A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Eleven composers who had written music for the dance (of whom I was one) were invited by Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1962 to write for the sixteenth number of zy Dance Perspectives, the issue which was called composer/ choreographer. In order to stimulate our thoughts, Miss Cohen gave us quotations from established figures in the field. I was given these: It is essential to keep the ear sensitive, but also to remember that the dance is an independent art, subject to laws of its own which can lead the choreographer to movements not really indicated in the score at all . .. to movements set above the sound on the basis of emotional timing. —Doris Humphrey I am not a creator of time. I like to be subordinated to it. Only a musician is a creator of time. . .. The music is first. I couldn't move without the music. I couldn't move without a reason and the reason is music. My muscles only move when time comes in. —George Balanchine The text I contributed follows. It was published in 1963 with only part of the statement by Balanchine. My title and Doris Humphrey's remarks were omitted. The spaces which appear below between some of the sections of text were also omitted. Quotations with which I was unfamiliar were introduced in the margins printed in red. They were by George Bernard Shaw and Lincoln Kirstein. I liked the one by Kirstein: "It can't hurt a composer to know something about dancing." WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Does dance depend? Or is it independent? Questions that seem political. They arose in an aesthetic situation. What's to be said? People and sounds interpenetrate. We thought that sounds took place in time. We see they're vibratory movements of particles in air. Each one, setting out from its point in space, gets to all its arrivals from a single departure. Thoughts about time drop off like dead skin. Dance takes place with one foot in the grave. "Dance or I'll shoot"—each time the 91 curtain goes up. Laws seem petty: they've not sacrificed tangible concerns and returns. What are the Arts? Offerings beyond the law within the limits of practicality. Practicality — read the newspapers — is changing.1 Years ago it was a question of 1. They ask when we speak: What are you trying to say? However, being told about the weather, we get ideas about the next step to be taken. It's those old statements that are so disconcerting — the ones we've memorized. A story, if it's new, could be refreshing. But when I try to remember her, I think of no stories. True, we sat together by appointment in Carnegie Tavern, but there was a twisted quality in her mind that made everything else seem absent. Nothing like conversation took place. I only begged and she refused. The other one had a chance but didn't take it and like most of us rabbits wherever he sees room he moves in. The third who might have been one of the two — well, we tried. We started a rumor that he had resigned. The young ones. Do they have to do it all over again? which one came first — the music or the dance. We'd tried the music first, so it seemed only reasonable to start things roundabout, putting the dance first. Later, when thinking-caps were used, it became evident that underneath both music and dance was a common support: time. This partial truth would have been hard to come by for a choreographer, due partly to the multiplicity of elements in the theatrical dance and due for the rest to the fact that analytical thought in the field of the dance was centered formerly on the problem of notation. Music, on the other hand, was, in those days, a relatively simple art: a succession of pitches in a measured space of time. Moving out toward the complexity introduced by twentiethcentury noise, music's materials became more numerous. Not just pitch and time, but timbre and amplitude too: four basic elements. One could think about music on the fingers of one hand without putting his thumb in it. All one had to do was establish a time-structure.2 Neither music nor dance would be first: both would go 2. We are poorer than we ever were because now we know how to spend money. And not just the studios for dance...