MORTON FELDMAN – ESSAYS

(ed. Walter Zimmerman, 1985)

PROLOG

ABOUT JIDDISHKEIT

Hans-Klaus Metzger: For many years now, you are writing these soft pieces.
Sometimes I think, they are a kind of mourning epilogue to murdered Jiddishkeit in
Europe and dying Jiddishkeit in America, especially in New York. Is there something
true about it?

Feldman: It's not true; but at the same time I think that's an aspect of my attitude
about being a composer that is mourning. Say, for example, the death of art. I
mean, remember that I'm a New-Yorker and a New-Yorker doesn't think about
Jiddishkeit. You think about Jiddishkeit if you live with only 5000 other Jews in
Frankfurt, so I haven't got that problem. I mean, I don't think of myself as Jewish in
New York. But I do in a sense mourn something that has to do with, say Schubert
leaving me. Also, I really don't feel that it's all necessary any more. And so what I
tried to bring into my music, are just very few essential things that I need. So I at
least keep it going for a little while more. I don't think this explains anything, does
it?

The only thing that applies to me as you talk about Jiddishkeit, is the fact that,
because I'm Jewish, I do not identify with, say Western civilization music. In other
words; when Bach gives us a diminished fourth, I cannot respond that the
diminished fourth means Oh, God. I cannot respond to that diminished fourth as a
symbol. But what my music is mourning, I just don't know what to say. I said just
earlier, that perhaps just mourning. . . I must say you did bring up something that I
particularly don’t want to talk about publicly, but I do talk privately.

To some degree I do believe for example, like with George Steiner, that after Hitler
perhaps there should no longer be art. Those thoughts are always in my mind. There
was a hypocrisy, a delusion to continue, because those values proved to me nothing.
They have no longer any moral basis. And what are our morals in music? Our moral
in music is 19th century German music, isn't it? I do think about that, and I do think
about the fact, that I want to be the first great composer that is Jewish.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN MUSIC-ABOUT THE EARLY WORK

by Frank O'Hara

The last ten years have seen American composers, painters and poets assuming leading roles
in the world of international art to a degree hitherto unexpected. Led by the painters, our
whole cultural milieu has changed and is still changing. The "climate" for receptivity to the new
in art has improved correspondingly, and one of the most important aspects of this change
has been the inter-involvement of the individual arts with one another. Public interest in the
emergence of a major composer, painter or poet has, in recent years, almost invariably been
preceded by his recognition among other painters, poets and musicians. The influence of
esthetic ideas has also been mutual: the very extremity of the differences between the arts
has thrown their technical analogies into sharp relief. As an example of what I mean by this,
we find that making the analogy between certain all-over paintings of Jackson Pollock and the
serial technique of Webern clarifies the one by means of the other - a seemingly "automatic"
painting is seen to be as astutely controlled by the sensibility of Pollock in its assemblage of
detail toward a unified experience as are certain of Webern's serial pieces. And it is interesting
to note that initial public response to works by both artists was involved in bewilderment at
the seeming "fragmentation" of experience. Although these analogies cease to be helpful if
carried too far, it is in the framework of these mutual influences in the arts that Morton
Feldman could cite, along with the playing of Fournier, Rachmaninoff and Tudor and the
friendship of John Cage, the paintings of Philip Guston as important influences on his work. He
adds, "Guston made me aware of the 'metaphysical place' which we all have but which so
many of us are not sensitive to by previous conviction."

I interpret this "metaphysical place", this land where Feldman's pieces live, as the area where
spiritual growth in the work can occur, where the form of a work may develop its inherent
originality and the personal meaning of the composer may become explicit. In a more literal
way it is the space which must be cleared if the sensibility is to be free to express its individual
preference for sound and to explore the meaning of this preference. That the process of
finding this metaphysical place of unpredictability and possibility can be a drastic one is
witnessed by the necessity Feldman felt a few years ago to avoid the academic ramifications of
serial technique. Like the artists involved in the new American painting, he was pursuing a
personal search for expression which could not be limited by any system.

This is in sharp, contrast to the development, of many of Feldman's contemporaries, for

example Boulez and Stockhausen, whose process has tended toward elaboration and
systematization of method. Unlike Feldman's their works are eminently suited to analysis and
what they have lacked in sensuousness they invariably may regain in intellectual profundity
and in the metaphysical implications of their methods. But if we speak of a metaphysical place
in relation to Feldman, it is the condition under which the work was created and which is left
behind the moment a given work has been completed.

Feldman's decision to avoid the serial technique was an instinctive attempt to avoid the
cliche's of the International School of present day avant-garde. He was not to become an
American composer in the historical-reminiscence line, but to find himself free of the
conceptualized and self-conscious modernity of the international movement. Paradoxically, it
is precisely this freedom which places Feldman in the front rank of the advanced musical art of
our time.

A key work in the development away from serial technique is the "Intersection 3" for Piano
(1953). A graph piece, it is totally abstract in its every dimension. Feldman here successfully
avoids the symbolic aspect of sound which has so plagued the abstract works of his
contemporaries by employing unpredictability reinforced by spontaneity - the score indicates
"indeterminacy of pitch" as a direction for the performer. Where others have attempted to
reverse or nullify this aural symbolism (loud-passion, soft tenderness, and so on) to free
themselves. Feldman has created a work which exists without references outside itself, "as if
you're not listening, but looking at something in nature". This is something serialism could not
accomplish. This freedom is shared by the performer to the extent that what he plays is not
dictated beyond the graph "control" - the range of a given passage and its temporal area and
division are indicated, but the actual notes heard must come from the performer's response to
the musical situation. To perform Feldman's graph pieces at all, the musician must reach the
metaphysical place where each can occur, allying necessity with unpredictability. Where a
virtuoso work places technical demands upon the performer, a Feldman piece seeks to engage
his improvisatory collaboration, with its call on musical creativity as well as interpretative
understanding. The performance on this record is proof of how beautifully this can all work
out; yet, the performer could doubtless find other beauties in "Intersection 3" on another
occasion.
"Projection 4" for Violin and Piano (1951) explores an entirely different area of musical
experience. A graph also (see illustration) its marvelous austerity is achieved mainly through
touch, and I will quote the note to the performer as an example of how the individual area of
experience in these graph pieces is indicated to the performers:

Note:

The violin part is graphed above that for the piano. Dynamics are throughout equal and low.
For the violinist: Timbre is indicated: 1 harmonic; P pizzicato; A = arco. Relative pitch (high,
middle, low) is indicated: = high; = middle; = low. Any tone within the ranges indicated may
be freely chosen by the player. Multiple stops are indicated by numbers within the squares.
Duration is indicated by the amount of space taken up by the square of rectangle each box
(: :) being potentially 4 icti. The single ictus or pulse is at the tempo of 72 or thereabouts. For
the pianist: The 1 indicates playing without sounding (for the release of harmonics). Pitches,
their number and duration are indicated as for the violinist. A comparison, of these two graph
pieces, whose ambiances are so totally dissimilar, gives an idea of the great compositional
flexibility possible with graph notation.

Unpredictability is used in a different way still in the "Piece for Four Pianos" (1957). This work,
scored in notation rather than graph, begins simultaneously for all four pianos, after which the
following notes may be played to the end by each of the pianists at time intervals of their
mutual or individual choice. Feldman has said. "The repeated notes are not musical pointillism,
as in Webern, but they are where the mind rests on an image - the beginning of the piece is
like a recognition, not a motif, and by virtue of the repetitions it conditions one to listen." As
we proceed to experience the individual time-responses of the four pianists we are moving
inexorably toward the final image where the mind can rest, which is the end of the piece. In
this particular performance it is as if one were traversing an enormous plain at the opposite
ends of which were two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses.

In all of Feldman's recent work the paramount image is that of touch - "The use of the
instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas." (Which brings us back
to Rachmaninoff, Fournier and Tudor.) In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure
is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the
performer must create the experience with an application of paint on canvas.

