It's more than a little ironic that the best thing to have happened to John Cage of late is the publication of The Selected Letters of John Cage (Wesleyan). It's unknowable what this man, this singularity of 20th-century music, this devotee of silence and its sounds and durations, would make of the fact that words �" his own words, even, about the ineffable would become a potent advocate of his music. Few would call him the greatest composer of the 20th century, but fewer still would dispute the fact that he did more than any other to get people to listen, and at a time when the audience for "classical music" had never found it more challenging, even forbidding.
What the letters spell out with clarity is the depth, seriousness, and divine playfulness of Cage's enterprise, the energy (and yes, love) that went into it, and its sheer luminosity at its purest. To his devotees he will always be a god, but a quarter-century after his death in 1992, this brilliant, child-like trickster has yet to overcome the perception that he was a prankster, a crank, perhaps even a sham. Americans hate nothing more than to feel they have been made the butt of a joke.
If you know anything of Cage you know that his most famous composition is 4'33", performed by a pianist who sits at the instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a note. Its point was to get its audience to hear everything in that span of time, and it was anything but a prank.
On Dec. 18, 1950, Cage wrote to Pierre Boulez, one of his dearest friends and a man he idolized, about a piano piece as different from 4'33" as could be imagined: Boulez's dense, monumental Second Sonata, which had been played the night before by the brilliant 25-year-old pianist David Tudor, a straight man who appreciated Cage and with whom Cage was bewitched. The public performance the previous night could not have happened without Cage's support, and Cage tells Boulez that the experience left him with "feelings of exaltation. Your music gives to those who love it an arousing and breath-taking enlightenment." Then, of his own work at the moment, Cage adds that it "brings me closer to a 'chance,'" an early mention of the aleatory aspect that never left his music thereafter. "Composition becomes 'throwing sound into silence,' and rhythm which in my Sonatas [for prepared piano] had been one of breathing becomes now one of flow of sound and silence."
Cage's letters are charged with the ecstasy of the found, the joy of the unexpected, the unanticipated connection, and it spills over into his relationships with his fellows and friends (including some amazing women), among them the giants of music in his time. There's not a whiff of name-dropping, though some very noisy names are dropped, and the reader is drawn deeply into the internal evolution of a man under music's spell. Early on he writes of his zeal to study with Arnold Schoenberg. His commitment to experimental music is explicit from the beginning, and it only gathers force over his 80-year lifetime.
The letters, nakedly love letters, to the dancer Merce Cunningham, whom he first met in Seattle when Cunningham took one of his courses and who became Cage's life partner in every respect, are syrupy with love, astringent with thought and purpose, and intimate in a way that does not leave the reader feeling like a voyeur. Editor Laura Kuhn arranges the letters into five parts, the last four of them roughly decades of Cage's life, and provides illuminating introductory contexts for each. But what's most striking about Cage's letters is the consistency of tone across the decades, the tireless support of the work of others, the jubilant collegiality and the quest for the revelatory in the ordinary. As his music does, these letters heighten perception and are a joy to read.
In a kind of Cagean coincidence, simultaneously with the release of these letters has been the publication of an arrestingly different, yet not wholly dissimilar take on silence, Pasqual Quignard's The Hatred of Music (Yale/Margellos). These pungent aphorisms in the style of Nietzsche come from a writer who was deeply immersed in the world of professional music, only to emerge from it craving silence in a noisy world.
On its second page we read, "Aristotle says in his Politics that the mouth and the hands of the muse are occupied exactly like those of a prostitute who, with lips and fingers, reinflates her client's physis in order to make it stand below his belly, in such a way that it emits its seed." It's salty stuff, no more to be written off than Cage's more ecstatic musings. Its timely reminder: "Fascism is related to the loudspeaker."