The reverberations of Erik Satie’s 1917 ballet Parade continued to sound well into the 1950s and beyond, thanks to John Cage’s efforts to keep the anarchic experimentation of Satie and his collaborators vibrant. Whether such musical circuses are “modern,” postmodern or hark as Duchamp in Willem de Kooning’s estimation “back to Mesopotamia” is perhaps a question of relative perspective — a conceptual illusion of sorts.

A recent essay by Sheila Christofides celebrates the elegant collaboration (if not the elegant corpse) between avant-garde Paris and the North Carolina Black Mountain School.

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