On the other hand, one of the most remarkable pieces recorded, here is "Structures for String
Quartet" (1951). It is a classical string quartet without sonata development, without serial
development, in general without benefit of clergy. Like Emily Dickinson's best poems, it does
not seem to be what it is until all questions of "seeming" have disappeared in its own
projection. Its form reveals itself after its meaning is revealed, as Dickinson's passion ignores
her dazzling technique. As with several other Feldman pieces, if you cannot hear "Structures",
I doubt that studying the score would be a help, though it is a thoroughly notated field of
dynamic incident, whose vertical elements are linked shy a sort et by contrapuntal stimulation
of great delicacy and tautness.

In an oeuvre which so insistently provides unpredictability with opportunities for expansion

and breath, the question of notation at all arises, for the graph would seem to provide an
adequate control for the experience and a maximum of differentiation. But differentiation is
not Feldman's point, even in the graph music: the structure of the piece is never the image,
nor in eschewing precise notation of touch is Feldman leaving the field open for dramatic
incident whereby the structure could become an image (as in Boulez). Notation is, then, not so
much a rigid exclusion of chance, but the means of preventing the structure from becoming an
image in these works, and an indication of the composer's personal preference for where,
unpredictability should operate. Also John Cage remarked in this connection. "Feldman's
conventionally notated music is himself playing his graph music". And of course the degree of
precision in the notation is directly related to the nature of the musical experience Feldman is
exposing. This notation can be very precise, as in "Extensions 1" for Violin and Piano (1951),
which indicates an increasing tempo of inexorable development from beginning to end by
metronomic markings, as well as the dynamics and expressive development.

Although the traditionally notated works are in the majority on this record ("Extensions 4, Two
Pianos" for Two Pianos, "Three Pieces" for String Quartet), I have gone into the use of
unpredictability in this music at such length in order to reach a distinction about its use in
much contemporary music. In Feldman's work unpredictability involves the performer and the
audience much in the same way it does the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and
intensity. But in much of the extreme vanguard music in America and Europe, particularly that
utilizing tape and electronic devices along with elements of unpredictability, the statistical
unpredictability has occurred in the traditional manner during the making of the piece; it has
been employed preconceptually as a logical outgrowth of serial technique and it is dead by the
time you hear it, though the music is alive in the traditional sense of hearing. What Feldman is
assuming, and it is a courageous assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and inspired
musician who has the best interests of the work at heart. This attitude leaves him free to
concentrate on the main inspiration-area where the individual piece is centered.

What he finds in these centers - whether it is the sensuousness of tone and the cantilena like
delicacy of breathing in "Three Pieces" for String Quartet (1954-56), or the finality of the
"dialogues" in "Extensions 4" for Three Pianos (1952-53) - is on each occasion a personal and
profound revelation of the inner quality of sound. The works recorded here already are an
important contribution to the music of the 20th Century. Whether notated or graphed, his
music sets in motion a spiritual life which is rare in any period and especially so in ours.

THE ANXIETY OF ART

Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is
difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away.
Still, there is this sense of something imminent. And what is imminent, we find, is neither the
past nor the future, but simply - the next ten minutes. (Pasternak)

Do you remember in Dr. Zhivago the way history sweeps everything out of his life, everything
creating the slightest human feeling? How his identity is crushed by history, by the revolution?
How everything personal, every fantasy, every human vulnerability, loses its meaning and is
swept aside?

The same type of dynamic that swept away Pasternak's life can also take place in art. Here
too, the fact that a thing happened, that it exists in history, gives it an authority over us that
has nothing to do with its actual value or meaning. We see it life; why do we fail to see that in
art too, the facts and successes of history are allowed to crush all that is subtle, all that is
personal, in our work?

Yet the artist does not resist. He identifies with this force that can only destroy him. In fact, it
has an irresistible attraction for him, in that it offers him known goals, the illusion of safety in
his work, the tempting knowledge that nothing succeeds in art -like someone else's success.
In a word, because it relieves the anxiety of art.

It is true a price must be paid for this protection, this comfort, this net spread beneath him if
he falls. But think of what he gains when he identifies his art with a historical position. It is as
though some Mephistopheles stood behind him, whispering, "Go ahead. Create now. We'll
settle later."

Now let us make clear that to identify with history does not necessarily refer to the past. It
can refer equally to the newest and most extreme developments in art. An artist can be as
enamored of the new as of the old. He can even be committed to both, like Babel's dead
young soldier who is found with a picture of Lenin in one pocket, and his twillim in the other.
In fact, this is perhaps the most attractive position of all. When Schoenberg, for instance,
formulated his principle of composition with the twelve tones, he predicted this would extend
the Germanic tradition of music for another hundred years. His greatest satisfaction in having
devised something new seems to be that he extended something old. And for many,
Schoenberg holds the key to going backward culturally, yet appearing to move forward
artistically.

Differences in historical position, however, have always seemed unimportant to me. Boulez,
for instance, is intensely involved with how his music is constructed, while Duchamp selects a
ready-made. Yet they both meet in that what you see or hear is not as important as the
historical stance that brought it about.

For ten years of my life I worked in an environment committed to neither the past nor the
future. We worked, that is to say, not knowing where what we did belonged, or whether it
belonged anywhere at all. What we did was not in protest against the past. To rebel against
history is still to be part of it. We were simply not concerned with historical processes. We
were concerned with sound itself. And sound does not know its history.

The revolution we were making was not then or now appreciated. But the whole American
Revolution was never appreciated either. Not really. It has never been given the importance of
the French or Russian Revolutions. Why should it be? There was no blood bath, no built-in
Terror.

We do not celebrate an act of violence - we have no Bastille Day. All it was, was, "Give me
liberty, or give me death." Our work did not have the authoritarianism. I might almost say,
the terror, inherent in the teachings of Boulez, Schoenberg, and now Stockhausen.

This authoritarianism, this pressure, is required of a work of art. That is why the real tradition
of twentieth-century America, a tradition evolving from the empiricism of Ives, Varese and
Cage, has been passed over as "iconoclastic" - another word for unprofessional. In music,
when you do something new, something original youÕre an amateur. Your imitators - these
are the professionals.

It is these imitators who are interested not in what the artist did, but the means he used to do
it. This is where craft emerges as an absolute an authoritarian position that divorces itself
from the creative impulse of the originator. The imitator is the greatest enemy of originality.
The "freedom" of the artist is boring to him, because in freedom he cannot reenact the role of
the artist. There is, however, another role he can and does play. It is this imitator, this
"professional" that makes art into aurure.

This is the man who emphasizes the historical impact of the original work of art. Who takes
from it and puts to use everything that can be utilized in a collective sense. Who brings the
concepts of virtue, morality, and "the general good" into it. Who brings the world into it.

Proust tells us the great mistake lies in looking for the experience in the object rather than in
ourselves. He calls this a "running away from one's own life." How many of these
"professionals" would go along with this kind of thinking about art? They give us continual
examples of looking for the experience in the object - in their case, the system, the craft that
forms the basis of their world.

The atmosphere of a work of art, what surrounds it, that "place" in which it exists - all this is
thought of a lesser thing, charming but not essential. Professionals insist on essentials. They
concentrate on the things that make art. These are the things they identify with it, think of, in
fact, as it - not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it.
This is what every painter I know understands. And this is what almost no composer I know
understands.

The problem of music, of course, is that it is, by its very nature, a public art. That is, it must
be played before we can hear it. One beats the drum, then hears the sound. That's reasonable
enough. One can't just imagine sound as an abstraction, as not being related to someone
pounding the piano or beating a drum. To play is the thing. This is the reality of music.

Yet somehow there is something demeaning in the fact that there is no other dimension for
music than this public one. The composer doesn't even have the privacy of the playwright,
whose play can exist as a piece of literature. The composer has to be the actor too. And this is
embarrassing when I don't like his act. The lines of a masterpiece may be great, perfect, there
may be no argument with them; but I may not like the way not like the way the composer is
saying his own lines.

