Founded by Columbia University history professor Charles Beard and other anti–World War I academics associated with the progressive New Republic magazine, the New School featured the first academic curriculum ever designed by artists, and it clearly emphasized the here and now. Poet Hart Crane’s lover, Waldo Frank, gave the first college course on modern art. Composer Aaron Copland taught modern music. Dancer Doris Humphrey taught modern dance. Cage studied modern harmony and rhythm with Henry Cowell, “the open sesame,” in Cage’s words, “for new music in America.”

In addition to composing pieces like 1925’s The Banshee, which he played by moving a darning egg across piano strings, Cowell published experimental music, presented avant-garde concerts, and imported music from all over the globe (Cowell, in fact, coined the phrase “world music”) In 1938, Cowell sent Cage to meet Lou Harrison, a composer, percussion-instrument collector, and student of Balinese and Javanese gamelan. Harrison catalyzed Cage’s interest in Asian culture and musical ideas.

Before leaving for New York, Cage was working in a Los Angeles arts-and-crafts shop when he met Xenia Kashevaroff, one of six tall, striking, talented, and volatile daughters of a Juneau, Alaska, Russian-Orthodox priest. For Cage it was love at first sight. A few weeks later he took her out to dinner for the first time and asked her to marry him. In 1935, after he returned to L.A. from the New School, she said yes.

In 1938, Cage was working as the composer-in-residence at the Cornish School, a progressive arts academy in Seattle. Playing piano for a dance class, he saw Mercier Cunningham, a nineteen-year-old Cornish dance student from Centralia, Washington, for the first time. Cage and Kashevaroff asked Cunningham to join their percussion ensemble.

Cage had been sexually involved with men since his trip to Europe, when he hooked up with an aspiring artist named Don Sample. Cage and Sample were living together in Los Angeles, in Viennese architect Rudolph Schindler’s King’s Road house, a center for political, artistic, and sexual experimentation in the 1920s and ’30s, when Cage met Xenia. Cage insisted in later years he was open with his bride-to-be about his attraction to men. “I didn’t conceal anything,” he avowed. The three of them began a love affair that was cut short when Martha Graham came through town and asked Cunningham to join her dance company in New York.

For their part, Cage and Xenia made it to New York in 1942. Cage had been exempted from the wartime draft because his father was working on a top-secret device to help airplane pilots navigate through fog. In the four years since they’d been together in Seattle, Merce Cunningham had become one of Martha Graham’s principal male soloists. He’d even partnered with Graham in the popular triumph of Appalachian Spring, but Cunningham never allowed himself to be drawn into Graham’s powerful orbit. Cage and Cunningham rekindled their collaboration in April 1944, with a joint recital, inaugurating a personal and professional relationship that would last for the rest of Cage’s long and productive life.

In 1945, Cage and Xenia separated, and Cage moved to the top floor of a tenement building at Monroe and Grand Streets on the Lower East Side. There, Cage created a whitewashed aerie with views stretching from the Queensborough Bridge to the Statue of Liberty. He kept it empty but for a long marble table and a grand piano.

Over the previous few years, Cage had become increasingly frustrated with his inability to communicate his feelings through his music. He poured all of his “loneliness and terror that comes to one when love becomes unhappy” into The Perilous Night, a six-movement suite for prepared piano, for example, only to have one critic bark that it sounded like “a woodpecker in a church belfry.” Cage was “confused,” he said, “both in my personal life, and in my understanding of what the function of art in society could be.” Friends suggested psychoanalysis, and he tried it. A Jungian analyst whom he consulted predicted that after Cage was cured, he’d write more music. “Goodness,” Cage thought, put off, “I already write too much music, it seems to me.”

In 1950, Cage was teaching at the New School when a sixteen-year-old pupil named Christian Wolff brought him a copy of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which had just been published in English for the first time. The four thousand-year-old I Ching is a set of oracular images, sixty-four hexagrams composed of six straight or broken lines, that express archetypal human situations, such as “Conflict” (hexagram 6) or “Youthful Folly” (hexagram 4). Using a set of fifty yarrow stalks or three coins, a questioner may be able to divine the future; but Cage says he was drawn less by the wisdom of the I Ching than by its ability to help him compose music. Cage used the I Ching system of broken and unbroken lines as if it were a computer. By manipulating the yarrow stalks or by flipping the three coins again and again. Cage realized the opportunity to “liberate [his] music from every kind of like and dislike.” With the I Ching, Cage later wrote, “It was immediately apparent to me that I could devise a means of composing by using these operations.”