls for painting and sculpture. The center covered Cage and Tudor’s transportation, room and board, and performance expenses. But it gave them no performance fees, since their concerts would be held on a nonprofit basis. Cage anyway considered himself well repaid. On his first day in Tokyo he visited his old Columbia teacher Daisetz Suzuki, now ninety-two years old but still writing. And he found his hosts con- stantly attentive, “unbelievably imaginative in finding ways to make our visit enchanting.” The wondrous surprises included Kabuki at the Imperial Palace, a geisha banquet given by a celebrated master of flower arrangement, and not least a mountain—“rented for my mushroom hunting!” Cage also enjoyed a stay at a Zen monastery in Kyoto, near the famous garden at Ryoanji. The garden’s fifteen rocks and rectangle of raked white gravel expressed Japanese ma—the religioaesthetic idea of pregnant emptiness suggested in the tense silences of Cage’s music and blank spaces of his writings. Here was the profound dry landscape he had always talked about but seen only on postcards —“outside my bedroom!” In addition to Tudor, Cage was accompanied on much of his tour by three friends: Peggy Guggenheim, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Yoko Ono. His relationship with Guggenheim went back to the time he and Xenia first arrived in New York. Over those twenty years he had stayed several times at her Venice palazzo. Between visits she listened to recordings of his music, sent him a Dunhill cigarette holder, read Silence, and wrote adoringly to him as “Darling” or “Mushy Mushy.” Accompanying him in Japan thrilled her, she said—the realization of a dream. The composer Toshi Ichiyanagi—husband of another young Japanese musician, Yoko Ono—had been a student in Cage’s New School class. Twenty-nine years old, small, bespectacled, he experimented with tape music at the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation in Tokyo before coming to live for several years in New York, where he also studied at the Juilliard School. Cage praised him for having found several ways “to free his music from the impediment of his imagination.” He often mentioned Ichiyanagi in connection with his other most gifted student: “My favorites now are Christian Wolff (still) and Toshi.” Grateful for Cage’s support, Ichiyanagi had been spreading the word in Japan before Cage ever got there, introducing Indeterminacy and arranging concerts of works by Cage, Feldman, and Wolff. Yoko Ono, the same age as her husband, looked on Cage as a friend. The daughter of a Japanese banking executive who had given up a career as a concert pianist, she had composed some twelve-tone songs at Sarah Lawrence College but dropped out of school to elope with Ichiyanagi. She had visited but not enrolled in Cage’s class, and after first meeting him said to her husband, “Do you realize this is it?” For FRACTURES · 1 83 the last ten years she had been living and working in New York, hosting avant-garde events at her Chambers Street loft (see ahead). She rejoined Ichiyanagi in Japan before Cage’s arrival, and the Sogetsu Art Center mounted a solo exhibition of her ‘instruction paintings.’ The couple actively served Cage during his monthlong tour. Ichiyanagi arranged a show of Cage’s scores at Tokyo’s Minami Gallery (a center of new art), and joined him, Tudor, and the composer/pianist Yuji Takahashi in recording for Japanese radio a four-piano version of Winter Music. Ono worked with Cage in presenting over Japanese TV some talk-with-music pieces, and lay stretched out crosswise on the harp of a piano for a presentation of Music Walk. Fittingly, Cage dedicated to the couple a musical joke he composed (?) in Japan, entitled 0´00˝ (4´33˝ No. 2). The score is one sentence long: “In...