What I want to make clear is that composers instinctively gear themselves to this rhetorical,
almost theatrical element of projection in music. Their most delicate whisper is a stage
whisper, a sotto voce. Though tonality has long been abandoned, and atonality, I understand,
has also seen its day, the same gesture of the instrumental attack remains. The result is an
aural plane that has hardly changed since Beethoven, and in many ways is primitive - as
Cezanne makes us see Renaissance space as primitive.

Naturally, if the instrumental attack in music always creates the same aural plane, something
must be done to activate, to vary it. It must be propped up to make it more interesting. That
is why music is so involved with differentiation. A piece like "Socrate" by Satie, that goes on
and on, with very little happening, very little changing, is practically forgotten. Of course,
everyone knows it's a marvelous piece. Every year there's talk about it, every year someone
says, "Yes, let's do Socrate" - but somehow it isn't ever done...

Now, as things become increasingly compressed and telescoped, as differentiation becomes, in

fact, the subject of most composition, music has taken on the aspect of some extraordinary
athletic feat. Think of a runner trained to run backward at great speeds, or, what is even more
difficult, to run backward very slowly and steadily. Why backward? Since music is increasingly
obsessed with this one idea - variation - one must always be looking back at one's material for
implications to go on. Change is the only solution to an unchanging aural plane created by the
constant element of projection, of attack.

This is perhaps why in my own music I am so involved with the decay of each sound, and try
to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we
hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this
expresses where the sound exists in our hearing - leaving us rather than coming toward us.

I was once told about a woman living in Paris - a descendant of Scriabin - who spent her
entire life writing music not meant to be heard. What it is, and how she does it, is not very
clear; but I have always envied this woman. I envy her insanity, her impracticality.

In reading over what I have just written, I see that in an implicit way I suggest the possibility
of another type of aural dimension. Actually, that is not what concerns me. What concerns me
is that condition in music where aural dimension is obliterated. What do I mean by this? The
obliteration of the aural plane doesnÕt mean the music should be inaudible - though my own
music may sometimes seem to suggest this. Offhand, I think of Schubert, "Fantasie" in F-
Minor. The weight of the melody here is such that you can't place where it is, or what it's or
what it's coming from. There are not many experiences of this kind in music, but a perfect
example of what I mean can be found in Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Frick. Not only is it
impossible for us to comprehend how this painting was made; we cannot even fix where it
exists in relation to our vision.
Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and
observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest
in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than
musicians.

The painter achieves mastery by allowing what he is doing to be itself. In a way, he must step
aside in order to be in control. The composer is just learning to do this. He is just beginning to
learn that controls can be thought of as nothing more than accepted practice.

I, for one, listening to so much of the music of the past twenty years, must admit I still find
the controls somewhat intimidating. But the intimidation is waning, because all the music
seems to have are these controls. I believe it was Veblen who once said of the economic goals
of America, "What good is all this planning when the ends are so indeterminate?" One could
make the same observation about music today. We see the same abundance - but of what? As
the old mythology dies away, as music no longer extols the same subject matter it once did, a
new mystique arises. The mystique of its own making, of its own construction. What
composers apparently seek today is an infallible technical position. Although they claim to be
so selective, so responsible for their choices, what they really choose is a system or a method
that, with the precision of a machine, chooses for them. In the past, if you didn't like
something, you didn't use it; you let it alone. Now everything is used. I remember certain
composers who worked all the time. Now they have big reputations, and work an hour a week.
They do a lot, they have so much to work from.

At least in the music of the past, when we find controls taking over, there is still a dichotomy;
we can still distinguish between the man and his machine. This is true even when controls
take over most completely. Take the "Grose Fuge", possibly the most revealing of all
Beethoven's compositions. An aura of danger, of something gone amiss, hovers above this
music; a suggestion of a final judgment turned against itself. One suspects that Beethoven in
this work was pushed aside by the music's onslaught.

Do I dare to suggest here that whatever transcendental quality this work possesses might be
just because of this fact? Just because what we have here, in its most volcanic and pathetic
way, is a control in control of its master? What will happen to my thesis, to my years of
thinking and working in the opposite direction?

The answer to the paradox may be in something I have written elsewhere: "For art to
succeed, its creator must fail." How many times have I felt, while listening to a work of Cage,
a sense of regret, or loss for its creator? And when we meet face to face at these concerts, I
would really like to say to him, "Let me extend my condolences to you personally, but tell,
"Atlas Eclipticalis" it was most thrilling experience of my life."

If there is no such thing as a moral, or an honest, or a "true" position in art, what does
approximate it is an art with just a little less control.

Of course, the history of music has always been involved in controls, rarely with any new
sensitivity to sound. Whatever breakthroughs have occurred, took place only when new
systems were devised. The systems extended music's vocabulary, but in essence they were
nothing more than complex ways of saying the same things. Music is still based on just a few
technical models. As soon as you leave them you are in an area of music not recognizable as
such.

Agreed, we might begin every age with the same handful of Assumptions, but not with the
same closely related technical procedures throughout all of history! This obsessive emphasis
on a ritual which has become identical with the belief it symbolizes, leads us to only one
conclusion - that music must be some kind of religion. The mission of music is evidently to
propagate the tenets of this religion. Schšnberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Boulez - their fame is
because they did exactly this.

Interestingly enough, it is not to these men that so many of the younger generation have
turned as to an almost religious force, but to a man totally removed from them - John Cage.
Not since Tolstoi has there been an artistic figure who has made such an impression on the
youth. The clue to this phenomenon may perhaps be found in a conversation between Cage
and a visitor at his home in Stony Point. The visitor was speaking of Cage's many remarkable
achievements and innovations, praising the enormous progress he had brought to music. Cage
walked over to the window, looked out into the woods, and finally said, "I just can't believe I
am better than anything out there."

This is not really an artistic, or even a philosophic, position. It is a religious position. Isn't this
what Cage implies when he says he created a camera for others to take the picture? if art is
self-effacement to begin with, what Cage achieves is self abolishment. We said earlier that the
painter's mastery consists in stepping aside and letting things be themselves. Cage stepped
aside to such a degree that we really see the end of the world, the end of art. That is the
paradox. That this very self-abolishment mirrors its opposite - an omniscient dogma of final
things. It does suggest, it does have an aura, of art's final revelation.

What does Cage give us besides this camera? It would be hard to say. Yet why do we know, in
the most ambiguous musical circumstances, when it is the ear what is not Cage? We know at
once if the performer is involved with his own glamour, or if he is insensitive, or if he
misunderstands. Like a certain Personage we will not name, Cage is hidden, but we know
what's good and bad in his eyes. If you're asked what is Cage, that's hard. But even
Stockhausen knows when it's not Cage.

He does not give the young people of this generation an ideal. He does not cry, like
Mayakovsky, "Down with your art, down with your love, down with your society, down with
your God." The revolution is over. Mayakovsky's, and ours. What Cage has to offer is almost a
type of resignation. What he has to teach is that just as there is no way to arrive at art, there
is also no way not to.

A close and valued friend once became annoyed at my persistent admiration of Cage. "How
can you feel this", he said, "when it's apparent that everything he stands for negates your own
music?"

This was my answer: "If anyone negates my music, it is, say, Boulez. With Boulez you have all
the aura of a right or righteous gesture. It looks like art, smells and feels like nothing but art,
yet there is about it no creative pressure that makes a demand on me. It lulls me to sleep
with its own easily acquired virtues."

My only argument with Cage, and there is only one argument, is with his dictum that, "Process
should imitate nature in its manner of operation." Or, as he put it on another occasion,
"Everything is music."

Just as there is an implied decision in a precise and selective art, there is an equally implied
decision in allowing everything to be art. There is a Zen riddle that replies to its own question.
"Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" the riddle asks. "Answer either way and you lose your
own Buddha nature."

Faced with a mystery about divinity, according to the riddle, we must always hover, uncertain,
between the two possible answers. Never, on pain of losing our own divinity, are we allowed to
decide. My quarrel with Cage is that he decided. A brilliant student of Zen, he has somehow
missed this subtle point.
Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now,
years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be
continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing
more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I
said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

The question continually on my mind all these years is: to what degree does one give up
control, and still keep that last vestige where one can call the work one's own? Everyone must
find his own answer here, but there is a story about Mondrian that may clarify what I mean.

