Homage to a ʼnon-harmonic genius’: Glanville-Hicks on cage1

Abstract

In 1949 Peggy Glanville-Hicks composed Obeisance to a Lucite Spectrum for piano solo, a birthday gift for her friend John Cage. But it is a piece that she never subsequently acknowledged and that is not recorded in any of her lists of works. Composed at a time when Glanville-Hicks was vigorously and almost unilaterally promoting Cage’s music in the pages of Musical America, the New York Herald Tribune and Vogue, and when the evidence of their extant correspondence suggests an intimate and mutually supportive friendship, it reflects their common interests in Indian philosophy and aesthetics as well as in mysticism in general. In the numerological basis of the work’s system of durations and at..