John Cage's Percussion Collection (July 8, 1940)

Cage's Inventory of Percussion Instruments (July 8, 1940)

Early on known as a percussion composer, John Cage spent time in the period September 1938-Summer 1939 building a percussion instrument collection at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington. Cage was employed at the Cornish School as composer and accompanist for the class Creative Composition and Percussion Instruments and to accompany the classes in modern dance taught by Bonnie Bird. 

It was at the Cornish School that Cage first met Merce Cunningham, a young man seven years his junior who hailed from Centralia, Washington, a rural part of the state, some 80 miles south.  Cunningham had entered the theater program with aspirations of becoming an actor, but quickly took to dance and thus was often in Cage's presence in Bird's modern dance classes. (Cunningham later recalled that Cage was excitedly referred to in whispers by the Cornish students as the "handsome new teacher in the red sweater"). Other faculty members in residence at Cornish were Margaret Jansen and Doris Dennison, both of whom played in Cage's ensemble, known as the Cage Percussion Players. Cunningham occasionally played with them, and Xenia, Cage’s young wife, also a transplant from Los Angeles, was a regular member. Cage referred to them all as his “literate amateur musicians.”

Merce Cunningham, Bonnie Bird, Syvilla Fort, and Dorothy Hermann,
performing "Three Inventories of Casey Jones" at the Cornish School, 1938,
choreography by Bird, music by Ray Green.

Cage's instrument collection was hard come by, and many an appeal was written to potential funders to help it grow. Cage often wrote (see The Selected Letters of John Cage, 2016) that in addition to the instruments he'd amassed, he also had access to Henry Cowell's Rhythmicon, as well as instruments invented by Léon Theremin. He had acquired a thunder screen designed by Harold ("Dr. Snodgrass") Burris-Meyer of the Stevens Institute of Technology, and he had access to instruments then being developed by his father, John Milton Cage, Sr., a well-known (and slightly eccentric) inventor, including one that would demonstrate "the variation of the overtone structure of a tone."

Works scored for percussion instruments alone were scarce at the time, and Cage appealed to a variety of composers to write scores for him. The list of composers Cage reached out to, as well as the composers whose works appeared on his programs, is eclectic: Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives, George Antheil, José Ardevol, Gerald Strang, Johanna Beyer, Edgar Varèse, Franziska Boas, Mildred Couper, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, William Russell, Ray Green, and Amadeo Roldan, among others. Some of these names are well known to us today, while others exist only on the fringe of memory.

The Cage Percussion Players

The Cage Percussion Players became well known at the Cornish School and around Seattle, but the ensemble widened its reach by touring a bit throughout the Northwest, presenting concerts at venues that included the University of Idaho in Moscow (Jan. 8, 1940), the University of Montana in Missoula (Jan. 9, 1940), and Whitman College in Walla Walla (Jan. 11, 1940.  The program in each of these venues consisted of works by Cage (Quartet, 1935), Johanna Beyer, Ray Green, Lou Harrison, and William Russell.  The Cage Percussion Players ended its tour at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (Feb. 14, 1940), where added to the program was the premiere performance of Cage's Second Construction.*


*Third Construction (1941) endures as one of Cage's most popular works, to both players and audiences. I'm reminded of the time I had the great pleasure of performing at an enormously successful Musicircus at the Embassy Theatre in Los Angeles on Sept. 12, 1987, an event produced by Larry Stein, a longtime member of the Repercussion Unit. This was part of the larger John Cage Festival taking place in Los Angeles (Sept. 5–12, 1987) celebrating the composer's 75th birthday. The many weeklong events included “An Evening of Words About, For, and By John Cage,” wherein Cage read his little-known (and still prescient) text “Other People Think” (1927), an essay he'd presented at the Hollywood Bowl 60 years before. I was one of eight performers in Cage's Radio Music, while Cage had been charged with reading "Part IV" from his Empty Words.  We found ourselves on a simultaneous break and we sat together quietly watching the proceedings. All of a sudden virtually everyone began to move hurriedly from one side of the theater to the other, and I quickly looked at my program: Nexus was scheduled to perform Cage's Third Construction in just moments and in exactly the position people were heading.  I commented that this must be one popular work!  Cage simply sighed and then laughed, his eyes twinkling. "Oh, yes," he said. "It's my Bolero."

