MerceDay 3: the practising musician and the percussion orchestra

MerceDay 3. This page from a 1943 issue of “Life” magazine records John Cage’s concert of percussion music at the Museum of Modern Art. Cunningham can be seen as one of the players, centre right.

Cage and he had known each other since 1938, when Cage joined the faculty at the Cornish School in Seattle as Cunningham was beginning his second year. Cage had presented his very first percussion concert at the Cornish School. When he invited Cunningham to join the orchestra, he said he did so because he knew how good Cunningham’s rhythm was. In 1939, Cage gave a lecture on percussion that began with the words “Percussion music is revolution.”

In fact, Cunningham was a good, though self-taught, musician, having taught himself piano as a boy (sometimes accompanying his brother Dorwin, who played violin). Many years later, in New York in the 1960s, Carolyn Brown and David Vaughan were waiting to go out for dinner with Cunningham when they heard him playing one of Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales” on the piano. When Brown said “You should choreograph that, Merce”, Cunningham replied “I already have.” He meant that he had made a dance to it without letting the dancers hear the music. Neither Brown nor Vaughan ever knew which dance it was. Last year, I believe I discovered the answer from combing his notes: a duet for Brown and himself in”Story” (1963).

Another important aspect of the 1943 Museum of Modern Art concert is that it was at this time that Cage and Cunningham became lovers. The idea was initiated by Cage’s Bohemian wife Xenia, who had already experimented with sexual ménages, and who found Cunningham so attractive (when he danced with Martha Graham, she found him “like a god, only better”) that she suggested she and her husband try a ménage à trois with him. At the end of his life, Cage spoke of how he had been startled to realise during the ménage that he was more attracted to Cunningham than to his wife. The two men began a private affair. Only after a year did Xenia discover; the discovery threw her completely off balance, and soon ended her marriage. In 1992, when the Cunningham company threw a wake after Cage’s death, Cunningham invited her. She came to it, though very people knew who she was.

Friday 16 April.