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October 17, 2003
TT: Outsmarted
In case you haven't heard, Merce Cunningham, who invented postmodern choreography long before the term "postmodern" was coined, has collaborated with Radiohead and Sigur Rós on a new dance, Split Sides, which received its world premiere earlier this week at the BAM Opera House with both bands in attendance. I was in St. Louis, but I caught up with Merce last night, and though the bands had already hit the road, they left their music behind for the company to dance to.My plan had been to write about Split Sides this morning, but Tobi Tobias, one of my fellow arts bloggers hosted by artsjournal.com, beat me to it, and I couldn't have put it better. Click here to go to her posting and you'll know pretty much what I thought.
I only have one thing to add, which is that I'd never heard anything by Radiohead prior to last night, even though an alarmingly large number of my musician friends had long been urging me to give them a listen. No special reason--I simply never got around to it--and when I heard that Merce was working with the group, I figured I might as well wait to see and hear what they cooked up together. Boy, was I ever disappointed. Radiohead's portion of the score for Split Sides was nothing more than tinkly British minimalism with a beat, mere aural décor, musical background without a foreground. (Sigur Rós wasn't much better, or different.)
Tobi summed it up quite aptly:
Both Radiohead and Sigur Rós laid down a background of hypnotic New Age chimes-and-gongs (music to space out on), agitating it with the static of indecipherable speech, mechanical noise, and threats from nature (thunder, the buzz of swarming insects). Presumably the competing, fragmented sounds and rhythms reflected the contemporary mindset. To my ears--untutored in such matters, I grant you--all of it sounded terribly dated....Neither sound score was what devotees of, say, Bach--favored by choreographers of various persuasions--would call music. Yet neither, though far less intellectually sophisticated than the work of, say, John Cage, was radically different, in effect, from the aural accompaniment Cunningham has traditionally provided for his dances.
Tobi Tobias may be "untutored" when it comes to up-to-the-nanosecond rock, but she wasn't far wrong. In fact, she wasn't even slightly wrong. My companion for the evening, as it happens, was a jazz musician who is a Radiohead fan, and who assured me that what we heard was unrepresentative of what the group really sounds like. I believe her, and I promise to check out whichever Radiohead CD she recommends. But as I listened last night, the thought occurred to me that any classical musician familiar with avant-garde developments of the past quarter-century or so would find the technomuzak that accompanies Split Sides to be weak tea indeed. As I say, I don't know what Radiohead sounds like at its best, but what I heard at the BAM Opera House was--brace yourself--provincial.
I happen to admire Merce Cunningham very much, which rather surprises me. I wrote about him at length in a 1994 essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader (out next April from Yale University Press, for those of you joining us late), of which this paragraph strikes me as particularly relevant:
To spend an evening with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company is to leaf through a fat scrapbook of twentieth-century nonsense....As the curtain goes up, we find ourselves face to face with two of the most absurdly rigid theories ever foisted upon a dance audience: the idea that dance and music ought to take place simultaneously but not synchronously, and the idea that large choreographic structures can be meaningfully determined by rolling dice. As the "orchestra" starts to play, we are confronted by the ghost of John Cage, the man whose harebrained notions probably did more to damage Western music than anyone since Schoenberg. (Fifty years from now, Cunningham's dances will keep Cage's music alive in exactly the same way La Bayadčre keeps the music of Minkus alive.) And then we forget the theories, and are enthralled. The superficial foolishnesses recede quickly into the background; even the music becomes unimportant, a distant clatter one quickly learns to tune out. The dances are all that matter. Of all the lessons Merce Cunningham teaches us, this is the most important one: theory is meaningless to a genius.
Nine years later--and even though I didn't care for Split Sides--I still feel the same way.
Posted October 17, 2003 12:46 PM
