Composing Chess
Paul B. Franklin and Lowell Cross

Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.
Siegbert Tarrasch

The invitation card announcing The Imagery of Chess exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery promised visitors an array of "paintings, sculpture, newly designed chessmen, music and miscellany." The assortment of chess sets and chess-related artworks on view was, according to one critic, both "weird and wonderful."1 In the handful of press reviews following the opening, however, the visual artists in the show received the lion's share of publicity. Only two articles even mentioned, and only in passing, that music also figured in the exhibition.2 And neither bothered to identify the two musical selections on display or to name Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994) and John Cage (1912-1992) as their creators. Each composer, in fact, produced a work specifically for the occasion. Rieti's Chess Serenade (1944) and Cage's Chess Pieces (1944) underscore the relationship between the acoustical in music and the abstract mechanics of chess, suggesting the symbolic union of Apollo and Caissa. In so doing, they exemplify what Marcel Duchamp, co-organizer of the exhibition, eloquently described as chess's non-retinal beauty, cerebral splendor rooted in "one's gray matter" where the pieces of the game, like musical notes, "aren't pretty in themselves" but become so when played.3
Chess Serenade and Chess Pieces are markedly distinct compositions, in concept and content, epitomizing the differences between their composers. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian Jewish parents, Vittorio Rieti came of age in Paris in the 1920s, where he counted fellow composers Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Sauguet among his intimates. He was celebrated for his ballet compositions, particularly Barabau (1925) and Le Bal (1929), commissioned by Diaghilev and choreographed by Balanchine, as well as The Night Shadow (1941, premiered 1946), re-orchestrated themes from Bellini's operas with choreography by Balanchine and sets and costumes by Dorothea Tanning. In the course of his eighty-year career, Rieti produced a vast body of work notable for its elegance, technical mastery, urbane wit, lack of pretense, and consistent neo-classical style. In 1973, he admitted: "I maintain the same esthetic assumptions I have always had. I have kept evolving in the sense that one keeps on perfecting the same ground."4
The exact details surrounding Rieti's involvement in The Imagery of Chess exhibition remain a mystery. In the summer of 1940, he fled war-torn Europe for New York.5 He, his wife, Elsie, and son, Fabio, quickly became part of the expatriate Jewish and European community in America's cultural capital. Max Ernst, a close family friend, probably invited Rieti to contribute to the show. "We had a friendly relationship," the composer later confided.6 The Rietis were a "bridge and chess family," Fabio recalls, and his father, a perfectly competent player, taught him the game.7
Chess Serenade consists of a single sheet of musical notation in Rieti's hand.8 The subtitle inscribed at the top of the page reveals its subject: "The KNIGHT serenading the QUEEN on top of the CASTLE, while the KING confers with the BISHOP on the subject of the PAWNS." In this clever formulation, Rieti deftly managed to mention the six types of pieces comprising the game, highlighting each with capitals of blood-red ink, a common hue for chess pieces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.9 The rest of the manuscript is in black ink. Dedicated to Levy, Chess Serenade remained in the dealer's collection his entire life, which may explain how it eluded Franco Carlo Ricci in his biography of the composer.10
	Except for Rieti's inclusion of chess nomenclature in the subtitle to Chess Serenade, little else in the piece refers directly to the game. For example, nothing in the score's structure evokes the numerology of chess. Composed for single piano, Chess Serenade displays a distinct serenade tune in six-bar phrases in the right hand, initially in D minor. Its restatement at the end of the work closes in D major, possibly implying checkmate. (The employment of a raised, or major, third-here, F sharp-in the ultimate chord in an otherwise minor-mode composition is known as a Picardy third.) Counterbalancing the legato, syncopated tune of the right hand, the nervous, staccato, secco accompaniment in the left hand extends throughout the entire thirty-six measures of the piece. Chess Serenade is in 5/8 meter (with the exception of one 2/8 bar in the nineteenth measure), relatively rare in musical composition. Rieti imbued the work with an underlying wry humor, not only with his descriptive subtitle, but also through the stark contrast he established between the smooth serenade tune in the treble clef and the jerky, offbeat, percussive writing in the bass clef. Extremely short, the score exemplifies his neo-classical style.
