Patsy Lynch Wood

Patsy Lynch Wood (Student 1942-1948)

 

Patsy Lynch Wood attended Black Mountain College for six years, and graduated with a degree in Music. She became friends with composer/musician John Cage and lived at The Land, a small community founded by former BMC artists and musicians in Stony Point, NY. Ms. Wood played piano in Cage’s Satie Festival during the summer of 1948 and is quoted in one of Cage’s books. Her first job was at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

 

Back To Question Everything!

Nell Goldsmith, Patsy Lynch, ca. 1943 -1944. Archival pigment print from a digital scan of a color slide. Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, State of North Carolina.

[The Satie Festival] proved to be a totally different musical experience from the years before. Cage’s presence was highly exhilarating, through it created an electricity that tore the community into two musical camps. At mealtime, people stood up and made declarations about the very existence of music! All kinds of feelings were generated and persisted throughout the Sumer. For me, it was a time to be questioning music’s “status quo.”
Patsy Lynch Wood, from "Impressions of Music at BMC in the 1940s" in Sprouted Seeds: An Anthology of Personal Accounts

Patsy Lynch Wood, Score for 3-Part Motet for soprano, alto and tenor, 1947. Ink on paper. Collection of Black  Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. Gift of the Artist.