1938: Cage had a teaching post for the summer thanks to a referral by Cowell, who had suggested that Cage go to San Francisco to visit Lou Harrison. Harrison was teaching at nearby Mills College, and pulled strings to have Cage appointed to the faculty for the same program. Backed up by his UCLA experience, he composed music for choreographer Marian van Tuyl. It was an exciting and productive summer, for three of the best-respected contemporary dance groups and some of the leading lights of the Chicago School of Design, among them Gyorgy Kepes and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, were present. The President of the College, Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, was a devotee of Gertrude Stein. In July Cage met the wife of George Antheil, which opened up the possibility of correspondence.

One day Cage traveled to San Francisco and found four jobs in one day. Of the four, Cage opted to work for Bonnie Bird, formerly of the Graham troupe and now teaching at the Cornish School in Seattle. p.55

The Imaginary Landscape No. 1 was premiered as accompaniment to the Cocteau piece on March 24, 1939, and was later used at Mills College for Marion van Tuyl's dance Horror Dream; it has a convincing claim to being the first electroacoustic composition. p.65

Cage had attempted to stir up interest in percussion writing after the December 1938 concert by sending a mailing to numerous composers telling them of the resources available and inviting them to submit compositions. Lou Harrison was one enthusiastic respondent. p.66

In a letter to George Antheil, he records:

I am doing everything I can to establish a "center of experimental music." The purpose of this center will be to do research, composition and performance in the field of sounds and rhythms not used in the symphony orchestra: the ultimate purpose will be the use of electrical instruments which will make available the entire desirable field of sound.

Both Aurelia Henry Reinhardt at Mills and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago School of Design were keen to house the "center" but did not have the resources to fund it themselves. pp67-68

1940

By September the Cages were living at 228 Seventeenth Avenue in Richmond, San Francisco, and John Cage was working for the Works Progress Administration. p.71

Cage applied to work on the WPA Music Project, but those in charge did not accept he was a musician. The Music Project was confined to performers on more traditional instruments, who were sent out to establish glee clubs and the like. Instead it was proposed that he join the recreation project... p.72

Cage worked in hospitals and community centers. His first assignment was to entertain the children of visitors to a hospital in San Francisco. that may have first suggested 4'33", he claims. "I was not allowed to make any sound...for fear that it would disturb the patients. so I thought up games involving movement around the rooms and counting...dealing with some kind of rhythm in space."

He worked with black and Italian children. In a Catholic school after hours he taught Chinese children in a class at which attendance was voluntary. "I got along best with the Chinese because I'm very permissive and the Chinese are highly organized," as Cage recalled the paradox. He set up sound-sources such as flowerpots and invited the children to improvise. They all made the same gesture, as if they were choking themselves; they did not know how to enjoy this freedom. Cage wondered if they would act differently without him, so he went to the other end of the room - it was long - and feigned attention to the blinds. "Before I knew it, I was hearing music," he remembers, "and gradually they were playing beautiful things."

The class folded because, as his young charges told him, Cage was not teaching them anything about counterpoint. What happened, and the way Cage recounts it, are both typical of the first half of his career. Cage reflected years later, "I think the teachers in the real school had thought that my work with them was not in the right direction."

Cage wrote the Living Room Music while in San Francisco in 1940, for four performers who played any household objects, furniture, or parts of the architecture. The pitch range gradually drops from the first to the fourth player: the first three use the three middle fingers of both hands, the fourth uses fists. The piece is written in four movements, "To Begin," "Story," "Melody" and "End." the text of the "Story" comes from Gertrude Stein - "once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around" - set to busy sixteenth note rhythms in a structure of seven by seven measures. The "Melody," written with sharps only as accidentals (he had tended to use flats), may be played on any suitable instrument. The simplicity of the piece evokes the music he wrote for the bookbinders; it parallels the Furniture Music of Satie, though it is not clear whether Cage knew of it at this time.

1941

Beginning on January 29, 1941, Cage taught an extension course in percussion at Mills College: fifteen meetings for twelve dollars, every Wednesday from four to five. The course, prospectus notes, involved "systematic examination of new sound materials," with "particular emphasis on sound in relation to the modern dance." p.73

The work of Cage at this time has often been seen as aligned with that of a West Coast Group or Californian Percussion School alongside Cowell, Harrison, William Russell, the early investigator of microtonal scales Harry Partch, and later Alan Hovhaness. Early in 1941 Cage and Harrison together organized a concert at the California Club in San Francisco, and decided jointly to write a percussion piece, using Cage's rhythmic structure as the unifying feature.

They agreed on a six-minute duration and divided it into specific numbers of eighth notes, grouped in measures of 4 for convenience, at a given metronome mark; and they opted for metal instruments including a water gong and Japanese temple gongs, which can be played by friction on the edge, rather like playing a wine glass. Recognizing that the emergence of the sound is rather unpredictable, they suggest "the tone may begin earlier than notated." Instruments may be substituted provided - as Cage ruled for Living Room Music - the high-to-low stepping of the four parts remains clear.

Cage wrote parts for the first and third voices, Harrison for the others; Harrison's parts were composed in groups of nine-and-a-half measures, and those of Cage were set against his scheme, with the third voice written in sections of seven and fourteen measures, and the first voice a freely written solo.

The score is dated April. It was the first time Cage had collaborated on composition, normally the provenance of the solitary artist - notwithstanding most of the arrangements being made by telephone - and, as he said years later, "I have always been fond of working in a team." he added, anachronistically with regard to Double Music, "the more egos you have, the better chance you have of eliminating the ego altogether." Between March and April 1941 Cage also worked on the Third Construction, dedicated to Xenia for their wedding anniversary.

Cage and Harrison also cooperated on a recording of the latter's Third Symphony, having chosen the work by audience poll at their public concerts. They advertised it as the first recording of music of organized sound; Cage had recently found the term in an article by Varese in Commonweal and used it in preference to his own "organization of sound" simply for its conciseness. When they sent an advance copy of the disc to Varese, he responded with a telegram asking them not to use his phrase. Cage and Harrison could only apologize, since the recording was already released.

From May 18, until June 1, Cage was again enrolled on the Recreation Project, teaching for the University of California Extension Division at the Pomo Trail Camp for Recreation Counsellors in Mendocino County. In July he returned to Mills, where he met Virgil Thomson; it was their first encounter, although Thomson, living in Paris at the time, had received one of the letters sent out by Cage in search of new percussion music after his first Seattle concert.

Cage also became reacquainted with Moholy-Nagy, setting up a course in collaboration with him. He invited Cage to teach a class in experimental music at the Chicago School of Design. It seemed to offer, if not much of a salary, new opportunities - there was at least a whiff of Cage's plan for a center for experimental music - and the Cages moved to Chicago over the summer of 1941, renting an apartment at 323 West Cermak near Chinatown. pp.74-75

The work of Cage up to this time attracted both criticism and praise. One line taken by detractors was that performance of the music needed no skill, the implication being that it was thereby invalidated. "It doesn't take much skill to smash a beer bottle with a mighty heave," said the reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1939, referring to the Cage Players' performance of a William Russell piece. "It does take a lot of skill to play the timpani, which were not in evidence." p.76