Second Hand (1970)


Music: John Cage, (Cheap Imitation)
Décor & Costumes: Jasper Johns
Lighting: Christine Shallenberg

In 1944 Merce Cunningham choreographed a solo called Idyllic Song, to the first movement of Erik Satie’s Socrate, in an arrangement by John Cage for piano solo. Over the years Cage had suggested to Cunningham that he choreograph the other two movements, as he planned to arrange them for piano solo also. Late in 1969 he did so, reconstructing his original solo and adding a duet for himself and Carolyn Brown to the second movement, and a group dance to the third. Cunningham himself never left the stage. The work was performed in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s first season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January 1970. However, the Satie estate refused permission for the use of Socrate in any form, whether Satie’s own composition for four sopranos and small orchestra, or in an arrangement by Cage. Cage therefore composed a new work, using the structure and phraseology of Satie’s original, but otherwise using chance operations to determine what notes would be played. He called this Cheap Imitation. Cunningham therefore called his work Second Hand.

Satie’s work is a setting of excerpts from the Dialogues of Plato, in three sections: “Portrait of Socrates,” “The banks of the Ilissus,” “Death of Socrates.” Cunningham has said that Second Hand was “the last time I made a work following the phraseology of a musical score,” but has not acknowledged incorporating its dramatic content. However, Carolyn Brown and James Klosty have both said that that content is implicitly if not explicitly present; certainly there is an elegiac feeling in the last movement.

Second Hand has no décor: Jasper Johns, at the time the dance company’s artistic advisor, designed the costumes, each of a single color except for the edge of the arm or leg on one side where another color enters. Johns asked that the dancers line up at the curtain call in a certain order, when the colors are seen to form a spectrum.