Alastair Macaulay writes movingly about a musician he greatly admired:
John Cage (1912-1992) died 32 years ago today, a few weeks before his 80th birthday. Merce Cunningham, his partner, came home from rehearsals on August 11 to find Cage lying on the kitchen floor, suffering a stroke. Cunningham called a friend with medical knowledge who examined Cage’s eyes at the moment the situation became irreversible. She and others accompanied Cage to Saint Vincent’s Medical Center, where he died the next day. Although it took some persuasion, Cunningham spent some time alone with Cage before his death.
Cunningham, who (like all the men in his family) was always a worker, used some of the time to take notes for the dance he was preparing (Enter). The day after Cage’s death, he returned to work with his company, initially rehearsing older choreographies.
Various legends have arisen about the company, not least that he inserted into Enter (for the dancer Alan Good) the exact physical position on the floor in which Cunningham found Cage on August 11 – but this is false. The position that Cunningham assigned to Good before Cage’s death was one observed in a Maillol sculpture (River) in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art.
It is fair to say that Cage’s death, although he had not been actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for several years, had a profoundly destabilizing effect on the company: within the next 18 months, half the dancers left the company. The connection between his death and their departure is neither simple nor obvious: few (perhaps only two) had known him even remotely well. But Cage was a kind of anchor. Without him, Cunningham – despite his immediate return to work – found it excessively difficult to make certain high-level administrative decisions: a situation that was not resolved for several years.
Cage was a strong personality. I hope it’s true that Cunningham, as I said, said these very Beckettian words about his death: “I come home at the end of the day and John isn’t there. On the other hand, I come home at the end of the day and John isn’t there.”
Read on here. The good stuff is yet to come.
