The San Francisco Dancers Workshop founded by Anna Halprin is renowned in US West Coast avant garde performance history, tracing a long and clear path which started in 1956 when Halprin broke away from her then-partner Welland Lathrop. Her remarkable life, including her work from the 1960s with composers La Monte Young and Terry Riley, has been well documented, but I’ve long been intrigued by her less well known collaborators. Just before the pandemic I was excited to unearth the archives of one of her main dancers, AA Leath, about whom very little has been written beyond a Dance Digest reference in 1960 calling him “an exceptionally fine artist and perhaps the finest male modern dancer in America as far as technique goes”. In addition to his marvellous technique, it turns out Leath was also an exceptionally fine hoarder.

Buried in one of Leath’s boxes was a score titled Earth Interval, composer Doris Dennison’s music for two percussionists dated May 1956 and written for a solo dance Leath had choreographed. Dennison’s name comes down to us, but is only ever mentioned briefly, if at all, as a member of John Cage’s earliest percussion quartet at the Cornish School of Music in Seattle. In December 1938, Cage’s group with his wife Xenia, Margaret Jansen and Dennison is generally considered to have performed the first complete concert of percussion music in the US. Cage gets a lot of credit here, but was there more than one composer in the quartet? Who was Doris Dennison, and what had she done in those intervening years leading up to Earth Interval?

Dennison arrived at Cornish, her alma mater, in 1938 to teach eurythmics, joining the faculty at the same time as Cage. Born in 1908 in Saskatchewan, Canada, she was raised in the Seattle area, graduated in 1932, and then lived with her grandmother in London while studying Dalcroze eurythmics. Cornish invited her back to cover for another faculty member who was on leave. “I had a lot of Dalcroze training at Cornish before I went to England,” she told Leta Miller in an interview many years later. “You get pretty good rhythmic training in that. John was not one to write simple rhythms. Many of these pieces we played were pretty complex rhythmically. I guess the Dalcroze did me good help.”

Cage’s group performed between 1939-40, including a tour of four colleges in the northwestern part of the US. At the end of that spring semester, Cage resigned from Cornish and Dennison’s two year stint came to an end. Both moved to the Bay Area, as did the other members of the quartet, so their work could continue. Reuniting with his friend Lou Harrison, Cage organised a number of concerts for the group including the landmark 14 May 1941 performance at the California Club, which included Cage and Harrison’s Double Music, the premiere of Cage’s Third Construction, and Harrison’s 13th Simfony, which the audience chose by popular demand for a subsequent recording, Harrison’s first.

There was a lot of activity but no money. Dennison described to Miller in that same interview rehearsing at Harrison’s place on the third floor of dancer Carol Beals’s home in the Western Addition district of San Francisco while struggling with odd jobs and sneaking into the dining hall at Mills with Jansen so they could eat. Dennison was eventually hired as accompanist by the dance department at Mills and stayed for over 30 years. Even after Cage left the Bay Area, he and Dennison remained close. Together they accompanied Merce Cunningham’s solo performance when Merce and Cage returned to San Francisco in 1949, and, as musical director of the Mills College summer dance session of 1950, Dennison programmed and performed Cage’s music.

Anna Halprin and Welland Lathrop established their dance school and professional company in the late 1940s, inviting Dennison to join as accompanist – a second job. This kept her in close contact with nationally known dancers who came through town to work in the Halprin-Lathrop School, including Franziska Boas, Gertrude Lippincott, and her old friend Cunningham. Dennison was composing percussion music for the Halprin-Lathrop company by 1953. Earth Interval is scored for recorder, drums, gongs, maracas, muted gongs, and bowl gongs, with the composer noting in particular, “In 2nd movement, 1st player lowers + raises a gong into a tub of water while beating” – a neat trick she’d picked up from Cage years earlier.

The work, like the dance, is in three movements: Land Form, Air Tide, Earth Play – these titles are no doubt a nod to Halprin’s work integrating dance into the natural world in the setting of her outdoor dance deck in Marin County. Dennison accompanied Leath herself in the earliest performances, including a return to the northwest for the 1957 Pacific Coast Arts Festival at Reed College which also featured prominent poets, painters, and writers like Mark Tobey, Carl Morris, Kenneth Rexroth and David Park. Dennison was keeping good company, if avoiding the limelight.

With the score of Earth Interval in hand, I reached out to Third Coast Percussion, the superb Chicago-based ensemble who are experts in Cage’s work and everything that came after. An unknown composition for percussion by a connected but unknown female composer from this period seemed like something that we ought to hear, and TCP enthusiastically agreed, taking great care to understand the work in its fullest context.

This is the first complete recording of Earth Interval to become widely available. Perhaps it will go some way to honouring Doris Dennison among the pioneering women of mid-20th century music.

Read Terry Riley’s 2021 obituary of Anna Halprin here.