Second visit to John Cage, July 11 1989, 3PM to 5PM

Early in this visit I ask if the catalogue of the etchings 1978-82 is still available. Cage says he doesn't have any more copies, but I could always write to the Crown Point Press for one.

Then he says that I can have the catalogue of his recent exhibition of watercolours.

He goes to fetch this. When he comes back he has a copy of X writings 79-82, a programme of last years summer series at the sculpture garden in the Museum of Modern Art written by Paul Zukofsky, a copy of Themes and Variations, and the catalogue. He gives me all this, and signs X.

We have started by enthusing over Thoreau's 'Walden', picking

out special passages, sharing the exhilaration of the ending. Cage says that it's exhilarating because it's so affirmative of life.

I ask him about the intriguing stranger, the unidentified philosopher who visits Thoreau on page 180 of the Signet edition - who is he?

Cage doesn't know; he agrees that this near metaphysical character is intriguing.

'If you look in a book about Thoreau you may find the information.'

But he says he is in no hurry to find out for himself.

Cage offers to lend me his copy of the journal, bound in two massive volumes.

'If you can carry it and you want to borrow it, it'll give you a taste, you won't be able to read it all.'

Cage goes on to talk about other figures he associates with the spirit of Thoreau. Emma Goldman is one, the anarchist alive when Cage was young. She wrote a book called 'Living My Life', and her name was synonymous with the Devil's.

Cage's interest in Thoreau has led to some interesting correspondence; one writer links Thoreau with Kant.

'Laughter and Music are linked by the fact that they do not mean anything: they have no constant base, they are continually in flux.'

A letter of June 23 informs Cage that he has been awarded the 1989 Kyoto Prize in Creative Arts and Moral Sciences

He's going to fly to Japan to receive it.

He's drafting a set of replies to fifteen questions from the Inamori Foundation. He finishes off the last one during our Thoreau conversation and is greatly amused.

He tells me he's spent the day since ten waiting for his landlord to come. He doesn't mind the waiting, it's just inconvenient because he can't go to the store or anything.

The landlord wants to alter the house's use, he wants Cage and Cunningham to move away, he would even pay them to do so.

'I'm very happy here,' says Cage.

Cage thinks that the landlord is unlikely to succeed because it's illegal to evict senior citizens and it's illegal to raise their rent.

Cage says the Huddersfield festival will include a Roaratorio. But Merce won't be there, it's too bad, they couldn't fix a date.

'I think it's important to be able to adapt,' says Cage.

I show him my new piece, SoHo Song, and he is interested. He says that it should work.

'You'11 have to get it performed,' he says,'then you'11 find out where you are going. '

Cage says I should meet James Tenney, a composer who works in Toronto. He writes harmony that grows imperceptibly from auditorium and tuning sound.

'I've always been against harmony,' says Cage,'but when I heard. that I called him up to say if that's harmony then I'm all for it!'

Cage shows me 'Seven' of May 1988, which consists of seven parts for instruments and no score.

The piece is twenty minutes long, divided into time brackets of about fifteen seconds each. One of the time brackets in every part is fixed, the others are flexible with respect to beginning and end.

Bamboo rods are among the frictional means to sound the percussion.

Clarinet and flute 'brush' imperceptibly into sound in the manner of a pen moving on oriental paper, where the ink is the sound - an exceptionally beautiful metaphor.

Unconventional fingering is asked for, so the timbre and intonation will be strange and will fluctuate.

'And that is the problem of anarchy, how to get things to happen without forcing them.'

I ask if there is a book that was of especial importance to him in the time immediately preceding the composition of the String Quartet of 1950.

Cage thinks carefully, and then tells me of Ananda K Coomaraswamy, who was half Irish and half Indian. This was profoundly important to Cage because he was a· Westerner reaching out to the Orient for ideas on Music and religious practice.

'Coomaraswamy wrote a magnificent volume called the Transformation of Nature into Art. He was the living proof that the old wives' tale that orient and occident could never be brought together was wrong.'