Music and dance are two things that just go together, like peanut butter and jelly, like cookies and milk. But one is not necessary for the other to occur. Music inspires movement, and the opposite is also true. Merce Cunningham wanted to put the spotlight on dance independent of music. Instead of putting moves to music, he put music to his moves. I don’t know if he was the first to do this, but many choreographers work that way today. My dance teacher once told me that you can make a dance fit to any music. At first I thought that was not entirely possible, but then she told our class to find another song to put our moves to because our song didn’t follow the guidelines. It took changes in sequence and tempo, but we each found completely different songs to use.
Each of the dances we showed the class looked like a different dance, even though we used the same moves. This just shows that although moves can be independent of music, music changes and enhances a dance. I have spent countless hours agonizing on song choices in order to set a certain mood in a piece I was choreographing, so I think Cunningham was smart to create a dance and set music to it afterwards but I know it couldn’t have been easy.
Music can be found wherever there is sound. In this I agree with John Cage. Music does not have to come out of the traditional instruments. For example, the show Stomp uses stuff like brooms, basketballs, trashcans, poles and kitchen equipment to make some very cool music. Even Tesla coils can be used to make music. Here is a link to a video of music made with a robotic drums, tesla coils, and pipes of some sort.
In the reading, Cage said that “we must explore the materials of music. What we can’t do ourselves will be done by machines and electrical instruments which we will invent”. This has already happened, with the examples above, but also with synthetic sounds like those an electric keyboard can make. Lots of good music is made using synthetic beats, like “Scars” by Basement Jaxx.
But I do not think that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is music, though silences can emphasize sounds. And, I find traffic annoying, or just white noise – not musical in any way. I don’t understand why people would pay money to watch a full ensemble sit in silence.