“I occupy myself with how not to interfere with the music,” George Baknchine once said. To the pioneers of the modern dance, who were still defining their art in opposition to the ballet, the problem was just the reverse. Until dance liberated itself from its reliance on music, they felt, it would forever remain a “subsidiary art,” in the words of John Martin, the New York Times critic and arch apologist for the modern dance. In his 1933 treatise The Modern Dance, Martin claims that for “the last several hundred years” dance has “quite legitimately excluded” itself from classification as a “major art” because it has existed “almost entirely within the boundaries” of another art—namely, music. Even if the choreographer chooses to treat his accompaniment as mere background music, for its “general mood and subject,” the music still manages to win out in the end: “The mere fact that his background is more fixed than his own creative figures stultifies him. He must respect the musical phrase even though it is not at all in consonance with the dance phrase.”

Martin in 1933 could not conceive of either a music or a dance that did not consist of phrases. In the mid-Sixties, however, we got both, and the modern-dance-versus-music problem appeared to have found its solution. Postmodern dance and minimalist music proved to be a cohabitation made in heaven. Rejected by the avant-garde musical establishment, which at this time was still deeply involved with serialism, the minimalist composers