Desire Paths: John Cage's Transatlantic Crossing

Abstract

John Cage has had a long and remarkably wide influence in the United Kingdom. Not only was the run-up to his centenary year filled with music and art events, including a major touring exhibition of his visual art curated by British artist Jeremy Millar, but his work has also been adopted by popular culture. In 2010, for instance, a collective of pop musicians recorded his 4’ 33” as a Christmas single and strove to have it head the music charts. In the same year, on the BBC’s radio program Desert Island Discs, poet Ian McMillan chose 4’ 33” as the one record he would want to take to a desert island.1 Within British culture Cage remains a radical touchstone—an intriguing, even mysterious, figure: he was, after all, an American. Talking about what Cage has meant to him, again on BBC radio in the series Great Lives, in 2007, the British-born and American-raised artist Michael Craig Martin said of him, “when someone influences you, it is because they say something that in your heart is familiar to you. They are hitting on something you already feel.” The history of that something, and of Cage’s presence in Britain, is the subject of this. In it I pick up traces of some long standing, and in some cases, long forgotten, transatlantic conversations about art, education, and culture that reveal something about the times and circles through which Cage moved, and which connect British and American counter-cultural histories.