“You are the music/ While the music lasts.” Whatever these words mean in Eliot’s Four Quartets, they have often been given new meaning in dance, and nowhere more so than in the solos choreographed by Merce Cunningham. He is the choreographer whose most radical, controversial, and profound contribution to choreography was to separate it from music — or so it seemed. The dance that the audience saw and the music that it heard were composed independently. The audible music, which often varied unpredictably at each performance, operated separately, sometimes like a hostile environment. What was easy to miss was that, whereas most dance responded to heard music, Cunningham’s dance embodied many unheard musics. It was a theatrical adventure without serious precedent: sometimes the dancers seemed to be at one with “the music of the spheres.” The neurologist Oliver Sacks often wrote, most hauntingly in Awakenings, of the effect of music on physical coordination. He turned this effect into a participle: some recovering patients feel that they are “musicked,” others feel “unmusicked.” The profound connection that he describes of music to movement is something that all lovers of dance surely recognize. But Sacks tends to write of music as something that enters the human from an exterior source, from outside, as a stimulating accompaniment. Cunningham took the process to another level: he and his dancers made music by dancing it. The originality of the approach can hardly be exaggerated. Cunningham died in 2009. Are the musics within his choreography surviving his death? April 16, 2019 would have been Cunningham’s hundredth birthday. Since he died not too long ago and presented his last big premiere on his ninetieth birthday, memories were fresh. The centennial evening was marked by “A Night of a Hundred Solos,” staged in three cities: London, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles, a hundred in each city, a different anthology in each case. If you knew Cunningham’s choreography, it was natural to regard all three events as retrospectives, spanning the fifty-six years of his extraordinary career, 1953 to 2009. I was among many who watched one performance live, the other two on screen.Yet much about the evenings was anti-retrospective. The dancers could have included alumni of Cunningham’s own company (several of whom are still in good shape), but they were excluded. Instead, the performers were chosen from a far wider range of ages, physiques, and technical skills than Cunningham himself had used. As a result, the performance opened up Cunningham’s work in new directions to dancers who had never performed his work in public before. As always after a choreographer’s death — and sometimes during her or his lifetime — there were moments when his spirit seemed entirely absent, and others when it was alive but in peculiar ways. Often enough his solos were marvelously present, with an astonishingly diverse assortment of dancers, newly musicked, offering a wide range of physical and expressive idioms.In a career devoted to experiment, Cunningham opened many doors to the future. (“New possibilities” was a favorite catchphrase of his.) What was uncanny about “Night of a Hundred Solos” is that, by creating a dance theater composed of solos alone, it anticipated the realm of social isolation that would become the new norm within less than a year. Even when the stage contained several different solos at the same time, each of the dancers was isolated, focused, motivated — and sometimes conflicted, sometimes experimenting. For Cunningham, a solo had always been a process of self-discovery — and here was the process continuing after his death. The London, New York, and Los Angeles editions, each ninety minutes long, were quite different anthologies of Cunningham material, but each amounted to more than a collection of solos: all three were celebrations of the possibilities of soloism. A year later Cunningham solos were being taught on Instagram, where “mercetrust” now has over 39,000 followers. And each solo is a musical composition in physical form. 
Cunningham was a skilled and powerful partner, trained in ballroom genres from his early teens; and he was happy amid company. But he was also, by temperament, one of nature’s soloists: freest when performing alone. In his case, isolation really was splendid. He began studying modern dance at the age of eighteen in Seattle, with Bonnie Bird, who had studied with Martha Graham. Graham, notably in her masterpiece Primitive Mysteries in 1930, had been studying the dances of the Native Americans of the Southwest. This was an era when American anthropology was seizing the imaginations of many: it helped Americans to identify the traditions peculiar to their continent. Cunningham, in his second year of studying modern dance, discovered anthropology, which remained a lifelong source of interest — in particular the dances and culture of one particular tribe of Native Americans, the Swinomish, a tribe that lives and fishes on the islands and coasts in northern Puget Sound, in northwest Washington state. Whereas the dances of the Southwest tribes emphasized the collective, many of the dances of the Northwest are trance dances for soloists. As Bonnie Bird put it: “The Northwest Indian dance is spirit dancing, quite different from the group dancing of the Southwest — it’s always solo dancing, one dances only when one has ‘caught one’s song’ and is filled with the spirit that takes over, that invades one.” In 1939, Cunningham moved to New York, dancing with Graham’s company until 1946. He began presenting his own choreography in 1942. From the 1950s on, his own work became renowned and notorious for what remains the most radical move in modern choreography: making dance and music co-exist independently of each other. The word “song,” used by Bird to describe the Northwest Native American dances, is often used by Cunningham dancers, though few of us were aware of this while Cunningham was alive. Once you know, however, it seems obvious. Patricia Lent, who danced for Cunningham from 1982 to 1993 and was named by him as one of his Trustees, has observed that Merce (and all of
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