Dated: 1940

Instrumentation: 6 percussionists (first movement), 4 percussionists (second movement), piano and 2 percussionists (third movement)

A John Cage percussion sextet, DANCE MUSIC FOR ELFRID IDE, will be given its modern world premiere on May 16th, 2007 over Hungarian Radio by the Amadinda Percussion Group. The work, which was accidentally discovered in 2005 by Laura Kuhn of the John Cage Trust while she was visiting the Mills College Archives searching for the manuscript of a different John Cage work, received its first and probably only other performance at Mills College on May 20, 1941.

John Cage was a member of the Dance Faculty at Mills College during 1940 and 1942, and he supplied music for the dance classes of Marian van Tuyl, the principal dance professor at the college. He wrote this work to accompany part of the Thesis Dance Concert of Elfrid Ide who was a graduate student and dance instructor at Mills.

Don Gillespie the editor of the soon to be published new edition of DANCE MUSIC FOR ELFRID IDE notes in the Preface that it is astonishing that this work which comes from a period during which Cage wrote many of his classic percussion pieces has remained unknown until now.