Someone suggested that since Mondrian used areas of all one color, why not use a spray
instead of painting these areas? Mondrian was very interested, and immediately tried it. Not
only did the picture not have the feel of a Mondrian, it didn't even have the look of a
Mondrian. No one who has not experienced something of this will understand it.

The word that comes closest is perhaps touch. For me, at least, this seems to be the answer,
even if it is nothing more than the ephemeral feel of the pencil in my hand when I work. IÕm
sure if I dictated my music, even if I dictated it exactly, it would never be the same.

But this whole question of being an artist comes only after so much work and reminiscence
begins to saturate your life. Proust did not know what his "subject" was until his life was
almost over. What you are, or are about to become, is clear perhaps to others, but never to
yourself. The fact that Flaubert could say to George Sand (after writing "Bovary") that he is
not sure whether he wants to become a writer, is close to what I mean. One never has an
identity as an artist, but in a vague way remembers oneself in that role.

The trouble is we use a theological dialectic to understand the whole mechanism of art. But
theological speculation has all too often been very much of this world; the search for God
merely a mask for the search for knowledge. ThatÕs why Spinoza was rejected. All he had to
offer was God; nobody wanted that.

The search for art, all too often, has been another mask for the search for knowledge. Another
attempt to reach heaven with facts. Since the Tower of Babel, this attempt has failed. You
canÕt reach heaven with knowledge, you canÕt reach it with ideas, you canÕt even reach it
with belief - remember our Zen riddle!

Years back someone said to me, "If you love something, why change it?"

Though this observation was not made about the art of the past, it very well might be. To
answer it, one must understand that the love of the past in art is something very different to
the artist than it is to the audience. The artist's life, remember, is a short one, the ordinary
span of, say, seventy-odd. The audience, on the other hand, goes on for centuries, and is, in
fact, immortal.

The audience feels the loss in change more crucially than the artist, because it loves art with
the passionate love one gives a thing one can never really possess. What it incessantly
demands of the artist is for him to make up for this loss. But it is very hard for the artist. He
feels the audience is suffocating art with its love and concern. He doesnÕt understand the
nature of their love, or the nature of their loss.

But this is perhaps a digression. What I am trying to lead up to is that there is a difference
between the many anxieties of an artist trying to make something, trying to find safeguards
against failure, and the anxiety of art. The anxiety of art is a special condition, and actually is
not an anxiety at all, though it has all the aspects of one. It comes about when art becomes
separate from what we know, when it speaks with its own emotion.
Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is
difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away.
Still, there is this sense of something imminent. And what is imminent, we find, is neither the
past nor the future, but simply - the next ten minutes. The next ten minutes... We can go no
further than that, and we need go no further.

If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it. If there is a connection made with history, it is after
the fact, and can be perfectly summed up in the words of de Kooning, "History doesn't
influence me. I influence it."

AFTER MODERNISM

What if I met Pissarro in his own time - say, when he was fifty, a man of unique talent and
with a unique position in the art world? What if I watched him slowly growing older, slowly
falling under the influence of the younger men? Would I understand better how an idea takes
over in the world of art - be in a better position to see the profound irony of idea as opposed
to life? In Pissarro's century it was discovered that Nature is not a fixed ideal, but a thing to be
reconstructed according to the personal vision of the artist. With this thought begins
modernity. And with this thought modernity ends. Where the pre-modernists had pursued
nature in terms of its omniscience (i.e., that to become one with nature one had to paint like a
god), modernity found its omniscient metaphor in process.

Pissarro appears not to have understood or had the gift for invention, or rather for that
"literary rightness" so characteristic of modernity. The broken brushstroke to which he finally
capitulated - the Pointillism of the younger men - was actually after a literary fact rather than
a painterly one. Pointillism, after all, is an idea about painting. An idea extracted from the
sensory experience, but nevertheless an idea. Impressionism itself is a literary idea, as
opposed to an artistic rightness. The modernist is magnificently literary always. This is not to
detract from his genius; nevertheless it is a practical genius. How could it be otherwise, when
escaping from the status quo of nature? A grand plan must be made ready for this escape,
and above all - a practical plan!

Pissarro did not know that for the young the emotion of being on the barricades is enough. He
did not know that the young do not have responsibility - only audacity. Like Cezanne, he was
under the illusion that truth was to be found in the process. Unlike Cezanne, he did not create
his own process. And so he failed. It is important for us to understand his failure - more than
their successes. We need his failure, for it contains a human element that hardly exists in
Modernity.

Just as the Germans killed music, the French killed painting, by bringing into it the literary
clarity that had produced a Stendhal - whose motto, you will remember, was "To be clear at
all costs". But in painting you cannot decide a priori what is going to be clear. That's why
Fragonard, who aimed at an artistic rightness, looks so much more ridiculous than Delacroix,
who has the whole literary apparatus holding him up. One has only to look at a Delacroix to
see that ideas are almost literally holding the painting together!

I have always thought this reliance on the literary arose quite naturally out of European
culture, in the constant pull between the religious and the esthetical. The esthetical, of course,
is traditionally defensive because of the religious. Painting, literature, none of the arts could
deal with abstract thought, could be conceived of abstractly; they had to present ideas with
which to fight this other Idea.

To understand Cezanne, we must realize that if he was not of his own time, neither was he
really of ours. He is understood too much by his influence. In essence, his idea is directly
opposed to that of the modernist. With Cezanne it is always how he sees that determines how
he thinks, where the modernist, on the other hand, has changed perception by way of the
conceptual. In other words, how one thinks has become the sensation.

Cezanne creates a special problem for us because he was so attuned to the process that he
actually mistook it for life. We do not know whether the monumental coldness we feel is
coming from the man or from his process. Like Manet, Cezanne gave us the "painting as a
painting", but he also gave us our last great revelation about nature. This is what makes his
"analytic" approach so extraordinarily moving. For Cezanne the means had become an ideal.

In modernity we find all Cezanne's preoccupation with process - without this ideal. But without
an ideal one can only view life like a social scientist.

Nature, of course, is not life. A symbol, a metaphor - at most a moral. Used as a subject, it is
a painfully literary as anything else. Yet to be obsessed with its secrets brought about an
ambition, a virtuosity we do not find in modernity. We have only to compare the virtuosity of
Picasso with that of Botticelli to see how true this is.

Modernity reveals itself slowly - there is a stutter within its ironies. It is as fearful of success
as it is of failure. And it is so audience-oriented that an Andy Warhol can finally be taken as
seriously as a Picasso. Picasso himself, the Arch Modernist, the man in whom the whole
movement culminates, lets his audience in on everything, uses them almost as a third eye.
Cezanne is not responsible for Picasso. But Picasso is responsible for Warhol.

It is painful to observe that modernity's most advanced ideas, its most adventurous works, are
so often academic - if not in practice, then in theory. People who criticize modernity fail to
realize that everything they want - all the didacticism, all the super-logic they long for - are all
right there. In all the search of a Proust, or even of a Cezanne, all their penetrating analysis of
nature and human nature, what lingers is but this analysis. If something else is wanted from
these men, we must skirt the edge of a Cezanne canvas, where his touch is free from purpose,
or go to the very end of Proust, where metaphor can no longer protect him.

With modernity the painter no longer had to make that perilous transition from one world to
another called "He has only to "relate" each area, and each idea. Yet it was in this transition,
in this journey, that the artist learned a swiftness, a surety, a Nijinsky-like utterance of his
limbs, an incredible utilization of sight, that we associate now "only with the art of the past.
This total involvement, this total coordination of the sense, this complete sensual experience
has only very recently been captured again in Abstract expressionism. Here, in reaction to
modernity, there is an insistence that one can no longer take refuge in ideas, that thought is
one thing and its realization another, that real humility does not lie in all this super-rationality,
but again, in trying to paint like a god.

