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This week we listen to an excerpt of John Cage reading from his Series re Morris Graves (1973), a lengthy text work first published in 1974 as an introduction to The Drawings of Morris Graves, edited by Ida E. Rubin for The Drawing Society, Inc. Graves (1910-2001) was an extraordinary self-taught artist who was beautifully captured in The Sounds of the Inner Eye: John Cage, Mark Tobey and Morris Graves, published in separate German and English editions to accompany a 2002 exhibition mounted at the Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany) and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington).

Cage and Graves met in Seattle in the 1930s, when Cage was engaged as a teacher and percussionist at the Cornish School, and the two became fast friends. The material of Series re Morris Graves derives from personal experiences and recollections, as well as conversations with the artist and with some of his friends. Here and there Cage vocalizes brief quotations from The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass by Carl Jung, and the I Ching, which renders this text particularly evocative of its subject. And unlike the other works contained on the same box set of 2 CDs released by Mode Records in 1999 – two works based on the writings of Jasper Johns (What You Say and Art is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else) – Cage’s Series re Morris Graves is not written in mesostic form, but is rather through composed.