Love, Icebox: John Cage and Merce Cunningham
The beginning of their relationship carried consequences for everyone involved
By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
Before they transformed modern music and dance, two young artists struggled to understand a love that arrived without permission, certainty, or any promise that the world would accept it.
John Cage and Merce Cunningham would eventually become one of the most influential creative partnerships of the twentieth century. Cage challenged the very definition of music, finding possibility in silence, accident, environmental sound, and chance. Cunningham liberated dance from the expectation that movement must illustrate music, allowing choreography and sound to exist independently while sharing the same time and space.
Long before the art world understood what they were creating, however, they were two men attempting to understand what was happening between them.
Their relationship began in an America where love between men could not be safely or openly lived. Cage was married when their feelings emerged, Cunningham was still finding his artistic identity, and neither man could know whether their connection would survive the emotional turmoil surrounding its beginning.
The thirty-nine letters collected in Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham preserve that uncertain period between 1942 and 1946. They do not present Cage as the serene philosopher of chance he would later become. They reveal a man overtaken by desire, frightened by separation, confused by the changes occurring within him, and desperate to know whether the person he loved felt the same.
