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“I’m what you would call an amateur mushroom hunter, and so far I
haven't killed myself or killed any other person,” the avant-garde artist
and composer John Cage once joked in an interview with filmmaker
Henning Lohner. However, those close to the artist would know that he
was being modest, if not a bit dishonest. Cage’s fascination with fungi
was anything but amateurish. And he once poisoned himself, along
with six of his friends, with a dish of hellabore (a scavenged flower, not
a mushroom per se), mistaken for skunk cabbage.
Cage's lifelong obsession with mushrooms began during the Great
Depression. Without sufficient money for food, the artist picked the
mushrooms growing around his home in Carmel, California, and took
one to the public library for further research. He discovered the fungi
were edible, and ate them exclusively for about a week. In the early
1950s, Cage began foraging for mushrooms once again while living on
an artist commune in rural New York State. Fascinated by their
haphazard growth, the artist went on mushroom hunts, studied fungi
identification, and even collected them. (The composer's extensive fungi
collection is now housed at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)
“I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music
by devoting oneself to the mushroom,” Cage explained in “Music
Lovers’ Field Companion” (1954). For Cage, the experience of finding
mushrooms, often hidden under grass or mulch, was similar to the
experience of hearing quiet sounds that are typically eclipsed by the
noise of crying babies or fire engines,
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seminal work 4°33”, staged in Woodstock, New York, in 1952. The
performance consisted of the musician David Tudor sitting at a piano
for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, without playing a single
note. Instead, he opened and closed the keyboard lid three times to
mark distinct periods of silence. The performance drew attention to the
ambient noises in the room—the rustling of the programs, the sneezes
and coughs, the raindrops on the roof—and framed these accidental
sounds as the music itself.
While sounds could stimulate one’s hearing, though, mushrooms could
stimulate two of the senses: sight and taste. In 1959, Cage further
formalized his interest in mushroom identification by teaching a class
on the discipline, along with the horticulturalist Guy Nearing, at the
New School in New York City. While the dean of the school was
initially hesitant about the course offering, she eventually gave her
approval after recognizing the class could help students develop their
observational skills. The class, which included Fluxus artists
Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, went on foraging expeditions, but
only to woods accessible through the city’s public transportation system.
‘They held large dinners to consume their spoils, and their Annual
Banquet even madc it into the culinary pages of the New York Times.
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the 'host'Mike Bongiorno at the $5-million-lite-question. “You must 2)
Paws the Mdmarn ésudt the whive-Sporteds4 gisnictiscontained in
Atkinson's Studies of American Fungi.” Much to the audience’s surprise,
the composer confidently responded, “I can enumerate the list
alphabetically.” He won the top prize of $10,000 and used the money
to buy a new piano and a Volkswagen bus for his partner Merce
Cunningham’s new dance company. Three years later, Cage crystallized
his mushroom obsession by co-founding the New York Mycological
Society, along with some of his students from the New School.
In the 1960s, Cage made a living by regularly supplying New York
restaurants like the Four Seasons with the pickings from his mushroom
hunts. He also invented his own fungi-focused recipes, publishing one
for “dogsup,” a mushroom-filled replacement for ketchup, in
American Vogue in 1965. He later published a book on the subject—
Mushroom Book (1972)—in collaboration with the mycologist
Alexander H. Smith and the artist Lois Long, filling the pages with
more recipes, poems, scattered observations, diary entries, and
illustrations. The book is now in the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art.
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