	In Chess Serenade, Rieti personified the pieces of the game, concocting a theatrical tale of power, seduction, and intrigue like that in every chess match. We are led to believe that the King conspires with the Bishop against the Pawns. Distracted, he is oblivious to his Queen's amorous entrapment by the Knight who exercises his less than chivalric wiles out of earshot atop the castle. While the closing Picardy third conveys uplifting finality, a sentiment the winner of any chess game experiences, the identities of the victor and the vanquished remain uncertain. The score moreover reveals no hint of violence or war, the scheming King's and Bishop's apparent objective and one of chess's chief metaphors. Conversely the Knight's wooing of the Queen evidences romance, an opposing allegory of the game and an especially powerful one during the fractious early 1940s. Rieti's decision to ally chess and love hearkens back to medieval and early Renaissance Europe when the game played a pivotal role in courtship rituals of the upper classes, the chessboard signifying an erotic arena of amorous engagement and sexual conquest.11 In this context, the crimson coloring in the subtitle of Chess Serenade may symbolize the heat of desire as much as the bloodshed of combat, both predicated on passions whether inflamed or smoldering. Furthermore, a serenade is a love song, the Latin root of which, serenus, signifies "serene." Rieti tempered the disjointed, left-hand accompaniment at the beginning by instructing it be played piano (softly). Mezzo forte (moderately loud), the loudest indication, comes in the fifth system, and the piece ends pianissimo (very softly). Chess Serenade's calm and intimacy evokes tranquillity and may even imply refuge from war, something Rieti and his immediate family achieved when they escaped to New York. His mother, aunt, and uncle, however, were less fortunate; all three were sent to Auschwitz in 1943 and perished there.12 Rieti only received news of their deportation around November 1944, weeks before the opening of The Imagery of Chess.13 Might Chess Serenade also be understood as a heartfelt if wordless love song to his lost relatives? Behind its gaiety and sophistication "hides a good deal of melancholy," as the Italian composer Alfredo Casella noted in reference to his longtime friend's entire oeuvre.14
	Chess Serenade was first publicly performed at the Detroit Institute of Arts on 30 November 1945, as part of a longer work of the same title that Rieti completed the previous January.15 He wrote the second version, however, as a three-part suite for two pianos.16 During the 1940s, Rieti composed several similar works for duo pianos, the most well known being Second Avenue Waltzes (1942).17 It remains unclear whether he originally conceived Chess Serenade as a short piece for one piano and subsequently developed into a full-length two-piano arrangement, or vice versa. In any event, true to his belief in "perfecting the same ground," Rieti recycled the final movement of the latter version in three subsequent works, the ballet Pasticcio (1956), the two piano piece New Waltzes (1957), and the ballet-pastiche Capers (1963).
	Unlike Rieti, Cage was no foreign national. "My family's roots are completely American," he confided.18 Born of Protestant stock in Los Angeles, Cage studied with Arnold Schoenberg in the mid-1930s. The latter's "democratic" twelve-tone scale offered a model for composing that laid the foundation for his future work, including Chess Pieces. "What was so thrilling about the notion of twelve-tone music was that those twelve tones were all equally important....It gave a principle that one could relate over into one's life and accept, whereas the notion of neo-classicism one could not accept and put over into one's life."19 Cage's exploration of silence-ambient sounds instead of traditional notes-in works like 4'33" (1952) brought him critical acclaim, and sometimes derision. Beginning in the early 1950s, he employed chance operations and new technology in composing in order to free himself of his likes and dislikes. Relentlessly innovative, Cage became a major force in the postwar American avant-garde. As Schoenberg confessed: "he's not a composer, but he's an inventor-of genius."20
	Cage remembered that Levy asked him to participate in the The Imagery of Chess exhibition. The two had met previously when the composer purchased artwork from the gallery.21 Levy must have known that the composer had dabbled in painting in the 1930s, forsaking it for music when he realized that people responded more enthusiastically to his scores than to his canvases.22 Cage also was acquainted with the show's other two organizers; he met Ernst in Chicago in late 1941 or early 1942 and Duchamp in New York in the summer of 1942.23 However, he was not an active chess player in these years. Later, in the early 1960s, Duchamp helped him perfect his game with private lessons and even offered him a signed copy of Opposition and Sister Squares Are Reconciled, his and Vitaly Halberstadt's 1932 treatise on endgames.24
