After fleeing Lithuania to avoid being arrested by the advancing Russian Army in 1944, and living briefly in Bad Nauheim, Frankfurt, Germany, Jurgis Mačiūnas and his family emigrated to the USA in 1948, living in a middle class area of Long Island, New York.
Primarily influenced by John Cage's Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research and an emerging interest in eastern philosophy, a number of avant-garde artists in New York were beginning to run parallel and competing happenings at the beginning of the 1960s [REF].