Doom-ridden Bacchants for lunch, anyone ?

[Katharine Kanter]

Idling away the hours in a little provincial library a fortnight ago, I suddenly noticed a packet of books on Martha Graham, ever one of my Têtes de Turc.

Her autobiography opened at the very page that Tells All: an onslaught on the use of string instruments for the dance. Classical dance being in its essence ANTI PERCUSSIVE, I found the lines below of peculiar interest.

Friends have just pointed out to me the relevant, parallel passages in Theodor Adorno’s “Philosophy of Modern Music”.

Martha Graham On Music

from her aptly-named autobiography « Blood Memory » (1991, Doubleday publishers)

page 75

“Louis (Horst) felt that music for the dance should not overwhelm or in any way overshadow the dance movement.

“He did not want me to use strings in any of the compositions I would later commission for my dances. He preferred piano, percussion and wind instruments.

“He did not want strings in any of the music because he felt they were too lush and too romantic – in other words, deadly to contemporary dance.

“Your body does not feel the same when you dance to strings as when you dance to woodwinds. It simply cannot. It doesn’t even feel the same when you dance to a flute or a bassoon.

“There is a different thing which hits against your body. The wall of sound holds you in a certain way. You rest on that tone.”


Further insight into these doom-ridden Bacchants is provided by Agnes B. de Mille in her biography of Graham, entitled “Martha”.

“Nelly Fisher, a Graham student in the 1930s, added: ‘you must think of the emotional aspects of the contraction, the fact that it proceeded from a deep emotional feeling, often, pain. People have stamped on the earth for percussive effects, but I don’t think they’ve ever used percussive accents with the body, except in dances of ecstasy, like flagellants or dervishes, where they were quite literally driving themselves into abnormal conditions.”
“In the Graham technique, the arms and legs moved as result of this spasm of percussive force, like a cough, much as the thong of a whip moves because of the crack of a handle. The force of the movement passes from the pelvis and diaphragm to the extremities, neck and head. It is a device common to jazz dancing.”

(page 98)

These "spasms of percussive force" do rather remind one of retching at the sight of something oddly repellent, but perhaps if practised before lunch...