• DOI:10.1093/MUSQTL/85.3.545
• Corpus ID: 190055555

Institutions, technology and economics. Cage, Cunningham, and collaborators: the odyssey of Variations V

@article{Miller2001InstitutionsTA,
  title={Institutions, technology and economics. Cage, Cunningham, and collaborators: the odyssey of Variations V},
  author={Leonard S. Miller},
  journal={The Musical Quarterly},
  year={2001}
}

• L. Miller
• Published 1 October 2001
• Art
• The Musical Quarterly

Lincoln Center, New York, 23 July 1965. The New York Philharmonic's highly publicized, lavishly funded, and well-attended French-American Festival was slightly past its midpoint when it offered an innovative and grandiose spectacle. The ninth performance of the series opened with works by some of the best-known French and American composers of the time-Edgard Varese's Hyperprism (1922-23), Pierre Boulez's Improvisation sur Mallarme II (1957), and Elliott Carter's Second String Quartet (1959). But the novelty of these works paled in comparison to the after-intermission entertainment: a single forty-minute aural and visual extravaganza devised by John Cage and Merce Cunningham titled Variations V. Lukas Foss, the festival's artistic director, succinctly summarized his agenda: "What distinguishes this festival from many others," he said, "is that it tries to tempt prominent artists to do things they don't ordinarily do."1 Cage and Cunningham were only too happy to oblige. Cage enlisted three composers-James Tenney, Malcolm Goldstein, and Fredric Lieberman-to operate the dozens of tape recorders and radios that provided the aural content of the production. The output from these devices fed into a fifty-channel mixer designed by Max Mathews of Bell Laboratories. Cage and David Tudor worked the mixer controls. So many wires ran from the electronic sound sources to the mixing board that Robert Moog (who was busy supervising his own machinery) recalls the eerie sensation of walking back and forth on a soft bed of Radio Shack cables.2 The stage set consisted of twelve 5-foot-high antennas Moog had built for the occasion, capacitance devices that sensed the proximity of the seven dancers: Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, Barbara Dilley Lloyd,3 Sandra Neels, Albert Reid, Peter Saul, and Gus Solomons. At the base of the antennas were additional sensors, a set of photocells built by Bell Lab engineers under the supervision of the Swedish research scientist Wilhelm (Billy) Klfiver. Whenever the dancers interrupted the light to the photocells or came within a four-foot radius of the antennas, they