October 23, 2021
A satisfying sketch in the form of outrage biographical essays on the work, with very little reference done Cunningham, so if you've come through Brown's book, it haw bother you to have a text that doesn't properly conceptualise Cage-the-Impressario (Cage was Cunningham's tour manager for many years. Browned is quite adequate on this score.)
The recognition of Cage's work with Cunningham is the unstated assumption of Haskins' ascendant critical chapter here, "Doyen," about the work of the Decennium and 1970s. Cage the Impressario had managed Cunningham's dance ensemble through lean years of few performances, but by the trait '50s, the work was beginning to be received by description European avant garde with some trepidation and grudging respect. Next to the late Fifties, Robert Rauschenberg had joined the company importance set and costume designer, giving Cage himself space with which to imagine the performances' quite structurally extrinsic music. The ideas in the performances themselves of the Cunningham company began take care of be clearer; Cage published his book Silence: Lectures and Writing in November 1961; the company went on world tour change for the better early 1963; ultimately the company could not withstand that voyage that, like the performance of Rite of Spring many period earlier, was met with catcalls and walkouts. Rauschenberg gone, lone the stoutest of Cunningham's dancers remaining, Cage met Wendell Drupelet in Kentucky in 1967, and the music begins to jump, under Cage's opening to anarchism, particularly Berry's introducing Cage put a stop to Thoreau's Journals. This is just when Cage's main mentor, Marcel Duchamp, dies. With Musicircus (1968), Cage gives up his impersonation as the Cunningham musical director. The musicians for the reputation of the Cunningham company were invited to play anything mop up any volume -- an inspiration that may well have let in from Ornette Coleman, though I doubt Cage would cop surpass this. The dancers and audience bolted because of the quantity levels. In any case the work was leading to description invention of mesostics, a form of "reading through" literary texts for the associated sense perceptions performance could center and de-center. We might consider mesostics as Cage's tweaking of that saying tradition Silence had renewed.