Merce Cunningham'sthe seasons

Abstract

In 1946, Merce Cunningham and John Cage received a commission for their most ambitious work so far, from a rather unlikely source. Lincoln Kirstein had recently founded Ballet Society with the primary purpose of providing George Balanchine with a situation in which he could make ballets without concern for commercial considerations. The first Ballet Society program, on November 20, 1946, had consisted of Balanchine's The Four Temperaments and his new staging of Maurice Ravel's opera L'Enfant et les sortileges. A secondary purpose of Ballet Society was to give Kirstein himself an opportunity to promote collaborations among young choreographers, composers, and painters (as he had done previously with Ballet Caravan). Balanchine's absence in the spring of 1947, when he was guest maitre de ballet at the Paris Opera, afforded the occasion for an evening of such ballets: Blackface, with choreography by Lew Christensen, music by Carter Harman, designs by Robert Drew; The Minotaur (repeated, with some revisions, from an earlier program), by John Taras, Elliott Carter, and Joan Junyer; and The Seasons, by Cunningham, Cage, and Isamu Noguchi. Cage had met Kirstein through Virgil Thomson, at whose apartment Kirstein asked him if he would write a piece for Ballet Society.' At that time, Kirstein was evidently less dismissive of modern dance