	Chess Pieces consists of a musical composition for piano transcribed in alternating blocks of black and white ink defining the squares of a chessboard, the ground of which is greenish-blue gouache on Masonite(tm). While the visual effects of the artwork are striking, Cage's straightforward score, musically speaking, is unremarkable. It encompasses twenty-two movements of twelve measures each, set forth in traditional piano notation along two horizontally parallel staves, the upper for the right hand and the lower for the left. The painting's current matting covers its edges, concealing the double bars that most certainly exist at the end of each movement along the right side. Clef signs (sometimes partially veiled) and 2/2 time signatures, however, are patently visible down the left side. Cage scholar Richard Kostelanetz opines: "there is no notational continuity from square to square in any direction...suggesting that the boxes can be read (or played) in any order," going on to proffer that "no musician would know in which direction to read this collection of staves, because no square is intrinsically superior to any other."25 Even if the geometric uniformity of Chess Pieces and the equal distribution of its notes across the work's surface belie a central focus, there is nonetheless a precise order to Cage's composition. First and foremost, the clef signs and the 2/2 time signatures orient the viewer, signaling the beginning of each movement. No single square, moreover, is a musical element unto itself; they all include approximately two measures from about three different movements, certain staves straddling two squares. Given such obvious clues, anyone capable of reading music "would know in which direction to read this collection of staves."
The draft manuscript for Chess Pieces, dated 1943, provides further insight into its structure.26 For reasons that remain obscure, the order of the twenty-two movements in the manuscript differs from that in the artwork. For instance, the first eight passages in the former correspond to double staves 12-19 in the latter. The ninth, tenth, and nineteenth passages in the manuscript match the second, first, and eighth double staves, respectively, while passages 11-15, 16-18, and 20-22 coincide with double staves 3-7, 9-11, and 20-22. The music in the manuscript and the painting are essentially the same, both being in 2/2 meter (alla breve). However, Cage wrote the draft in a hasty, sketchy manner, often leaving the bass (left hand) to be filled in later. No single key or modality unites the twenty-two passages, but end notes for certain movements (double staves 15-19) are indicated in the manuscript ("on e," "on d," "on b"). Lacking key signatures or accidentals (sharps and flats), one is left to interpret Cage's inscriptions as indications of musical modes such as those in Gregorian chants ("church modes"). If performed on a keyboard instrument, they are played only on the white keys without sharps or flats (black keys). Such modes are "minor" to our twenty-first-century ears.
Even though neither the structure nor the mechanics of Cage's score refer specifically to chess, in choosing Chess Pieces as his title, he punningly associated its twenty-two movements (pieces) with the pieces of the game. The visual prominence of the notes in the painting also suggests a correlation between the shorthand language of musical notation and that of chess notation. The sixty-four-square chessboard format of the artwork reiterates these ideas. And sixty-four became sacrosanct for Cage in the early 1950s, when he embraced chance operations derived from the sixty-four symbolic hexagrams found in the ancient Chinese I Ching as his principal method of composing. He later identified the rigor of chess as "a balance with my use of chance operations."27 In addition to the checkerboard pattern of Chess Pieces, the black and white inks Cage used for his musical notations evoke the common colors of the game's two opposing armies, not to mention the palette of the piano keyboard on which they were meant to be played. This alternating grid-like color scheme also calls to mind Cubist-inspired "dazzle" camouflage developed during World War I and redeployed in World War II to disguise naval vessels. Repeating geometric schemes of highly contrasting tonal values, often black and white, applied by artists known as "camoufleurs" created dramatic optical illusions that prevented ships from being targeted.28 In Chess Pieces, the staves and musical notes function similarly, veiling the chessboard beneath their shimmering warp and woof. Cage may have been familiar with dazzle camouflage thanks to his father, an inventor who designed a gasoline submarine just before World War I and during World War II researched and developed, with his son's assistance, a radar-like system to assist pilots see through fog. The younger Cage's contribution to the war effort exempted him from the draft.29 An avowed pacifist and anarchist in his later years, he condemned the conflict as "perfectly hideous."30
