Passenger list for the paquebot Cuba, June 24, 1930.
A pivotal event in John Cage’s development was his trip to Europe in 1930 and 1931. This took place after he dropped out of Pomona College, where he had studied for two years. The journey is said to have lasted for up to eighteen months, from the summer of 1930 to the end of 1931, and included stops in France, Italy, Germany, North Africa, and Spain. Mark Katz, in his revelatory 2004 book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, notes that Cage had apparently attended a concert of “gramophone music” at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik’s Neue Musik Berlin 1930 festival, on June 18 of that year. [1] This program included Hindemith’s Trickaufnahmen and Ernst Toch’s suite Gesprochene Musik, for sped-up pre-recorded voices, which yielded the famous Geographical Fugue. The idea of a teen-aged Cage receiving inspiration from the ferment of interwar Berlin is irresistible, and I included it in my 2007 book The Rest Is Noise.
Alas, it didn’t happen. In the course of researching Cage’s early years in Los Angeles, I’ve uncovered a host of errors and omissions in the extant biographical record. In this post, I’ll concentrate on the European trip, leaving other discoveries for a later, longer piece. I had become suspicious of the claim that Cage was in Berlin in June 1930 because of a comment that appears in his Pomona school record: “June 1930. Does not plan to return. Going to travel in Europe.” This suggests that Cage did not depart until that month, and all indications are that his first stop was Paris. Having read Thomas Hines’s revelatory 1992 interview with Cage [2], in which the composer recalled embarking at Houston on a boat bound for Le Havre, I went in search of passenger lists, and obtained via eBay the Liste des Passagers scanned at the top of this post. Monsieur John Milton Cage is listed among tourist passengers aboard the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique steamer Cuba, which sailed from Houston on June 24, 1930. Given the long sailing times, Cage would not have arrived in France until late July. [3]
Cage, who like many artists was not the most reliable narrator of his life, seems to have been responsible for the confusion. Katz cited as his source a Lawrence Weschler interview with Cage, reported in Weschler’s wonderful Atlantic article “My Grandfather’s Last Tale,” from 1996. Weschler is indeed Toch’s grandson, and an authority on the great German-speaking emigration to Los Angeles, of which Toch was part. After mentioning that 1930 concert, Weschler writes: “A young American in the audience, John Cage, was particularly captivated, or so he told me years later, when I met him while researching an article about his and Ernst’s dear friend the musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky. ‘Ah, yes,’ Cage said, that marvelously sly twinkle in his eye. ‘Toch — boy, was he onto some good stuff back there in Berlin. And then he went and squandered it all on more string quartets!’” [4] In another essay, Weschler reports a family story about Cage having come to Toch’s door in Pacific Palisades to inquire about the “composer of the Geographical Fugue” and to ask permission to publish of the piece in Henry Cowell’s New Music Edition. Weschler dates this encounter to about 1935.
A document in the Henry Cowell papers at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts gives a different picture of this Cage-Toch encounter. In a letter dated October 28, 1940, Cage tells Cowell that he recently visited Toch, as part of his efforts to win interest in a Center for Experimental Music. (In this period he also approached Leopold Stokowski and Diego Rivera; hoped-for meetings with Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, and Edsel Ford apparently did not come about.) He had made recordings of his percussion instruments and was playing them for various notables. He writes: “I just received an interesting score from Toch, whom I saw, and who heard the records I have. His score is for speech to be recorded 9 times as fast as it is performed. A ‘Geographical Fugue’ is particularly interesting.” Contrary to the Toch family story, this letter makes it sound as though Cage had not known about the Geographical Fugue before he went to see Toch — although it’s not out of the question that he had earlier learned of the piece or possibly even heard a repeat performance in Germany. [5] In any case, Cage now begins mentioning the work in letters and writings: in a December 1940 letter to Peter Yates; in another letter to Cowell in January 1941 (pairing his own Imaginary Landscape No. 1 with Toch’s Fugue under the rubric of “music impossible without records”); and in a Modern Music column from 1942, dismissively reviewing Toch’s Pinocchio overture (“I think we could get along without his popularities and music for films long enough to hear his Fuge aus der Geographie, written for speech nine times as fast as spoken”). [6]
Eventually, Cage helped to put together an English-language version of the Fugue and approached Toch about having it published in New Music Edition — in 1950, not in 1935, as some commentators claim. [7] Toch granted permission in a letter to Frank Wigglesworth dated June 27, 1950. [8] The Fugue was then performed live at a New Music Society concert at Columbia on May 10, 1951, with Marianne Weltman, Sydney Cowell, Frank Wigglesworth, and Cage himself delivering the spoken parts. Vladimir Ussachevsky was on hand to record the performance and play it back at nine times the original speed. The program also featured Virgil Thomson’s Capitals, Capitals, Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s Thomsoniana, Lou Harrison’s Canticle No. 3, and the world première of Cage’s own Imaginary Landscape No. 4, the legendary piece for twelve radios. [9] In the following years, the Fugue became a popular chestnut among college choruses, albeit without any drastic electronic acceleration.