To fully grasp the significance of passage it may help to think of it in terms of music. In late
Schubert, for instance, the transition from one musical idea to another is "not" only apparent,
but even too apparent. Like a bad poker player, Schubert always shows his hand. But this very
faultiness, this very failure is his virtue. In it we see all the ingenuity, all the genius of the
artist. In other words, we hear the bravura in a Schubert sonata as clearly as we see it in the
lace sleeve of Vel‡zquez. In Beethoven, on the other hand, we feel a more powerful reserve.
In Beethoven we don't know where the passage begins and where it ends; we don't know we
are in a passage. His motifs are often so brief, of such short duration, that they disappear
almost immediately into the larger idea. The overall experience of the whole composition
becomes the passage.

Cezanne carries this idea even further into an extraordinary concept of one's whole life work
as the passage. This is why his paintings are not objects like the paintings of Manet, who
simply finishes one and begins another. Isn't it true that Cezanne makes everyone else look
like a caricature of "the artist at work"? Doesn't he make it clear that it is a self-deception on
their part to think they can "begin" or "finish" anything? Cezanne of course is not the first.
Don't we also feel in Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt that the whole continuity of their
work is the passage? Not until Mondrian do we discover this again. For the life of me, I can't
tell which Mondrian succeeds and which fails - they are all so much part of the same thing.

It is rather strange how continually Mondrian's world touches that of the painters of the New
York School in the fifties. Looking at the facts, Mondrian not only embraced Cubism when he
first came to Paris, but embraced it with all the zeal of the convert; in fact he even clung to it
after everybody else had given it up. If Cezanne "solidified" Impressionism, it was Mondrian
who gave Cubism fluidity. It is hard today to realize how momentous Cubism was at that time.
It had taken over the world of art to an extraordinary degree. So much so that it's quite
surprising to see the perfect ease with which both Picasso and Braque left it. "We gave up
Cubism because we loved painting", was Braque's casual explanation. Very witty - very French
- but he forgot that all the others had given up painting because they loved Cubism. Only in
Europe do you find men like that - men who make a whole revolution, guillotine anybody and
everybody who disagrees with it, and then change their mind.

The irony of Mondrian is that, like every Messiah, he was Messianic about things that cannot
be transmitted. We must be grateful, however, that Mondrian the Messiah failed, for that
failure gave us Mondrian the painter. It was because, in his own words, he was, involved with
"total sensuousness -total intuition" that Mondrian finally felt his way out of Cubism.

Though to the end of his life he went back to those first principles that had taken so great a
hold over him in those Paris years, there is an almost "indeterminate" aspect in Mondrian. Not
in relation to the placement of his square, but in how he painted toward it. Mondrian did not
begin with the square. He slowly arrived at it, arrived at it not as a consummate idea (this
came only toward the end of his life), but as antagonist as well as protagonist. In effect
Mondrian is fighting the square - resisting it. He erases - he paints on it - he paints over it
-bypasses it - ignores it - destroys it. It was only toward the end of his life that the square
itself began to do what his brush did earlier. He realized then (as Pollock did in his own way)
that a totally pure rhythm cannot be articulated by the sensuous brushstroke. Mondrian's final
leap was out of the idiom - out of the classic enigma of painting altogether. Where earlier he
couldn't get close enough to the canvas, in these last canvases it is as if he stepped out into
the life that surrounded him. No wonder he once said to Max Ernst. "It is not you but I who
am the Surrealist."

Of course it is the polemical work that becomes the spokesman for any age - like John Cage
today, who many people feel speaks for me. But what was really interesting about the
Abstract Expressionists was the singularly non -polemical environment they created. One must
understand this point; it is crucial to understand that Abstract Expressionism was not fighting
the traditional historical position, not fighting authority, not fighting religion. This is what gives
it that uniquely American tone; it did not inherit the polemical continuity of European art. If
Mondrian was a fanatic in the European tradition, Guston is merely a compulsive - quite
another thing. Mondrian wanted to save the world. You have only to look at a Rothko to know
that he wanted to save himself.

We think of Rothko, of Mondrian as simplifying the problem of painting, not realizing that they
added a still further complication. How could anything that never existed before be considered
simple? How could a process that did not reveal itself be meaningful, at a time when process
is how we have come to understand art?

What links Mondrian, Rothko and Guston? An unyielding tenacity that suggests nature more
than man's inventiveness. What keeps their work from becoming a self-contained object is
that each painting gravitates toward the other, either in memory or in anticipation. Again as in
nature the experience is in depth, and not a surface to be seen on a wall. We will come back
to this thought again a little later.
In my own field, music, the high points have come when a compromise was effected between
the horizontal and the vertical, as in Bach and then in Webern. Perhaps this is also true of
Piero della Francesca and Cezanne. Mondrian, closer to this simultaneous perfection, seems to
want to erase it by constantly disturbing the picture's degree of visibility. Yet the visibility of
the picture was his only concern. So much so that he hid the brushstroke. But this only
revealed even more clearly the touch, the pressure, the unique tone of his "performance". It is
for this reason that his paintings seem to be painted from afar, but must be looked at so
closely as not to see the edge of the canvas.

Rothko gives a totally opposite sensation. There is virtually no distance between his brush and
canvas. One views it from a vast distance in which its center disappears.

Guston, neither close nor distant, like a fleeting constellation projected on the canvas and then
removed, suggests an ancient Hebrew metaphor: God exists but is turned away from us.

What is the intelligence behind such work that can make the leap without the need of
organizational principle into the successful orchestration of a work of art? In music that leap is
between tone and sound. Tone being that which we relate - sound that which follows not by
logic, but by affinity.

We are taught to think of music as an abstract language - not realizing how functional it is,
how related to that other spirit, whether it be literary or a literary metaphor of technique. Can
we say that the great choral music of the Renaissance is abstract? Quite the opposite. Josquin,
who had a genius for making a gorgeous musical coloration around a devotional word, uses
music to convey a religious idea. Boulez uses it to impress and dazzle the intellect by
representing what seems to be the mountain peaks of human logic. One takes it for granted
that Beethoven's Grand Fugue is composed of abstract components making a magnificently
abstract musical whole. It was only recently that I really began to hear it for what it is: a very
literary stormy hymn - a march to God. Music can't be so very abstract when it serves such
different and such definite functions!

The abstract, on the other hand, is not involved with ideas. It is an inner process that
continually appears and becomes familiar like another consciousness. The most difficult thing
in an art experience is to keep intact this consciousness of the abstract.

In the interest of clarity, perhaps we had better separate the word "abstract" as I am now
using it from what it usually implies. The abstract in the sense I use the term has appeared in
art all through the history of art - an emotion the philosophers have failed to categorize. To
make it perfectly clear that it is this uncategorized emotion that I wish to describe, we had
better call it the Abstract Experience. We would like to surrender to this Abstract Experience.
We would like to let it take over. But we must constantly separate it from the imagination, or
rather, that aspect of the imagination that is in the world of the fanciful. In my own work I feel
the constant pull of ideas. On the one hand, there is the inconclusive abstract emotion. On the
other, when you do something, you want to do it in a concrete, tangible way. There is a real
fear of the Abstract because one does not know its function. The imagination is so many
things; it can go so many ways. Paul Klee attests to the infinite possibilities of the imagination.
The abstract, or rather the Abstract Experience, is only one thing -a unity that leaves one
perpetually speculating. The imagination builds its speculative fantasy on known facts. Facts
that have their basis in a very real, a very literary world. Even when it is irrational, it can be
measured in terms of the rational - like Surrealism. The imagination provides answers without
a metaphor. The Abstract Experience is a metaphor without an answer. Whereas the literary
kind of art, the kind we are close to, is involved in the polemic we associate with religion, the
Abstract Experience is really far closer to the religious. It deals with the same mystery - reality
- whatever you choose to call it.
Some years ago, Guston and I made plans to have dinner together. I was to meet him at his
studio. When I arrived he was painting and reluctant to leave off. "I'll take a nap", I told him.
"Wake me up when you are ready."

