![]() Today, Northwestern’s music library is a hub for scholarly research into Cage as well as into experimental performance more broadly. Roberts, then Northwestern’s music librarian, because he was interested in “the problem of where to go to study manuscripts of contemporary music” and he wanted his own materials to be “safer and better kept.” At the time, few institutions took “new music” seriously, but Roberts had begun amassing one of the largest academic collections of it (it may even have been the only such collection in 1973). The archive also contains unprocessed ephemera, such as nine scrapbooks documenting Cage’s childhood and early tours. The other main section, the Correspondence Collection, consists of letters and other materials from throughout Cage’s life (not just those he received but also those he sent, thanks to the carbon-copy Note-o-Grams he wrote on), with the exception of letters related to acquiring the scores for Notations. One of the archive’s two main sections, the Notations Project Collection, includes scores that Cage collected for his book Notations, an ambitious anthology documenting how composers wrote music in the 60s, published 50 years ago by the avant-garde Something Else Press. Credit: Published by permission of the composer Its nontraditional score includes a razor blade taped to the page. ![]() Robert Moran created Sketch for a Tragic One-Act Opera specifically for John Cage’s Notations book project. Researchers can schedule appointments to view specific pieces from the collection in the library’s Special Collections Reading Room. Primarily a research destination for academics, the collection is kept in hundreds of folders and dozens of boxes in Deering Library on the Northwestern campus. The John Cage Collection isn’t housed in a tourist destination like a museum, and in fact it’s a couple miles outside Chicago. That said, not many Chicagoans know this archive exists-and if they do, they’ve probably heard of it only because of its Beatles lyric sheets, which have been a perennial magnet for local media coverage. But the collection at Northwestern is the largest single concentration of Cage materials anywhere in the world-it not only surveys modern musical composition during the 1960s but also humanizes a composer who continues to divide scholars with his challenges to the definition of music. Wesleyan University holds documents related to most of Cage’s books, the New York Public Library holds most of Cage’s music manuscripts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, holds Cage’s materials related to mycology (the study of fungi). Like, ‘Oh, that’s it, that’s the concert in October of ’87.'” “It was really weird to encounter myself in this archival collection. “I was going through a poster collection, and I found a poster for the concert I performed in,” MacAyeal says. Since 2015 he’s served as curator of Northwestern University’s music library, and as part of the job he manages the university’s John Cage Collection, which the composer established with an initial gift in 1976 and added to repeatedly until his death in 1992. MacAyeal certainly hasn’t gotten away from Cage. “Whether you agree with him or not, you can’t not respond to him in one way or another.” “It’s hard to get away from Cage, as a composer or anybody that’s interested in new music since 1945,” he says. ![]() Thus MacAyeal’s fascination with Cage began. So he got MacAyeal involved to read excerpts from texts such as Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” chosen through chance operations. A composer as playful as he was profound, Cage had stipulated that the piece be performed by 12 “preferably American men who have become Canadian citizens,” but Brooks just needed willing musicians. In 1987, UIUC composition professor William Brooks, who’d participated in the HPSCHD premiere, staged a performance of Cage’s 1976 piece Lecture on the Weather, which incorporates words and drawings by Henry David Thoreau and was inspired in part by haiku form. ![]() He’d taught and researched at UIUC two decades before, from 1967 until ’69, spending most of his time cocreating a mammoth computer-music piece called HPSCHD that premiered in May 1969.Ĭage’s music didn’t leave the university when he did, of course. Arguably America’s most influential experimental composer, Cage is famous for his 1952 “silent piece” 4’33”, and in the 1950s and ’60s he’d pushed the envelope musically by composing works incorporating silence, indeterminacy, and electronics. Greg MacAyeal first encountered John Cage while studying music composition in the late 80s as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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