He then began to find his way outside academic language, investigating the chance methods of John Cage and embracing New York minimalism.
In his 30's he started to employ techniques of composition by chance methods, anticipating & influencing European & American composers of what is now called "aleatory" or chance, music.
John Cage, pioneer of the prepared piano and avant-garde composer of works such as 4'33", often employed chance methods (such as dice and the I Ching) when composing.
He investigated the use of chance methods, photographing successive attempts to make a straight line or a square by throwing three or four colored balls in the air.
"Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)," as he called it — the reference was to Cage's use of chance methods — was shown at the Dia Center for the Arts, in New York, for six months in 2002.
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the outlandishly hip beatniks who gathered there in the early 1950s, practically gave birth to Cunningham, introducing him to "happenings" and the chance methods that came to dominate his work.
Merce Cunningham radically changed the context for choreography in his attitude to music and decor as coincidental (rather than collaborative or supportive) to dance, in his employment of chance methods in dance composition and organization, and in his use of nontheatrical performance space.
He often started a piece with very definite ideas (his initial notes for one work — never shared with his colleagues at the time — ranged from Aristotle and Dionysus to Falstaff and Laurel and Hardy), but then used chance methods (and, in his last 20 years, the computer) to shape his treatment.
A consummate contrarian, Cage was always moving against the grain, challenging the status quo and subverting accepted norms in respect to musical structure, instrumentation, and composition a predilection that led him to employ chance methods of composition and develop the "happenings" model of performance.