Unlike the playable chess sets designed for The Imagery of Chess by Calder, Noguchi, Man Ray, and others, Chess Pieces was hung on the wall as a painting. Max Ernst's painted board for his Strategic Value set was displayed correspondingly, framed and under glass.31 Duchamp, Cage's aesthetic idol, offered precedents for this strategy of reorienting the chessboard from its customary horizontal position to the vertical, conjuring the artistic from the functional. To create several of his early readymades, for instance, he simply chose everyday industrial objects and rotated them from their traditional positions. For Bicycle Wheel (1913), he turned a fork and rim 180 degrees and mounted them on a stool. The urinal that became Fountain (1917) and the coat rack that became TrŽbuchet (1917)-a French chess term meaning "trap"-were shifted ninety degrees and laid on their backs. Duchamp utilized the same tactic in the 1930s, when he fabricated a series of chessboards and hung them on a wall in his rue Larrey studio in Paris. He punctured the accompanying pieces, colored-paper cutouts pasted on cardboard disks, with holes so they could be affixed to the boards with pins or pegs. Duchamp's own contribution to The Imagery of Chess, a pocket chess set (1943-44), could be held more or less vertically in one's hand; a pin added to each square prevented the pieces from falling. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that Jacques Villon, Duchamp's older brother and an avid chess player, explored a comparable sort of chessboard reorientation in his Cubist canvas Jeu (1919) in which he painted the top of a rectangular game table tipped ninety degrees upward, offering a bird's-eye view of the circular board sitting on it. Finally, Cage's decision to apply his delicate weave of musical notations across the surface of Chess Pieces owes something to the work of Mark Tobey, the American painter, amateur pianist, and composer whom he met in Seattle in 1938. Three years earlier, in the wake of discovering Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, Tobey fashioned numerous small-scale paintings of elaborate networks of thin interwoven strokes of white pigment. The all-over effect of these abstract "white writing" canvases, as they were dubbed, closely resembles that of Chess Pieces. "All of my work is a response to Mark Tobey," Cage professed.32
	To our knowledge, the music for Chess Pieces has never been publicly performed, published, or recorded. Cage did not even include it in lists of his works.33 Scholars, therefore, rarely cite either the score or the painting as part of his oeuvre. The composer retained possession of the draft manuscript all his life, and the artwork entered a private collection soon after it was first exhibited, both of which may account for its omission from the literature. Alfred and Rue Shaw of Chicago purchased Chess Pieces from Levy on 20 March 1945 for $100.34 Rue Winterbotham Shaw (1905-1979) was an early supporter and friend of Cage's; he dedicated Amores (1943), two prepared-piano solos and two percussion trios, to her.35 Soon after being elected president of the Arts Club of Chicago in November 1940, she invited Cage to perform there.36 He agreed, and on 1 March 1942 Imaginary Landscape No. 3 premiered, a percussion work inspired by World War II. "When the Second World War came along," Cage revealed, "I talked to myself, what do I think of the Second World War? Well, I think it's lousy. So I wrote a piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 3, which is perfectly hideous. What I meant by that is that the Second World War is perfectly hideous."37 The provocative titles Cage chose for several contemporary works-Credo in Us (1942), In the Name of the Holocaust (1942), The Perilous Night (1944)-resonate with the collective hardships and tragedies of wartime, even while they emanated from his personal struggles on the home front, principally the dissolution of his marriage and his emerging gayness. "I was disturbed both in my private life and in my public life as a composer," he declared.38 With the simplicity of its score and unhurried meter portending quiet as well as its individual notes camouflaging the board cum battlefield on which the game's two rival armies face off, perhaps Chess Pieces was the composer's private (silent?) protest against both World War II and chess's defining martial metaphor. "I could not accept the academic idea that the purpose of music was communication," Cage realized, "because I noticed that when I conscientiously wrote something sad, people and critics were often apt to laugh....The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind."39
	In a speech delivered at the 1952 New York State Chess Association convention, Duchamp voiced a formidable proclamation regarding art, chess, and the art of chess. "From my close contact with artists and chess players," he announced, "I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."40 Through their contributions to The Imagery of Chess exhibition, Vittorio Rieti and John Cage also demonstrated that certain composers are artists, certain chess players are composers, and the game itself a kind of musical composition, a conclusion Duchamp also reached in his lecture: "Objectively a game of chess looks very much like a pen-and-ink drawing, with the difference, however, that the chess player paints with black and white forms already prepared instead of inventing forms as does the artist. The design thus formed on the chessboard has apparently no visual aesthetic value and is more like a score of music which can be played again and again."41 To play chess, then, is to compose music, and vice versa.

