AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts sunday morning 165
CHOREOMUSICAL RELATIONSHIPS IN MERCE CUNNINGHAM’S
SeCoNd HANd AND THE AESTHETIC OF INDIFFERENCE
Daniel Callahan
Columbia University
Merce Cunningham and his critics, whether writing from a formalist or critical-theoretical
perspective, have consistently maintained that his mature choreography expresses nothing but
kinesthetic integrity itself. According to this view, Cunningham’s choreography is not inspired
by music, narrative, or ideas; it is driven only by the possibilities of the body in space and
time. Art critic Moira Roth has termed this retreat from expression, meaning, and politics in
the works of Cunningham, his partner John Cage, and the visual artists in their intimate circle
as the “aesthetic of indifference.” My paper will explore the history behind and the choreomusical
relationships in Cunningham’s Second Hand (1970, revived 2008) in order to complicate
this long-standing characterization of Cunningham’s oeuvre. Using new and previously unpublished
sources, I will provide the first sustained account of choreomusical relationships
and programmatic content in a Cunningham dance.
Beginning in the summer of 1969, after avoiding such an approach for thirteen years and (to
date) never repeating it, Cunningham choreographed a dance, Second Hand, to the “phraseology”
of music. The music was Erik Satie’s Socrate, a “symphonic drama” on the life and death
of the philosopher scored for vocalists and chamber orchestra, and a piece long beloved by
Cunningham and Cage. Cage prepared a two-piano arrangement for the company’s early 1970
première. Because of an eleventh-hour refusal of performance rights by the publisher, however,
Cage was forced to prepare Cheap imitation for the première, a partly chance-determined
piano version of Socrate that maintained Satie’s rhythms and tempi but altered his melodies.
While company members in 1970 and later critics suspected a programmatic content
following the suppressed Socrate, no one has yet connected the choreographic specifics of
Second Hand to the programmatic specifics of Socrate. Similarly, no one has recognized the
significance of Cunningham re-presenting his 1944 solo idyllic Song as Second Hand’s first
section. Idyllic Song had been Cunningham’s first dance to Satie, specifically to Cage’s piano
reduction of Socrate’s first movement, and a very early collaboration between the two men.
Cunningham’s programmatic concern in idyllic Song was antithetical to the critique of the
heteronormative family (specifically Cage’s, as I will show with reference to Cunningham’s
overlooked libretto) that the two men had provided in their first collaboration, Credo in Us
(1942), a dance tellingly and sardonically subtitled A Suburban idyll.
Drawing on Cunningham’s 1969 notes, the sole performance of Second Hand filmed with
sound, observation of the revival in rehearsal and performance, and interviews with past and
present company members, I will suggest that Second Hand ’s choreography is far from “indifferent,”
but instead at times directly expresses Satie’s libretto and music. Placing these formal
and programmatic connections against the background of the queer history of the Cage-Cunningham
relationship and the place of Satie and Socrate in it, I will argue that Second Hand
represents a moment of retrospective ambivalence about the aesthetic and the collaborative
model that would cement the canonical status of Cunningham and Cage in the American
avant-garde.