John Cage, Mycologist

Posted in Interesting Plant Stories on December 2, 2013 by Ellen Bloch

Ellen Diane Bloch is the collections manager of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium‘s Cryptogamic Herbarium, which includes the fungi collection.

Many people know John Cage (1912-1992) as one of the foremost experimental composers and musicians of the 20th century, but he was also a dedicated amateur in the field of mycology, the study of mushrooms and other fungi. When he was asked to teach a music course at the New School in New York City in the late 1950s, he said yes, but only if he could also teach a class in mushroom identification. He taught the class for three years.

A letter from Cage, now kept in The New York Botanical Garden’s archives in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, shows how committed he and his New School students were to their mycological studies. Dated November 6, 1961, the letter was addressed to Dr. Clark Rogerson, the Garden’s mycologist at the time.

Cage announced that after three years, the people involved in the New School classes wanted to form a society to “continue the field trips in suitable weather but which would add winter study periods with emphasis on the literature and work with microscope (sic). In addition we want to have a series of lectures given by authorities in the field. We would like to diminish the gap between ourselves as amateurs and the professional mycologists, knowing full well that we have much to gain, and hoping that our activities in the field can become more useful to the science itself … We would call ourselves the New York Mycological Society … We would have a Secretary and Treasurer but no other officers. We would not employ parliamentary law. Our wish is that the Society would function without dependence on leadership, focusing its attention directly on fungi.”

The New York Mycological Society, originally founded in the 1890s but growing moribund in the following decades, was thus revived in September 1962. The William and Lynda Steere Herbarium has several of Cage’s fungal specimens, including a mushroom that he collected in 1959 in New York.

Header image courtesy of PBS American Masters.