1 Kenneth Harkness, "Chessmen of Tomorrow," Chess Review, vol. 13, no. 1 (January 1945): p. 5.
2 See "Chess Fashions," Town and Country, vol. 100, no. 4269 (February 1945): p. 116; and J. G. [Josephine Gibbs], "Presenting the 'Imagery of Chess,'" Art Digest, vol. 19, no. 6 (15 December 1944): p. 116.
3 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 18-19. Duchamp was not especially fond of music. He informed Otto Hahn ("Passport No. G255300," trans. Andrew Rabeneck, Art and Artists, vol. 1, no. 4 [July 1966], pp. 7-8): "I'm not anti-music. But I don't get on with the 'cat-gut' side of it. You see, music is gut against gut: the intestines respond to the cat gut of the violin. There's a sort of intense sensory lament, of sadness and joy, which corresponds to retinal painting, which I can't understand. For me music isn't a superior expression of the individual."
4 Cited in "Vittorio Rieti, Prolific Composer In Neo-Classical Style, Dies at 96," New York Times, 21 February 1994, p. D8.
5 Franco Carlo Ricci, Vittorio Rieti (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987), pp. 94 and 403 n. 13.
6 Ricci, p. 257. According to Fabio Rieti (interview with Paul B. Franklin, Paris, 26 October 2004), his parents were never on personal terms with Duchamp; he did not belong to their "refugee circle."
7 Fabio Rieti, interview. Rieti's chess-playing abilities also account for his last-minute decision to participate in the tournament of seven simultaneous chess games organized and refereed by Duchamp at the Julien Levy Gallery in early January 1945 during the run of the exhibition. In surviving photographs of the event, the composer sits next to Tanning and near Ernst, leaning confidently over his chessboard as he waits his turn against the world champion of blindfolded chess, George Koltanowski.
8 Fabio Rieti has confirmed that the handwriting is that of his father.
9 See the numerous sets with red pieces illustrated in Colleen Schafroth, The Art of Chess (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
10 Ricci also failed to mention Rieti's participation in The Imagery of Chess.
11 On this history, see Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen: A History (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 124-47.
12 Suzannah Lessard, "Profiles (Vittorio Rieti): A Kind of Dancer," The New Yorker, vol. 64, no. 47 (9 January 1989): p. 40; and Ricci, pp. 358 and 412.
13 See Rieti's letter of 17 November 1944 to Darius Milhaud, reproduced in Ricci, pp. 357-58.
14 Cited in "Vittorio Rieti," p. D8.
15 Ricci, p. 484.
16 Vittorio Rieti, Chess Serenade: Suite for Two Pianos (New York: Associated Music Publishers, 1945).
17 The repertoire of the virtuoso piano duo Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale often included Rieti's two-piano compositions, some of which they commissioned. In their debut concert at the New School for Social Research, New York, in 1944, they performed John Cage's A Book of Music (1944) and the first version of Three Dances (final version completed in 1945), two works for prepared piano written for them by the composer.
18 John Cage, Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), p. 1.
19 Ibid., p. 38.
20 Ibid., p. 6.
21 Paul Cummings, interview with John Cage, New York, 2 May 1974, http://archivesofamericanart.si.edu/oralhist/cage74.htm.
22 Cage, p. 4. 
23 David Revill, The Roaring Silence: John Cage, A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), p. 78; and Cage, p. 11.
24 Cage, pp. 18 and 179. In 1974, Cage informed Cummings: "I play better now, although I still don't play very well. But I play well enough now that he [Duchamp] would be pleased."
