John Cage's Letter to Peter Yates, December 24, 1940

Introduction

Students of John Cage's music know the writer and critic Peter Yates primarily for one thing: it was Yates who said that Schoenberg considered Cage "an inventor of genius." But the letter below shows Cage as ghostwriter for Yates's article entitled "organized Sound." This letter is an early artifact from the long and sometimes testy friendship between Cage and Yates, to whom Cage once ironically wrote, "you are clearly the one in America who writes about music."