Introduction

Summary

The correspondence between John Cage (b. September 5, 1912, Los Angeles, CA; d. August 12, 1992, New York, NY) and Peter Yates (b. November 30, 1909, Toronto, Canada; d. February 26, 1976, Buffalo, NY) represents the final part of Cage’s three most significant exchanges of letters across his life and, unlike the other two sequences – between Cage and the composer Pierre Boulez and Cage and the pianist David Tudor – that with Yates covers a very broad temporal span, most of Yates’s working life, beginning in 1940 and continuing until 1971. It is, in no small part as a result of this long time period, more substantial than these others: it totals well over 100 individual items. Moreover, Yates knew Cage as a younger man, before, in a sense, he had yet become Cage.