A critic remembers John Cage

Alastair Macaulay writes movingly about a musician he greatly admired:

 
John Cage (1912-1992) died thirty-two years ago today, a few weeks before his eightieth birthday. Merce Cunningham, his life partner, came home from rehearsals on August 11 to find that Cage, lying on their kitchen floor, had had some kind of stroke. Cunningham called a friend with medical skills, who observed Cage’s eyes at the moment when matters became irreversible. They and others accompanied Cage to Saint Vincent’s Medical Center, where he died the next day. Cunningham, though he took some persuasion to do this, spent some time alone with Cage before his death.

Cunningham, always a worker (like all the men of his family), used some of the time to make notes for the dance he was then preparing (Enter). On the day after Cage’s death, he returned to work with his company, initially on rehearsing older choreography.

Various company legends sprang up, not least that he inserted into Enter (for the dancer Alan Good) the precise physical position on the floor in which Cunningham had found Cage on August 11 – but this is erroneous. The position that Cunningham gave to Good – before Cage’s death – was one observed in a Maillol sculpture (River) in the sculpture garden in the Museum of Modern Art.

It’s fair to say that, though Cage had not been active in the daily matters of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for some years, his death had a profoundly destabilising effect on that company: within the next eighteen months, half the dancers left. The connection of his death to their departures is neither simple nor obvious: few (perhaps only two) had known him remotely well. But Cage was some kind of anchor. Without him, Cunningham – despite his immediate return to work – found it excessively hard to make certain high-level administrative decisions: a situation that was not resolved for several years.

Cage was a strong personality. I hope it is true, as has been said, that Cunningham said the following very Beckettian words about his death “I come home at the end of the day and John’s not there. On the other hand, I come home at the end of the day and John’s not there.”

Read on here. The beautiful bit is yet to come.
 

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