(no subject)
Mid-way through my junior year in college, I changed majors from B.M. Music Performance to B.M. Music Composition. Early on in my new major, my work was strongly affected by John Cage’s aleatory approach to music, though I was probably more structured in building large constructions to control a fair amount of the random nature of things.
A couple of years in to my new major, I attended a performance of Merce Cunningham’s dance company, and found that I was even more strongly influenced, in terms of how I constructed some of my music thereafter, by Cunningham’s choreography - specifically in terms of the visual images and general flow between those images - which I think is somewhat ironic, because at least one of the pieces on the company’s program was a typically representative example of the ways in which Cage and Cunningham “worked together,” where the choreography and the music didn’t meet until the end of the creative process.
That must have been about twenty years ago, and Merce, in his seventies, was still dancing with his company. I was impressed.
It’s been a while since I’ve thought about how much Cage and Cunningham informed my creative processes - in the days when I was still creating, anyway.
Merce Cunningham (right)
April 16, 1919 - July 26, 2009
(With John Milton Cage, Jr.
September 5, 1912 - August 12, 1992)
Now, as far as the gay couple thing, this just occurred to me: I personally like to think that, had they stopped creating art long enough, if Cage and Cunningham had been able to find a way to merge their gene pools and produce a son, he’d probably look a bit like this.
Of course, having spent the majority of The L Word’s first season looking at Eric Mabius naked, I may be a little biased.