**

"Schoenberg had impressed upon me the need in music for structure (the division of a whole into parts). He said this should be accomplished by means of harmony, tonality. I had no feeling for harmony. I was interested in noises. I had to find what would be the proper structure for noises, and when I found it—an empty time structure—I found a proper structure for collaboration between two arts such as dance and music. And that, of course, covers all sorts of things, singing, for instance, anything, in fact, that
happens in time. "

"Four or five years ago, Cunningham would have said that the indeterminacy you can exercise in music is physically dangerous in dancing, because if two people moved with great strength, as they must to do certain things, and collide, you have something equivalent to a catastrophe which could make it impossible for either one of them to dance again. This is a problem with architecture—if the building is badly built, it will fall down. But then he has found ways to permit more freedom on the part of the dancers than formerly."

"I’ve noticed when I’ve seen dance that was not supported by the music, the dance immediately looks physically strong and rhythmic in its own right.
Each movement looks like a rhythm in a way that it never does if it’s going with the music. Now I simply can’t enjoy that, two things happening in unison. It just drives me berserk."


"The two things that music now is able to free itself from, as I see it, are pitches and rhythms, because those are the two aspects that were easily measured. It is difficult to measure tone quality or overtone structure, and also difficult to measure dynamics, but easy to measure tone and pitch; so as we give up those measurements, we’re able to move into a field of activity.

Now in dance, if you give up things that correspond to rhythm and pitch —namely, movement on two legs—what do you have? It’s almost as though you couldn’t give it up. You could, as you suggested, have a film, or the movement as we do have now of abstract shapes on film, or transmitted on television; but that isn’t the dance. And no matter how electronic our culture becomes, we will still have the question of two feet on the earth, and that very fact is going to produce dancers. There is nothing about scales and periodic rhythm in the art of music that makes them so eternally necessary.

Rather, I would agree with Busoni, who says that music gains its true nature when it is free of all such physical necessities; and where we notate regular rhythms, as Busoni says, they come to life only with rubato, they come to life only with irregularity.

But in the very nature of the dance are such questions as balance, muscle
control, left-right, left-right, etc."
John Cage