MerceDay 7: the choreographer and Satie’s “Socrate”

MerceDay 7. This photograph of Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown shows them in their duet in “Suite for Five” (1956), sometimes arranged as “Suite for Two”. The jump that Cunningham is executing here is a gargouillade, a step rarely given to a man despite the aptitude of many men for it; but when you see Cunningham dancing it on film, you don’t analyse what precise jump it is. Brown herself has often remarked “Merce didn’t do steps”, whereas, she added, she did. This duet made room for both approaches.

It’s a shock to discover from Cunningham’s notes that he had the second movement from Satie’s “Socrate” in mind here. He had choreographed the first movement as a solo, “Idyllic Song”, in 1944.; later, in 1970, he included “Idyllic Song” in a response to the entire score of “Socrate”, while again making the second movement a duet for himself and Brown (though with choreography quite unlike this duet in “Suite for Five”). When the Satie Estate created problems about Cunningham using “Socrate” - they wanted him to use the orchestral version, which was financially too expensive - he rearranged his choreography to a specially made score by John Cage, “Cheap Imitation”; and Cunningham named his work “Second Hand”, never telling his dancers about either the Satie score or his Socratic inspiration.

Many kinds of love were involved here. Cage fell in love with the music of “Socrate” soon after he had fallen with Cunningham (whom he had already likened to Nijinsky). Probably, as scholar Daniel Callahan has suggested, there was always an erotic subtext present when Cunningham used Satie music: he knew how much it mattered to Cage.

Friday 16 April