A Mycological Foray: A New Look at John Cage and His Mushroom Obsession
John Cage picking mushrooms in the woods, William Gedney Photographs and Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
The twentieth-century music composer John Cage was famous for his experimental approach to sounds, silences, and everything in between. As it happens, Cage was also an avowed mushroom aficionado and the inspiration he drew from fungi played no small part in his work. Almost three decades after his death, the influence of his mycological interests on his biography is indisputable. Here, in the twenty-first century, it’s impossible to talk about Cage’s music and theory without talking about the way that fungi permeates it.
Cage’s life is full of oft-repeated mushroom anecdotes. How he got his start in mushroom foraging during the Great Depression because he was a broke and hungry student. (In his writings, Cage describes passing out from fatigue after eating only mushrooms for an entire week.) How social mushroom forays lead to intellectual collaborations and theoretical developments. (Cage met one of his students, Allan Kaprow, while on a mushroom hunt organized by American artist George Segal.) How he created a guide for edible mushrooms near Stony Point, New York. (His class on mushroom identification at the New School for Social Research was immensely popular.) How Cage accidentally poisoned himself and some friends – Cage actually had to have his stomach pumped — after he mistakenly identified a poisonous hellebore (in the buttercup family) as skunk cabbage.
In one particularly famous episode, in February 1959, Cage appeared on the Italian television program Lascia o Raddoppio (Double or Nothing) and won five million lire (something like eight thousand dollars) by being able to name 24 white-spored agarics — edible mushrooms — that were mentioned in the Studies of American Fungi field guide. Cage listed them in alphabetical order and then bought a Volkswagen bus for his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and a piano for his home in Stony Point.
