Special Libraries News

Notable Cage Acquisition

In one of its most significant rare manuscript acquisitions of recent years, Northwestern University Library has just added an original musical score by influential American composer John Cage to its collection.

The work, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle, is a piece composed by Cage in 1945 for dancer Jean Erdman, who was a leading figure in American modern dance, a collaborator with both Cage and Merce Cunningham, and a featured dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company.

"This manuscript is an extraordinarily important addition to the materials we already have in our John Cage Collection," says D.J. Hoek, head of Northwestern's Music Library. Northwestern's Cage Collection is the largest repository of Cage's correspondence and ephemera anywhere in the world. It includes many of the original manuscripts by other composers that Cage collected, but only a handful of his own compositions.

"It's significant to scholars for several reasons," Hoek says. "There's the fact that it's one of his earliest pieces for prepared piano, which was one of his many musical innovations." Cage invented the prepared piano by inserting screws, bolts, and pieces of weather stripping in between a piano's strings. This leant the instrument a percussive sound, which Cage later enhanced by inserting other objects including wood, bamboo, plastic, rubber, and coins. Both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Academy of Arts and Letters presented him with awards for his prepared piano work, crediting him with having "extended the boundaries of musical art."

The manuscript is also significant, Hoek adds, because of its hand-written revisions, including its crossed-out original ending and the draft of the ending with which Cage replaced it. Music scholars tend to value revised original manuscripts over pristine ones because they reveal more about the composer's creative process than the unrevised pieces. In Cage's case, Hoek explains, revisions generally appear only on the earlier compositions, since "by the mid-1950s Cage was trying to eliminate the influence of personal taste from his compositional process and had developed rigorous systems to govern the way he composed."

Charles Deering McCormick University Librarian Sarah Pritchard says the acquisition also highlights the Library's commitment to enhancing its unique and distinctive collections in the electronic era. "The contemporary university library needs to offer access to an increasingly large spectrum of digital information, which is critical to scholars but tends to be similar from institution to institution," she says. "What may be more important in differentiating research libraries are the rare and specialized primary source materials that we collect and preserve for current and future generations of scholars."

Text by Nina Barrett, originally published in Library Briefings, Winter 2007.