The Seasons is a ballet with music by John Cage and choreography by Merce Cunningham, first performed in 1947.
[2][3] Cage composed the music in early 1947, in the midst of working on Sonatas and Interludes.
The dancers at the first performance were Gisela Caccialanza, Fred Danieli, Dorothy Dushock, Gerard Leavitt, Tanaquil LeClercq, Job Sanders, Beatrice Tompkins and Cunningham himself.
As in Sonatas and Interludes and the later String Quartet in Four Parts (1950), Cage was influenced by Indian aesthetics and like the latter work, The Seasons is built on the Indian concept of seasons: winter is associated with quiescence, spring with creation, summer with preservation and fall with destruction.
[1] The compositional technique involves using gamuts of sounds, i.e. predefined sonorities (single notes, chords, aggregates); Cage started developing this approach in The Seasons, and later perfected it in String Quartet in Four Parts and Concerto for Prepared Piano.