I opened my eyes after an hour or so. He was still painting, standing almost on top of the
canvas, lost in it, too close to really see it, his only reality the innate feel of the material he
was using. As I awoke he made a stroke on the canvas, then turned to me, confused, almost
laughing because he was confused, and said with a certain humorous helplessness. "Where is
it?"

A blind person who works with the knowledge of the confines he moves in might, because of
some slight unexpected shock, momentarily lose that all-important sense of the space around
him. The simple fact that I woke up at that moment had much the same effect on Guston. It
was as though he himself awoke - awoke to a sudden sense of the danger of what he was
doing. Yet the painting itself is not a representation of that danger - of that ambition. That
collision with the Instant which I witnessed is the first step to the Abstract Experience. And the
Abstract Experience cannot be represented. It is, then, not visible in the painting, yet it is
there - felt. In the same sense that Kierkegaard said the religious "dethrones" the esthetical,
one can say that the Abstract Experience in Guston's painting dethrones the visible
masterpiece before us.

I suppose it would have been fitting if Frank and I had met on the train coming to New York,
like in a Russian novel. Actually I'm not certain when my personal memories of him begin.
Let's just say he was there, waiting for us all.

What I remember is mostly what he said about myself or one of the others. He never talked
about his own work; at least, not to me. If ever I complimented him on something he had
done he would answer, all smiles, "well - thank you". That was the end of it. As if he were
saying, "Now, you don't have to congratulate me about a thing. Naturally, everything I do is
first rate, but it's you who needs looking after."

He admired my music because its methodology was hidden. Yet he admired other music too,
whose method was unashamedly exposed. Though he understood and appreciated my
particular position in regard to virtuosity, he did not share it. Frank loved virtuosity, loved the
pyrotechnics of it. He was, in fact, able to love and accept more difficult kinds of work than
one would have thought possible. It is interesting that a in circle that demanded partisanship
above all, he was so totally accepted. I suppose we recognized that his wisdom came from his
own "system" - the dialectic of the heart. This was his secret. That was what made it possible
for him, without ever being merely eclectic, to write so beautifully about both Pollock and
Pasternak, to dedicate a poem to Larry Rivers one day and to Philip Guston the next. Nobody I
knew resented Frank's love for an irrelevant genius like Rachmaninoff. We all know it was not
Rachmaninoff who was our enemy, but the second-rate artist who dictates what art should be.

His intense involvement with so many different levels of work, so many different kinds of
artist, naturally created great demands on his personal loyalties. But it was part of O'Hara's
genius to be oblivious to these demands, to treat the whole thing as if it were some big,
frantic, glamorous movie set. To us he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to
party, from poem to poem - a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger
Rogers. Yet I know if Frank could give me one message from the grave as I write this
remembrance he would say, "Don't tell them the kind of man I was, Morty. Did I do it. Never
mind the rest."

The sense of unease we feel when we look at a Guston painting is that we have no idea that
we must now make a leap into this Abstract emotion; we look for the painting in what we
think is its reality - on the canvas. Yet the penetrating thought, the unbearable creative
pressure inherent in the Abstract Experience, reveals itself constantly as a unified emotion.
The more it does this, naturally, the more distant it becomes from the imagery that it
conveys. In this sense, it is not one painting we are looking at, but two. This is what I meant
earlier when I described Guston's painting as neither close nor distant - not confined to a
painting space but rather existing somewhere in the space between the canvas and ourselves.
Let me try to make my meaning clear. In Cezanne's late painting, perspective appears almost
obliterated. The plane is pushed so close to us that it is almost hard to see. Yet it keeps intact
the reality of a painting painted on a canvas. Cezanne invented a way to paint something
where Guston invented something to paint. Because of this the play of light and dark no
longer takes place on the canvas per se. It becomes visible only when you perceive that it is
not on the canvas.

What does one say about Rothko? Mondrian and Guston give us at least a dilemma. This
attracts us, gives us something to hang on to, if nothing else. But we cannot climb those big
smooth Rothko surfaces. Last year in Los Angeles a certain lady told me about a lecture Frank
O'Hara once gave on the New York School. When he put on the slide of a Rothko painting, he
gave a long sigh, said "It's so beautiful - next slide please." The lady was indignant. "O'Hara
came all the way to Los Angeles arid that's all he had to say", she complained. I asked
whether she liked Rothko's painting. She didn't, which explained everything.

Rothko is closer to life, yet seems to be without the dilemma of life. And how are we to
understand life except in terms of its dilemma? As we all know, if life doesn't give us dilemma?
As we all know, if life doesn't give us dilemmas we invent them. Where with Mondrian arid
Guston one must leap into the abstractness in order to experience the painting (and we can
make the decision to make that leap), with Rothko we must find a way out of it.

Guston once said that at a certain point of involvement, the time it takes to touch his brush to
the palette, pick up some paint and bring it back to the canvas, is too long for him. Years ago
there were procedures, questions of what you were going to put in arid what you were going
to leave out. Today there is no ritualistic way to "get there". It has to happen. It's the
immediacy that counts. Whether that immediacy takes ten minutes or ten years is irrelevant.
The leap into the Abstract is more like going to another place where the time changes. Once
you make that leap there are no longer any definitions.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no existing set of conditions on how to begin a
work of art. One can begin with practically anything. This is just a matter of impetus, of
energy, or wanting to "do something". It is no longer even important how much work you put
into it, how long you sit on the egg, so to speak, before it hatches. In a sense, work is just
another aspect of art's polemic with the religious. Work is used to justify art - give it some
degree of legitimacy. The main thing now is not where you begin, or even what you put into it.
The main thing really is when is it finished.

Guston tells us he does not finish a painting but "abandons" it. At what point does he abandon
it? Is it perhaps at the moment when it might become a "painting?" After all, it's not a
"painting" that the artist really wanted. There is a strange propaganda that because someone
composes or paints, what he necessarily wants is music or a picture. Completion is not in tying
things up, not in "giving one's feelings", or "telling the truth". Completion is simply the
perennial death of the artist. Isn't any masterpiece a death scene? Isn't that why we want to
remember it, because the artist is looking back on something when it's too late, when it's all
over, when we see it finally, as something we have lost?

Mondrian, Rothko, Guston - all of them seem to have come to art by another route, a route
abandoned and forgotten by modernity, yet, to my mind, the path that has really kept art
alive.

LOST TIMES AND FUTURE HOPES

The day Jackson Pollock died I called a certain man I knew - a very great painter - and told
him the news. After a long pause he said, in a voice so low it was barely a whisper, "That son
of a bitch -he did it." I understood. With this supreme gesture Pollock had wrapped up an era
and walked away with it.

It was big stakes we were after in those times. Through the years we have watched each
others' deaths like the final stock quotations of the day. To die early - before one's time - was
to make the biggest coup of all, for in such a case the work perpetuated not only itself, but
also the pain of everyone's loss. In a certain sense the artist makes that pain immortal when
he dies young. Even the widows of these men don't behave like other widows. There is a kind
of exaltation, as though they know there can never be an end to the period of mourning.

Looking at Mondrian's total output, we see a man who has completed a consummate journey.
What regrets can we have? But do we ever hear a melody of Schubert's without that sense of
a life cut short, of genius cut short?

As a very young man, my brother once approached George Gershwin at Lewisohn Stadium,
and asked for his autograph. He never could explain to me what it was that had made that
brief contact so unforgettable. What he did communicate was his sense of extraordinary luck
to have had that one moment of Gershwin's presence.

That's a little the way I think of Frank O'Hara. Not in terms of artistic insight or of personal
reminiscence, but just in terms of that all-pervasive presence that seems to grow larger and
larger as he moves away in time.

Trying to write about that is like trying to write about F.D.R. What memoir can have the
impact of that room in Hyde Park where his cape is still hanging? What revelation can equal
that hat, that photograph, that profile?

It is only now that one sees the truth about this intellectual's intellectual - this Noel Coward's
Noel Coward - only now one realizes it was his capacity for work, his stamina, his passion for
work, that was the energy going through his life.