Laura Kuhn

John Cage Arrangements

While arrangements are not uncommon in musical practice -- the reworking of a composition written for one instrument or a set of instruments for another -- in John Cage's case they are quite unusual. There are really only two works in his lengthy catalog that fit neatly into this category: his Cheap Imitation (1969) for piano, deriving from a 1918 dramatic composition by the French composer Erik Satie entitled Socrate, originally conceived for voice and orchestra, and his Hymns and Variations (1979) for 12 amplified voices, based solely upon two early American hymn tunes by William Billings, Old North and Heath.

While both works are remarkable purely as arrangements, they're also noteworthy for their sheer melodiousness, not an adjective commonly applied to Cage's works of their time. And Cheap Imitation is also unusual for its history, spanning as it does some 30 peregrinating years, which is all beautifully recounted in James Pritchett's liner notes for the Mode Records 1998 CD, "Cage: The Works for Piano 3", capturing the magnificent keyboard artistry of Stephen Drury.

But here's a bit of archival footage of Cage himself playing the work in 1975 in a classroom setting at Broward Community College in Dade County, Florida, shared courtesy of Gustavo Matamoros, Director of Miami's Interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop.



Given the paucity of arrangements in his own catalog, one might wonder what Cage would think of the two works that make use of his works that were featured at last month's John Cage at Bard College Symposium. Of all of the pieces included in the two evening programs (this is a pdf file) at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 30 and 31, these little-known arrangements were clear audience favorites.

The first, Eric Salzman's Five Dances (1996-97), is an arrangement for string quartet of five works by Cage originally composed for prepared piano: Our Spring Will Come (1943), Dream (1948), Totem Ancestor (1943), In a Landscape (1948), and A Room (1943). While long available from C.F. Peters as EP 67725, the work is rarely performed. Here's the third movement from the feisty performance by four of Bard College's finest Conservatory musicians -- Fanghue He, Yue Sun, Leah Gastler, and Laura Hendrickson.



The second, Brian Nozny's Chess Pieces (2008), is an arrangement for percussion quintet of Cage's work by the same name that began life not as a piece of music, but as a painting, one created for the 1944 exhibition "The Imagery of Chess," organized by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp at the Julien Levy Gallery in NYC. As an art work, Chess Pieces is somewhat unremarkable: a 19" x 19" square painting in ink and gouache on Masonite, its 64 squares filled with music notation in Cage's hand in alternating black and white ink, its 22 systems reading sensibly from left to right. Despite its obvious relation to a musical score, albeit sans instrumentation, tempi, or dynamic indications, no documentation exists of its ever having been "played".

In 2005, Chess Pieces went on public display for the first time in more than 60 years in an exhibition entitled "The Imagery of Chess Revisited", the brainchild of its curator, Larry List, at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York. Musing upon its "playability," the pianist Margaret Leng Tan was engaged by the John Cage Trust and C.F. Peters to try her hand at a transcription. Once completed, she promptly recorded it, first to be heard via headphones at the exhibition, and later for release by Mode Records as "Cage: The Works for Piano 7" (2006).

The performance heard here is by Nexus -- Bob Becker, Bill Cahn, Russell Hartenberger, and Garry Kvistad -- with special guest artist Jason Treuting (on loan from So Percussion), who kindly substituted for Robin Engelman.



I don't know about you, but I find nothing quite as sexy as a bunch of middle-aged men romping about on a stage making glorious noises...

And, for added fun, given that this concert took place on Halloween, the performers donned blue jeans for the occasion, a la John Cage, and at their final curtain call, took their bows wearing silly John Cage masks.