25 Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (Ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1996), pp. 35 and 105-06. Kostelanetz erroneously describes Chess Pieces as consisting of "black" squares against "a continuous gray background," making one doubt if he had ever seen the original or a color reproduction. Despite his 1996 declaration that "the only reproduction known to me appears in my documentary monograph John Cage [1970, 1991]" (p. 105), Chess Pieces was published in black-and-white in the exhibition catalogue Marcel Duchamp, ed. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), p. 164, as well as in Jean-Yves Bosseur, John Cage: suivi d'entretiens avec Daniel Caux et Jean-Yves Bosseur (Paris: Minerve, 1993), p. 23. It also appeared in color in the exhibition catalogue Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform, ed. Richard Francis (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996), p. 93.
26 Chess Pieces, fourteen unnumbered pages, including cover, John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, call numbers JPB 94-24, folder 99 (original) and JPB 95-3, folder 109 (public service copy). No one, to our knowledge, has ever systematically compared Cage's draft manuscript for Chess Pieces to his painting of the same title. Our thanks to Laura Kuhn, director of The John Cage Trust, for enabling us to obtain a copy of the former.
27 Cage, p. 31.
28 Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (Dysart, IA: Bobolink Books, 2002), pp. 59-107.
29 Cage, pp. 1 and 10; and Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 96.
30 Cage, p. 59.
31 In a photograph by Fernand Fonssagrives accompanying Town and Country's spread "Chess Fashions" (p. 116), a female model poses in front of what the caption identified as "a painted chessboard designed by Max Ernst" mounted on or leaning against the wall.
32 Cage, p. 187. On the crosscurrents between Tobey's and Cage's work, see Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, ed. Wulf Herwogenrath and Andreas Kreul (Tacoma, WA: Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, 2002).
33 Cage, for instance, left Chess Pieces out of the annotated catalogue of his musical compositions prepared for his publisher. See Cage, John Cage (New York: Henmar Press and C. F. Peters, 1962).
34 Julien Levy, Gallery sales and inventory ledger, March 1945, p. 22, Estate of Jean Farley Levy and the Julien Levy Archive, Julien Levy Foundation, New Town, Connecticut. On 1 or 2 March 1945, Levy jotted Alfred Shaw's name in his ledger (p. 21) as the buyer of Cage's "chess board" but effaced it soon thereafter only to re-enter it on 20 March. Perhaps the Shaws hesitated in or delayed their purchase for some unknown reason. We thank Marie Difilippantonio, archivist of the Levy Foundation, for providing us with copies of the relevant pages from Levy's ledger.
35 The dedication inscribed on the manuscript (John Cage Music Manuscript Collection, Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, call numbers JPB 94-24, folder 96 [original] and JPB 95-3, folder 105 [public service copy]) reads: "AMORES / to Rue Shaw / John Cage / New York City, January February 1943."
36 On Rue Shaw, see The Arts Club of Chicago: The Collection 1916-1996, ed. Sophia Shaw (Chicago: The Arts Club of Chicago, 1997), pp. 18-19, 25-29. Cage's affection for Shaw was profound. Soon after he and his then wife, Xenia, settled in New York in 1942, he wrote Shaw (Arts Club of Chicago Papers, The Newberry Library, Chicago), jubilantly informing her: "And we are making a guest room for you Gretchen Alex Pat [Shaw's children] and Chicago. We will call it the Chicago Room." In 1980, following Shaw's death, Cage returned to the Arts Club and presented his text "James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet," the second Rue Winterbotham Shaw Memorial lecture.
37 Cage, p. 59. Tomkins concluded (p. 97): "Imaginary Landscape No. 3, with its thunderous sound effects and loud electric buzzes, was intended to suggest war and devastation."
38 John Cage, John Cage, Writer: Previously Uncollected Pieces, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, (New York: Limelight, 1993), p. 239. On Cage's sexuality and its potential impact on his work, see Thomas S. Hines, "'Then Not Yet "Cage"': The Los Angeles Years, 1912-1938," in John Cage: Composed in America, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 65-99; and Jonathan Katz, "John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse," GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1999): pp. 231-52.
39 Cage, John Cage, Writer, p. 239.
40 Cited in Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont, "Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose SŽlavy 1887-1968," in Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, ed. and intro. Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), n.p., entry for 30 August 1952.
41 Ibid. It is in the context of such a statement that one can comprehend Cage's admission (Bosseur, p. 172): "I think more and more of Duchamp as a composer."



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