Back t0 the early 1930s: Cage probably made it to Berlin sometime in 1931, although I have found no clear evidence to that effect. He was traveling in the company of Donald Sample, a Pennsylvania native and 1925 Harvard graduate who had been living in New York. The two had met on the island of Capri and begun a relationship. Sample, having specialized in literature in college, had turned toward art and was taking a particular interest in the Bauhaus. I’ve seen suggestions that Cage and Sample together visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, but when I attempted to confirm this by contacting the Bauhaus archive — records of visitors were kept at the time — an archivist advised me that Cage and Sample’s names do not appear in the extant records. I’ve discovered quite a bit more about Sample and am preparing a short account of his life. The photo above comes from his Harvard yearbook.
More confusion exists around the timing of Cage’s return. Kenneth Silverman, in his biography Begin Again, says that Cage and Sample came back to the United States “late in 1931”; David Revill, in The Roaring Silence, says “fall of 1931.” [10] Paul van Emmerik’s invaluable Cage Compendium website indicates that Cage was on the island of Majorca in the summer of 1931, where he composed his first, untitled work (between Aug. 8 and Sept. 13, to be precise). But an immigration list for the SS Florida, sailing from Havana to Key West, Florida, on July 1, 1931, has Cage and Sample’s names, together with their birthdates. My guess is that they sailed together on a CGT boat from Le Havre to Havana in early June, although my search for a corresponding passenger list has come up short.
NOTES
[1] Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Captured Music (University of California Press, 2004), p. 113.
[2] Thomas Hines, Interview with John Cage, May 21 and 23, 1992, transcript at Getty Research Institute, Special Collections.
[3] The Liste des Passagers does not give an arrival date, but a schedule for return voyages suggests that the trip would have taken a full month, with stops in New Orleans and Havana. The Cuba was requisitioned as an Allied troop ship during WWII and was torpedoed by a U-Boat in April 1945, though with minimal loss of life.
[4] Lawrence Weschler, “My Grandfather’s Last Tale,” The Atlantic, Dec. 1996. Weschler’s classic two-part New Yorker Profile of Slonimsky, “Boy Wonder,” Nov. 17 and 24, 1986, is reprinted in his collection Shapinsky’s Karma, Bogg’s Bills And Other True-Life Tales (North Point Press, 1988).
[5] Diane Jezic, The Musical Migration and Ernst Toch (Iowa State UP, 1989), p. 60, writes that the Fugue “was performed all over Germany by a choral group from the Berlin Hochschule.”
[6] See John Cage and Peter Yates, Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics, ed. Martin Iddon (Cambridge UP, 2020), p. 29; John Cage to Henry Cowell, Jan. 8, 1941, Cowell Papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Cage, “South Winds in Chicago,” Modern Music 19:4 (May–June 1942), reprinted in John Cage: An Anthology, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Da Capo Press, 1991), p. 67.
[7] See, for example, Carmel Raz, “The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s Gesprochene Musik,” and Christopher Raines, “Preface to Gesprochene Musik, 1. ‘O–a’ and 2. ‘Ta–tam,’”, both in Current Musicology 97 (Spring 2014), pp. 37, 63.
[8] See New Music Society papers, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I have found no correspondence with Cage in the Toch Papers at UCLA.
[9] Christian Wolff and David Patterson, “Cage and Beyond: An Annotated Interview with Christian Wolff,” Perspectives of New Music 32:2 (1994), p. 85.
[10] Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Northwestern UP, 2010), p. 10; David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life (Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 37.