As a literary artist he was a sort of latter-day Chekhov on the New York scene. When we read
O'Hara we are going a long and everything seems very casual, but as we come to the end of
the poem we hear the gun-shot of the Sea Gull. There is no time to analyse, to evaluate. We
are faced with something as definite and real and finite as a sudden death.

Unlike greatness, talent is an elusive thing, hard to pin down. Can anyone question, for
instance, that Stravinsky is great? He certainly fits the fantasy bill of culture, gives off all the
"greatness" culture demands. Yet he relies on so much beside his actual gifts that one
wonders whether he is really to the medium born. The fame of a Mondrian, on the other hand,
had to be propagated by a sort of word-of-mouth from artist to artist. How can culture admit
he is as great as Della Francesca, when he brought nothing to the work but his gifts?

Unlike Auden or Eliot, who never stopped writing for the undergraduate, Frank O'Hara
dispenses with everything in his work but his feelings. This kind of modesty always disappoints
culture, which time after time has mistaken coldness for Olympian objectivity.

Let us remember, however, that while culture has the initial say, it is the artist who has the
last word. Somebody once said the unconscious was a "subtle fox". History, too, has an
unconscious that plays its tricks on us. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century
everyone was sure it was Picasso; we are only now beginning to see it was Mondrian. How
could anyone have known or guessed? The work seemed so limited, so simplistic, so
unambitious. And all the time, nobody was reading it, nobody was seeing the touch, nobody
was looking at the handwriting on the wall.
Not that I am comparing Frank O'Hara with an austere artist like Mondrian. What I am saying
is, it may be Frank O'Hara's poems that survive when all we now consider "epic" is shot full of
holes, nothing remaining of it but its propaganda.

When you begin to work, until that unlucky day when you are no longer involved with just a
handful of friends, admirers, complainers, there is no separation between what you do and
who you are. I don't mean that what you are doing is necessarily real, or right. Rather, you
work. In some cases the work leads to a concept of music or of art that draws attention, and
you find yourself in the world. Maybe not for the right reasons, but you find yourself in the
world.

Yet there was that other "world". Of conversation, of anonymity, of seeing paintings in the
intimacy of a studio instead of a museum, of playing a new piece on the piano in your home
mstead of a concert hall. Because of this it isn t easy for me to talk to young composers these
days. I always feel what I am telling them is so incomplete. What I really want to do at times
is stop talking about all ideas, and just tell them about Frank O'Hara"ll them what really
matters is to have s"neone like Frank standing behind you. That's "hat keeps you going.
Without that your life is not worth a damn.

In an extraordinary poem Frank O'Hara describes his love for the poet, Mayakovsky. After an
outburst of feeling, he writes, "but I'm turning to my verses/and my heart is closing/like a
fist." What he is telling us is something unbelievably painful. Secreted in O'Hara's thought is
the possibility that we create only as dead men. Who but the dead know what it is to be alive?
Death seems the only metaphor distant enough to truly measure our existence. Frank
understood this. That is why these poems, so colloquial, so conversational, nevertheless seem
to be reaching us from some other, infinitely distant place. Bad artists throughout liistory have
always tried to make their art like life. Only the artist who is close to his own life gives us an
art that is like death.

I remember so little out of all those endless conversations. Are his words going so slow or so
fast over the eighteen years I cannot catch them? What did he leave us? A few poems, a few
drinks, a few rooms around town, a few friends. He was our Stendhal. No one came anywhere
near him.

"The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison", wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Note
how we say his full name. The same is true of Frank O'Hara. It is his full name that conveys
the complete meaning of this poet. This could be the subject of a game. How easily the last
name of Joyce or Valery falls on our lips. But we always say, "Gertrude Stein" - we always say,
"E. M. Forster". We need that extra sweep to distinguish those who typified an era from those
who thrust themselves above it.

I hope I will be lucky as Frank O'Hara, and be remembered by my full name. No last name for
me, sitting shivve over history.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

MORTON FELDMAN (*1926)

My earliest recollection of music - I couldn't have been more than five - is my mother holding
one of my fingers and picking out "Eli Eli" with it on the piano. At the age of twelve, I was
fortunate enough to come under the tutelage of Madame Maurina-Press, a Russian aristocrat
who earned her living after the revolution by teaching piano and by playing in a trio with her
husband and brother-in-law. In fact, they were quite well known in those days. It was because
of her - only, I think, because she was not a disciplinarian - that I was instilled with a sort of
vibrant musicality rather than musicianship.

I realize now that that image of Madame Press - a non-professional with all the ability and
brilliance of the "pro" - that "dilettanteism" - has always remained with me. She was a close
friend of the Scriabins and so I played Scriabin. She studied with Busoni, and so I played
Busoni transcriptions of Bach, and spent more time reading his footnotes than playing.

The years passed almost identically, and with the same random quality of these opening
sentences. I composed little Scriabin-esque pieces, gave up practising the little that I did,
eventually abandoned my teacher and found myself at fifteen studying with Wallingford
Riegger, who was equally lax with me.

I must have had a secret desire to leave this dream-like attitude to music, and to become a
"musician", because at eighteen I found myself with Stefan Wolpe. But all we did was argue
about music, and I felt I was learning nothing. One day I stopped paying him. Nothing was
said about it. I continued to go, we continued to argue, and we are still arguing eighteen years
later.

My first meeting with John Cage was at Carnegie Hall when Mitropoulos conducted the Webern
Symphony. I believe that was the winter of 1949-1950, and I was about twenty-four years
old. The audience reaction to the piece was so antagonistic and disturbing that I left
immediately afterwards. I was more or less catching my breath in the empty lobby when John
came out. I recognized him, though we had never met, walked over and, as though I had
known him all my life, said, "Wasn't that beautiful?" A moment later we were talking
animatedly about how beautiful the piece sounded in so large a hall. We immediately made
arrangements for me to visit him.

John at that time lived on the top floor of a tenement on Grand Street overlooking the East
River. It was a magnificent view; four rooms were made into two. A large expanse of the East
River, just a few potted plants, a long low marble table and a constellation of Lippold
sculptures along the wall. (Lippold lived next door.)

The reason I linger at the memory of how John lived is that it was in this room that I found an
appreciation and an encouragement more extravagant than I had ever before encountered. It
was here also that I met Philip Guston, my closest friend who has contributed so much to my
life in art.

At this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said,
"How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe and also that, just a
week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his
questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don't understand a word you're
saying." And so, in a very weak voice, I answered John, "I don't know how I made it." The
response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and, with a kind of high monkey
squeal, screeched, "Isn't that marvelous. Isn't that wonderful. It's so beautiful, and he doesn't
know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned
out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

In a few months I too moved into that magic house, except that I was on the second floor,
and with just a glimpse of the East River. I was very aware at the time of how symbolically I
felt that fact.

I had already become friends with David Tudor while I was with Wolpe. Now I introduced him
to John. Soon afterwards Christian Wolff appeared, and then Earle Brown, who met John while
he was on tour in the middle west and decided to make a new life in New York in order to be
with the new music.
There was very little talk about music with John. Things were moving too fast to even talk
about. But there was an incredible amount of talk about painting. John and I would drop in at
the Cedar Bar at six in the afternoon and talk until it closed and after it closed. I can say
without exaggeration that we did this every day for five years of our lives.

The new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct, more immediate, more
physical than anything that had existed heretofore. Varese had elements of this. But he was
too "Varese". Webern had glimpses of it, but his work was too involved with the disciplines of
the twelve-tone system. The new structure required a concentration more demanding than if
the technique were that of still photography, which for me is what precise notation has come
to imply.

"Projection Nr. 2" for flute, trumpet, violin and cello - one of the first graph pieces - was my
first experience with this new thought. My desire here was not to "compose", but to project
sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. In order not to
involve the performer (i.e., myself) in memory (relationships), and because the sounds no
longer had an inherent symbolic shape, I allowed for indeterminacies in regard to pitch. In the
"Projections" only register (high, middle or low), time values and dynamics (soft throughout)
were designated. Later in the same year (1951) I wrote "Intersection Nr. 1" and "Marginal
Intersection", both for orchestra. Both these graph pieces designated only whether high,
middle or low register of the instrument were to be used within a given time structure.
Entrances within this structure, as well as actual pitches and dynamics, were freely chosen by
the performer.

