for others, seemed to enlarge the range and scale of the possible.
I first met John Cage in the fall of 1965 when the Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to perform in a dance festival being held at the Harper Theater in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. It was Merce Cunningham I was eager to see for the first time out of a general curiosity about “modern dance,” but also because I had heard from friends that Cunningham was “really something completely different.” At the time, though I had a taste for adventure, my interests in dance and music were relatively conservative. George Balanchine was my favorite choreographer, and my very intense preferences in music were largely Baroque and pre-Baroque. I was in fact hardly aware of John Cage. And, looking now at the program for what was billed “DANCE FESTIVAL: The most important dancers performing in America—ballet, modern and ethnic,”5 I notice to my surprise that Cage, though listed as Musical Director of the Cunningham company and performing (as did David Tudor) in every event, was really not featured in the program. Neither he nor Tudor was given a bio.
The series of five performances was for me a sudden education in what I had never dreamed dance could be, as well as in new music—mostly by John Cage, but also by La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Bo Nilsson. (There was one piece by Erik Satie.) I saw Cage preparing a piano, heard both Cage and Tudor play. Many of the events involved complex multimedia components with theater-wide sound sources emitting constant surprises—words and noises. Program notes included “Let me tell you that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. Ivan Karamazov”—something familiar to me from my own reading of Dostoevsky. But then there was the more enigmatic and, as I subsequently learned, quintessentially Cagean “The events and sounds of this dance revolve around a quiet center which, though silent and unmoving, is the source from which they happen.” This, along with the sensibility structuring the conjunctions and disjunctions of sound, silence, film, and movement, completely astonished me. What occurred had not turned out to be dance accompanied by music in any way I had experienced before, but a strange intermingling of the visual and auditory glancing off one another’s energies, never cohering or congealing within a familiar logic of relations. Over half of the audience left early, a considerable number exiting during the last piece, Variations V, a simultaneity of dance, electronic sounds, VanDerBeek film, and “remarks” read by Cage.
The next night the audience became even more restless, with the premiere of How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Many stomped out angrily, shouting their disgust over their shoulders. This was the piece in which Cage, seated at a small table to one side of the stage, equipped with microphone and sound-sensitive collar, performed a repertoire of noisy activities—smoking, drinking a bottle of wine with gulps and swallows broadcast over loudspeakers, and reading a series of short humorous texts which he later published in A Year from Monday, calling them “the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance.” He goes on, “I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive.”6 Few if any of us in the audience had had the opportunity to think about all this. We were experiencing it “cold,” as some might have put it. I prefer “out of the blue.” It came with the pristine sensuality of “out of the blue.”
In the mode of Diaghilev’s “Astonish me!” (to Cocteau), I too relished surprise, and wanted more. The experience from the very first moment had been riveting—fascinating, humorous, mysterious. During that opening performance, I had seen and heard more acutely and complexly than ever before during a programmed aesthetic event. Very little of what had taken place was in a descriptive or referential relation to the natural world, but when I thought of how it had engaged my attention I could only liken it to watching ocean waves in infinite variety spuming against rock on the coast of Maine, or sky and water becoming one in the heat and stillness of a South Carolina low-country afternoon, or even moving through the endlessly interesting medias race of humanity in downtown Manhattan. These associations were familiar from my past. What was completely new, what I could not connect with anything I had ever been consciously aware of before, was what seemed to be a radical alteration in my experience of the relation between visual events and sound—space and time. (As a philosophy student I knew that this was truly profound, since according to Kant space and time were the fundamental aesthetic categories.)
When the performance was over, literally shaking with excitement and fright, I went backstage, where I came upon Merce Cunningham. I told him that this had been the most stunning, puzzling experience of dance and music I had ever had, that I didn’t understand what had happened, that I was intensely curious to find out. Were rehearsals by any chance open to the public? Cunningham was friendly and welcoming. He said, “Oh yes, of course,” and told me what their rehearsal schedule would be.
The next afternoon when I arrived at the theater, the dancers—Carolyn Brown, Gus Solomons, Sandra Neels, Valda Setterfield, Barbara Lloyd, Peter Saul, and Albert Reid—were beginning to arrive for warm-up exercises. I was struck again, as I had been the night before, by the exquisite discipline and precision of their movement—a rigor I had in my ignorance not expected outside the ethos of ballet. Sitting alone in the dimly lighted auditorium was the man in the black suit, white shirt, and tie I recognized as the composer-performer from the night before, John Cage.
When he saw me come in, he nodded and smiled, walked over, introduced himself, and sat down. He asked me about my interest in dance and music, wanted to know what I did. Was I involved with either? I told him that I was painting, writing poetry, and studying music (cello), all more or less “on the side.” I was a graduate student studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. “Oh,” he said with a smile, “I’m involved in the study of philosophy too. What kind of philosophy do you study?” I told him I had been studying ethics and philosophy of science, and was primarily interested in the methods of philosophy of language, particularly the work of Wittgenstein. Cage said he was interested in Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism, and that he didn’t much care for Wittgenstein—“too many rules.” But he was curious what I found of value in Wittgenstein, and I was curious about Buddhist philosophy, so we talked about those things and about my sense of something unfamiliar having happened the night before to my perception of space-time.
Cage was buoyant, charming, expansive. He explained the way in which he and Merce Cunningham worked together—each composing and choreographing independently, having agreed beforehand only on the length of time of a given piece. This meant that the relation between the dance and the music was not causality, but only that they happened to occur in the same space over the same period of time—“synchronicity.” Cage said neither he nor Merce Cunningham could bear to see dancers “Mickey Mousing” to the rhythm of the music. He then told me, rather shyly, that he had recently published a book of writings on some of these matters. It was called Silence. When I told him I would look for it, he said that he hoped I would find it interesting, but he was sure I would be interested in the I Ching, the “Chinese Book of Changes.” He said to get the Bollingen, Wilhelm/Baynes edition with the essay on synchronicity by Jung: “That may help.”
I ordered Silence the next morning and bought a copy of the I Ching. Jung’s foreword was both helpful and puzzling7:
We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception. —(C. G. Jung, p. xxii)
This confirmed the importance of chance; and/but then there was this:
Whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment
