The legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham has died at the age of 90. He and John Cage altered the landscape of the avant garde in dance and music. When younger, I attended a lot of dance recitals - I took a fair amount of dance, despite having anything but the body type for it. The fencing teams I was part of often met in dance studios, so I was around dancers a lot from an early age, including some first girl friends - I was under the impression in my early teens that all girls stood around with perfect turnout and upturned chin and little bun at the back of the head and aspired to Giselle.

I love dance, actually, and I recall seeing a couple of the MC performances at UCLA in the early 1980s. They really stimulated me. I eventually got tired of the whole random thing, the John Cage silence thing, not so much because of what Cunningham and Cage did with it, but because it so quickly and inevitably became a schtick in later hands, and a schtick at the expense of actual formal technique. Back at UCLA, a young avant garde film student, much influenced by Cage, once asked me if I would put my modest cello playing skills at his disposal as the sound track to his film. He had in mind some (for me) fairly difficult music, and I spent many months working it up and recording it for him. Having been perhaps overinfluenced by the avant garde, however, he took the tape with my (okay, not so thrilling) efforts, and proceeded to stomp on it, sprinkle the tape with oil and dribbles of bleach, and finally run it through a bucket of sand. Then he used that as the "musical" soundtrack. There wasn't much cello, high quality or low, left on the tape, and when I expressed my less-then-thrilled views, he told me that it wouldn't have been the same had I not put those months of effort into it. He cited Cage as inspiration (which I thought was not quite right) and thanked me sincerely and entirely without apology.

Still, even after I had tired of the gimmicks that all this zenny stuff spawned, I always loved Merce Cunningham Company performances. The dance was always amazing, it had something that really did introduce a spontaneity to contemporary dance that must have been like a glass of cold water when it first appeared. It managed to move and excite me when I saw it decades later. Merce Cunningham, adieu.