Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

2. The Art of Noise

2 · THE ART OF NOISE 1938–1942 Percussion Music; Lou Harrison OSKAR FISCHINGER’S concept of incarnate sound animated Cage’s thinking about music the rest of his life. Listening to the tone and timbre of objects wherever he went, he investigated the infinite number of sound sources: “I never stopped touching things, making them sound and resound.” The idea freed him from Schoenberg’s demand for understanding of harmony. He became increasingly interested in ‘percussion music,’ a phrase he used but resisted: “Percussion music really is the art of noise and that’s what it should be called.” Cage composed some of his first percussion music when he and Xenia went to live in Santa Monica, probably late in 1937. They survived on only fifty dollars a month, he recalled, money he earned scrounging odd jobs and doing research for lawyers. The couple moved into a large house run by a bookbinder named Hazel Dreis, an artist at her trade whose covering materials included python. Cage and Xenia both learned to bind books—Xenia most actively, though he enjoyed designing the covers. The shop also supplied performers and instruments for his new percussion pieces. The bookbinders played his works at the house in the evenings, apparently on common objects and in at least one case on wood blocks they used for the backs of books. He invited Schoenberg to one performance, but Schoenberg said he wasn’t free. He then invited his teacher to a performance a week later. “No,” he recorded Schoenberg saying, “I am not free at any time.” Cage’s passion for percussion music moved him into another world of art. Modern dancers, he discovered, were grateful to have sounds or noises they could use at their recitals. Soon he was earning a living accompanying dance classes and sometimes composing music for dance performance. The dates and chronology are uncertain, but over several months he offered a “Percussion Course” for dancers at a studio in Beverly Hills, wrote some pieces for a dance group at UCLA, and devised an underwater gong for an aquatic ballet. With his aunt Phoebe James he also taught a UCLA extension course at a progressive elementary school, entitled “Musical Accompaniments for Rhythmic Expression.” Cage and James reportedly produced lively noises to accompany the children’s rhythmic movements—striking radiators, jiggling rice inside a balloon. In the summer of 1938 Cage decided to seek similar employment in Northern California. He moved on to San Francisco, supplying musical accompaniment for dance classes at Mills College in Oakland. Once again for Cage, way led onto way. This time an old friend brought him to a new friend who brought him to new work that deeply challenged and greatly rewarded him. The old friend was Henry Cowell, who reportedly urged Cage to meet a former student of his who was also teaching at Mills—Lou Harrison. Just twenty-three years old, Harrison had started composing for piano at the age of ten. With Cowell’s encouragement he too looked for new means of producing sound and wrote for percussion. In the summer of 1938, Cage turned up at his small Oakland railroad flat. “Henry had thought that we would have things in common and would enjoy one another,” Harrison recalled, “and of course we did right away.” The mutual enjoyment would be long lasting. But for the moment Harrison offered something else. Bonnie Bird, a pupil of Martha Graham’s, had offered Harrison a job as an accompanist for her dance classes at the adventurous Cornish School in Seattle. He declined, recommending Cage instead. THE ART OF NOISE · 27 The Cornish School; the Prepared Piano Toward the end of September 1938, Cage and Xenia moved to Seattle, a city of some four hundred thousand people, where he joined the Cornish music faculty. He spent eighteen busy months at the school, highlighted by three unusual accomplishments: he invented an ingenious new percussion instrument, organized the first performance in America of a concert entirely devoted to percussion music, and began composing with electronics. The Cornish School occupied a spacious three-story rectangular building in a residential neighborhood. Founded and financed by a short, plump, dynamic woman named Nellie Centennial Cornish, the institution identified itself as A School for Cultural and Progressive Study of the Allied Arts. The curriculum offered training in many of the arts and stressed their interdependence—music, theater, dance, radio, costume design...