The midcentury dominance of aesthetic formalism and specialist critics reflects what Caroline Jones has described as a “bureaucratization of the senses,” in which each art form acquires its own self-referential form of theory and practice. Dance is dance; music is music. Thus, for a dance critic, the scant and dismissive coverage Walter Terry gives to John Cage is symptomatic. He describes the avant-garde sounds as “strange scores,” and after a brilliantly sensitive account of Merce Cunningham’s choreography, he remarks on their indigestibility by claiming to find himself craving “thirty-two bars of [Ludwig] Minkus” by the end of the concert. (Minkus was a nineteenth-century composer of traditional ballet music.) Despite this, the high-modernist rhetoric of the dance is hardly lost on him. Terry describes Cunningham’s solo dance Changeling (1957) as a chilling but still human picture of negation—“a portrait of an unwanted, or uncertain, creature.”
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Title | “Cunningham Dance Group Gives Avant Garde Works,” New York Herald Tribune, 19 |
Maker | Walter Terry |
Date | 17 February 1960 |
Type | press clipping |
Location | Getty Research Institute, David Tudor Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 1 |
Cite
Terry, Walter. “Cunningham Dance Group Gives Avant
Garde Works,” New York Herald Tribune, 19, 17
February 1960. Getty Research Institute, David Tudor
Papers, 980039, box 63, folder 1. In
The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music,
Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975, ed. Michael Gallope, Natilee Harren, and John
Hicks. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2025.
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