JOHN CAGE and THE LIVING THEATRE
Cage's "Music of Changes" was premiered at a Living Theatre concert series at the Cherry Lane Theatre on January 1, 1952* * * * * * * *
The following quotes are from "The Living Theatre" by John Tytell (Grove Press, 1995).
"One of the artists Judith wanted to attract to her chamber theatre was John Cage, whom she had seen playing piano with his elbows early in May [1951?] and then conducting a piece for 12 radios. 48 years old, mercurial but soft-spoken, Cage was a genuine innovator who had introduced chance elements into his work as a principle of musical composition. Cage argued that harmony, the unifying structural principle of classical music, had been replaced by the variable time lengths of Anton Webern and Erik Satie. Contemporary music was simply sound without any hierarchy. Squealing auto brakes, for example, were as valid a source for musical composition as the violin, and the musical revolution Cage suggested would come to incorporate street sounds. Judith met Cage again in the middle of May at a downtown art show. ... Cage told her how he had come to New York in 1943 to stay with Peggy Guggenheim, who abruptly rejected him when she discovered he was planning to give a concert at MOMA instead of Art of This Century. Guggenheim's rejection of Cage, similar to her treatment of Julian, had been a sexual motivation, and this was another link between Cage and the Becks." - pg 68-69
"At the end of September, they visited Cage and Cunningham who had expressed an interest in sharing a place that could be used for concerts and dance recitals. Gracious, unassuming, the two men lived in a large white room, bare except for matting, a marble slab on the floor for a table, and long strips of foam rubber on the walls for seating. The environment reflected their minimalist aesthetic. Cage proposed to stage a piece by Satie (Vexations) that consisted of 840 repetitions of a one-minute composition. He advised them not to rely on newspaper advertising, but to use instead men with placards on tall stilts and others with drums." -pg 72
"She had been introduced to the I Ching by John Cage one night in the San Remo." -pg 84
"Cage, Lou Harrison, Remy Charlip, and Goodman had all tried to persuade Judith and Julian to come to Black Mountain, but at that point they had already rented the Cherry Lane. They had wanted to extend the boundaries of poetic and experimental theatre while at the Cherry Lane, and to some extent, they exceeded; but the really giant step had been taken by Cage. ... Early in July 1952, Cage performed his Sonatas and Interludes in a large tent. Charlip had printed programs on tiny pieces of toilet paper and placed these programs on a table next to the entrance. Also on the table was a large bowl of tobacco. During the concert, the audience was invited to roll cigarettes with this tobacco, using their programs as cigarette papers. ... Near the end of the summer, Cage conceived a theatre piece where each performer was assigned a time bracket determined by chance... Cage read a lecture on Zen, then the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence... [more description of Black Mountain happening] While Goodman's reports of Cage's accomplishments at Black Mountain fascinated Judith, they were also a bit depressing in light of the failure at the Cherry Lane." - pg 87-88
"A week later, they were in Hoboken with Cage, Cunningham, and Paul Goodman watching experimental films to the mournful music of Hudson River foghorns. The evening led to an invitation for Julian to play a bartender in a scene set in a Brooklyn waterfront gay bar, which was shot at the end of February by a drunken Maya Deren." - pg 93
"The only person Judith admitted caring about was John Cage, "mad and unquenchable" with his "hearty, heartless grin." With Julian, she visited Cage in Stony Point in the Hudson Valley. ... Julian thought Cage was the "chain breaker among the shackled who love the sound of their chains." Cage collected wild mushrooms, which Julian interpreted as a tribute to his reliance on chance as much as to his exquisite taste. ... [Paul] Williams wanted to help them find a new location that Cage and Cunningham could share with The Living Theatre." - pg 121
"In the middle of 1957, they saw Cunningham dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to Cage's music. At a party afterward, C&C laughed all night like "two mischievous kids who had succeeded in some tremendous boyish escapade." - pg 125
"[They] visited Cage in Stony Point, where they made strawberry jam and gathered mint, wild watercress, and asparagus for dinner. Feeling a surge of confidence in his own writing, he gave Cage a group of poems to set to music." - pg 128
"With Judith, Julian, Cunningham, and Paul Williams, John Cage drove from "columned loft to aerie garage" in his Volkswagen bus, smiling despite the traffic and the fact that their search was now in its 4th month. Finally, they found an abandoned building, formally a department store on 14th St. and 6th Ave., which Williams declared would be suitable for sharing as a theatre and dance space." - pg 129
"Early in December, with Cage's assistance, [Cunningham] moved some of his backdrops into the space. Cage brought with him a variety of percussion instruments--he owned more than 300 at that time--which he donated to the theatre. Julian thought there was a distance about Cage that prevented intimacy and the fullest communication, but he felt Cage's gift was a real sign of the artistic support that would be crucial to the success of The Living Theatre." - pg 140
"One afternoon, Judith and Julian watched their friend John Cage performing on "I've Got a Secret," an inane television [game show] program. With a Waring blender full of ice cubes in front of him, a vase with roses, a grand piano with 5 radios on it, and a bath full of water, Cage began wildly striking the piano, drinking a soda, lowering a ringing gong into the bath, and pushing the radios off the piano. It was outrageous and absurd, Julian thought." - pg 163
