Deep Song, a solo modern dance by Martha Graham, premiered on December 19, 1937, at the Guild Theatre in New York City.
"[3] When Cowell was composing the music for Immediate Tragedy, Graham requested another movement, which he called Cante Hondo, Spanish for "deep song".
"It was full of strange, strong creation, full of angular spasms, of Picasso style abstractions in plane and three-dimensional mobility, expressing as no newspaper story with a Madrid date line has done of the struggle..."[9] Program notes for the troupe's 2015 season described "the forms of the dance – its swirls, crawls on the floor, contractions and falls" as "kinetic experiences of the human experience in war...
The Boston Transcript's critic wrote, "the dancer seemed to be overplaying her hand, so that what began as a moving portrait ended, by overstatement, in losing some of its point.
"[11] Another reviewer, noted the dance was "exaggerated in delineation and repetitious in content but a highly effective though stylized portrayal of a tortured mind and body.
Capucilli spent hours alone in the studio with the photographs on the floor in order to find the transitional material necessary for phrasing and emotional content.
[15] Since its reconstruction, Terese Capucilli, Christine Dakin, Joyce Herring, Alessandra Prosperi, Miki Orihara and then Xin Ying, Blakeley White McGuire, Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, have appeared in the solo role.