Its 5.30am and I have just woken up - this is the time of year when I wake up earlier and earlier - something to do with the increase in the length of the days, although it is still dark.

Andrew's comments on the USA and musical modernism made me want to check a fact out about Charlie Parker. Its at the end of chapter 24 of Ross Russell's biography. Its 1951-52 and Parker is feeling that the cutting edge is leaving him behind. As Russell puts it - the great days on 52nd St were now history.

Miles has just brought out the Birth of the Cool - an innovative record very much from the new LP era with arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and others for the nine piece band which includes tuba and French horn. As luck would have it this record is an artistic triumph and a commercial failure. Parker confides to Lennie Tristano that he doesnt think he has any thing more to say in the 12 bar blues format. He also speaks of studying with Stephan Wolpe and Varese.

I had this quote on my mind last night on the way home - I was listening to the Naxos collection of music by Varese which is stunning value at �4.99. I was also reading about Trout Mask Replica - Beefheart's masterpiece - recorded while he was still with Frank Zappa's label.

Steve P once gave me a biography of Zappa for my birthday - when I was in my 20s. It opens with Zappa saying how much he liked Varese's music and how influential it was on his early life.

I think Harrison Birtwhistle the arch musical modernist - who studied at Manchester (where Andrew did his PhD) thinks pretty much the same thing.

One point of departure in considering the issues raised by Andrew then is the life of Varese which is deeply rooted in the modernist movement. As a young man studying at the Paris Conservatoire he was good friends with Picasso for example, but he emigrated to New York in the middle of the first world war but not before getting to know Leger, Apollinaire, Dufy, Cocteau and Busoni while he was still in Europe.

In New York, he quickly became a member of the progressive artistic elite which included Marcel Duchamp who had arrived in NYC about six months earlier. A typically Duchampian event took V to the centre of the main avant garde artistic circle in NYC when his leg was injured as he waited for a bus on 5th Avenue. As a result he met the Arensbergs who ran a salon which brought avant garde European artists such as Man Ray and Picabia together with sympathetic US individuals. This effect became the hatchery for Dada in the United States.

At this point I should refer in passing to Henry Cowell - although he was born on the West coast he taught in New York. I am still working on Cowell's Resources for Modern Music - I was knocked out by his theory of undertones. Cowell taught both Gershwin and Bacharach - an interesting musical trio, but I think Bacharach was also taught by Martinu and Milhaud.

In the 30s the key locus is on the West Coast. Schoenberg and Stravinsky emigrate to LA and the young John Cage becomes a student of Schoenbergs. It seems Cage picks up from S the idea that modern composition is about systems. Cage is such an innovator that he sees that the twelve tone system is just one possibility.

Cage moves to New York at the start of the 1940s and immediately makes friends with Duchamp - indeed he dedicates one of his early prepared piano pieces to him. By this time Varese is disillusioned with his lack of success in the USA and has become a recluse.

However Cage draws around him younger composers like Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown in Greenwich Village in the late 40s and early 50s. What happens next is very unusual and has several strands. Cage has teamed up with the dancer Merce Cunningham - another progressive. Dance involves visual design and Cage and his circle get drawn into the Abstratct Expressionist ferment which is erupting in Greenwich Vilage around artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Phillip Guston and the critic Clement Greenberg who is the grand theorist of artistic Modernism. As a result of this efforts are made to re-establish Varese as a figure of the avant garde and he is introduced to this avant-garde artistic group. Artists like Rothko and Pollock immediately see the connection between Varese's ideas and what they are trying to achieve - in a way which the musical elite have not. This is literally at the same time that Parker is thinking (correctly in my view) that he ought to study with Varese.

Cage's system approach to composition at this time has taken him as far as using an 8 by 8 grid with a muiscal event in each cell. He constructs the piece by taking a "walk" through the grid. He is teaching Earle Brown and Brown's father owns a publishing firm. Brown pays for his lessons by giving Cage books from his father's stock. One of these books is a new translation of the I Ching and Cage immediately sees the links between this system and his 64 cell grid.

But Cage and Cunningham are also involved in the Black Mountain College in South Carolina run by Josef Aubers who is an exile from the Bauhaus. The Black Mountain College runs a summer school and the next generation of Abstratct Expressionists - especially Robert Rauschenberg go there to study and also mix with the emerging giants such as Rothko and de Kooning.

About the same time that Earle Brown introduces Cage to the I Ching, Rauschenberg is painting a series of all white canvases which obsess Cage as soon as he sees them. The result is the epoch making Cage composition "four minutes 33 seconds" which is premiered at Black Mountain College - I think in 1951.

At its simplest there is the stupendous mix of individuals and ideas boiling away in Greenwich Village and South Carolina at the start of the 1950s - Cage (through his links with Schoenberg) Duchamp, Varese and Aubers are a conduit which link the first wave of modernism to the worldhistorical eruption of creativity which is taking place. I dont have time this minute to roll this forward but a couple of observations might do the trick. Cage and Cunningham become goods friends with Rauschenberg and Jaspar Johns whose work leads directly to Pop Warhol and Conceptual Art. The Factory is a recreation of the mult-media network that existed in Greenwich Village 15 years earlier.

The history of Minimalism starts with Cages 4 33" and Rauschenbergs white canvases.

When John Cale arrives is New York in the early 1960s he sees the artistic life of the city as a collection of groups each led by a great innovator - Cage , Lamont Young , Rauschenberg. He thinks Lamont is gradually taking over from Cage.

Earle Brown interests me a lot in all of this. He is the composer who is keenest on jazz and he is also a leading experimenter with visual scores. The idea is that new music ought to use new means of instructing the instrumentalists and these new means should draw on the innovations of modern art. At the same time modern jazz shows how new music can be generated away from conventional scores. When I was in NYC I got a CD of Brown's early 50s work based on visual scores with a realisation on flute - plus the scores themselves in the CD book. It would be fun to have a crack.

I am less clued up about Wolpe - he is part of the patterm of Europe to America - he teaches at the Bauhaus and then is a very supportive figure for the young composers in Greenwich Village. But I have never heard any of his music.