After several years of writing graph music, I began to discover its most important flaw. I was
not only allowing the sounds to be free - I was also liberating the performer. I had never
thought of the graph as an art of improvisation, but more as a totally abstract sonic
adventure. This realization was important because I now understood that if the performers
sounded bad it was less because of their lapses of taste than because I was still involved with
passages and continuity that allowed their presence to be felt.

Between 1953 and 1958 the graph was abandoned. I felt that if the means were to be
imprecise the result must be terribly clear. And I lacked that sense of clarity to go on. I hoped
to find it in precise notation; i.e., "Extensions for Three Pianos", etc. But precision did not
work for me either. It was too one-dimensional. It was like painting a picture where at some
place there is always a horizon. Working precisely, one always had to "generate" the
movement - there was still not enough plasticity for me. I returned to the graph with two
orchestral works: "Atlantis" (1958) and "Out of Last pieces" (1960), using now a more vertical
structure where soloistic passages would be at a minimum.

This brings us to "Durations" - a series of five instrumental pieces. In "Piece for Four Pianos"
and others like it, the instruments all read from the same part - and so what you have there is
like a series of reverberations from an identical sound source. In "Durations" I arrive at a more
complex style in which each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual
sound world.

In each piece the instruments begin simultaneously, and are then free to choose their own
durations within a given general tempo. The sound themselves are designated.

The pieces, while looking identical on paper, were actually conceived quite differently. In
"Durations I" the quality of the particular instruments together suggested a closely written
kaleidoscope of sound. To achieve this I wrote each voice individually, choosing intervals that
seemed to erase or cancel out each sound as soon was we hear the next. In the "Durations"
with the tuba, the weight of the three instruments used made me treat them as one. I wrote
all sounds simultaneously, Imowing that no instrument would never be too far behind or too
far ahead of the other. Through thinning and thickening my sounds I kept the image intact. In
"Durations IV" threre was a combination of both. Here I was a little more precise in that I
gave metronome indiciations. I also allowed the instruments to have their own individual color
more pronouncedly than in the other.

PREDETERMINATE/INDETERMINATE

About two years ago I spent an evening with several colleagues. Each of us was associated
with a music that at different times and for vastly different reasons had caused some measure
of controversy. There were incidents to recall - stories of "scandals", old and new - all this
added to the gay and dangerous quality of the evening. I wasn't comfortable. I knew there
was no real getting together between us. Each of us had our pressure groups. Each of us
threatened the existence of the others. More important, their whole idea of music was
something different than my own. We might meet again in a cold and gay setting, but knowing
that one stands for something is knowing that one stands apart.

I left the gathering quite late with Pierre Boulez, and we walked over to the Cedar Tavern. We
closed the bar that night. Closed it, in fact, for good - the building was being demolished. We
talked about American literature, very little about music. There was nobody there I knew; the
older crowd had stopped going some time back. Somehow it didn't seem right that I should
spend that last evening with Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be. It is Boulez,
more than any composer today who has given system a new prestige -Boulez, who once said
in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only in how it is made. No painter
would talk that way. Philip Guston once told me that when he sees how a painting is made he
becomes bored with it. The preoccupation with making something, with systems and
construction, seems to be a characteristic of music today. It has become, in many cases, the
actual subject of musical composition.

It is interesting that the composers of the past are also remembered as legendary performers.
Perhaps this was what gave a certain realistic, physical aspect to the music they wrote. The
daring harmonic excursions of Beethoven in some of the late sonatas have the feeling of his
fingers as well as his ear. The same can be said of passages in Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin,
Debussy. Varese was one of the legendary peirformers. His instrument was sonority.

Of course, the history of music is, in a sense, the history of its construction. Music has always
been involved with re-arranging systematized controls, because there seemed to be no
alternative. The transition into atonality in the early part of this century, and its subsequent
organization by Schoenberg into a method of composing with the twelve tones, was not an
alternative. It was still another organizational process, and one that adapted itself perfectly to
the old forms.

The idea of construction as a subject in music was largely brought about by the breakthrough
of musical innovation in the past fifty years. It was assumed that all these new ideas could be
brought within the existing logical state of order. And in the first half of the century this
process worked. The new possibilities of sound suggested by the innovation were not regarded
as having any compositional significance. What was emphasized was the unifying of all these
new musical elements into significantform. An emphasis on this more evasive element - sound
- would have upset the precarious balance of the "ideal composition".

As music became still more complex after the Second World War - as the method of twelve-
tone manipulation was also used to isolate rhythm, dynamics, etc. - sound began to emerge
as a disproportionate element too immense to be ignored. When they tried to put Humpty
Dumpty back together again there was a sonic explosion. The sound could no longer be
handled. What Boulez had no interest in, had taken over.

Between 1950 and 1951 four composers - John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and myself
- became friends, saw each other constantly - and something happened. Joined by the pianist
David Tudor, each of us in his own way contributed to a concept of music in which various
elements (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc.) were de-controlled. Because this music was not
"fixed", it could not be notated in the old way. Each new thought, each new idea within this
thought, suggested its own notation.

Up to now the various elements of music (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, etc.) were only
recognizable in terms of their formal relationship to each other. As controls are given up, one
finds that these elements lose their initial, inherent identity. But it is just because of this
identity that these elements can be unified within the composition. Without this identity there
can be no unification. It follows then, that an indeterminate music can lead only to
catastrophe. This catastrophe we allowed to take place. Behind it was sound - which unified
everything. Only by "unfixing" the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music
could the sounds exist in themselves - not as symbols, or memories which were memories of
other music to begin with.

Though indeterminate music was decried as antuntellectual and even irrational, the methods
used to arrive at it began, after a time, to arouse a certain interest. A number of influential
composers, particularly men of such vast intellectual appetites as Karlheinz Stockhausen had
begun to incorporate these new "techniques" in their own thinking. Paradoxically, these were
now used as new criteria for control. Stockhausen assumes, for example, that an
indeterminate process will have the same effect in a "statistical" way as the most complex and
accurate notation. Evidently he feels what we were trying to devise was some new way of
coming upon the old result.

The implication here goes beyond that of a technical misunderstanding. It illustrates perfectly
the historic function of the establishment. This says, in effect, "Though you are the parent of
this music, you are not sufficiently responsible. We therefore assume custody of your art."

The circle has been completed. The obsessive involvement with "order" in music has led to
such an impasse that the most daring break with historical process is used in the hope of
finding a way out.

BOOLA BOOLA

It's a mad scramble for crumbs. (Milton Babbitt, circa 1947)

When I was fifteen, someone handed me a book called Jean Cristophe. That was what ruined
my professional life. Coupled with this, my father said he would give me what his father gave
him - the world. The world turned out to be Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer night. It
never occurred to me to go to a University.

I did not understand the full extent of my loss until very recently when I read an article in The
Nation. This informed me that the most advanced music in America is being written in certain
colleges throughout the country, and that a sort of musical Renaissance is taking place in
these colleges, unknown to the public at large. A number of the faculty composers were
singled out for praise, and a great deal of space given to the laudable upsurge of performance
in these universities. It seems some of them are organizing their own performing groups,
sometimes vying with each other for the services of professional free-lance players.
Professionals are needed, for these musical events are taking place not only on an inter-
collegiate babies, but even in such historic ruins as Carnegie Hall. It is noted that Harvard has
been regrettably inactive in this direction - in a Pravda-like touch, it is reprimanded for
neglecting its opportunities.

The music itself? To call it latter-day Schoenberg or latter-day Webern is to over-simplify. In a

certain sense it is a criticsm of Webern and Schoenberg. To take another man's idea, to
develop it, expand it, to impose on its logic a superlogic; this does imply an element of
criticsm.
Perhaps the music can be described as academic avantgarde, a term already in some usage.
This term takes in certain twelve-tone developments, their application to tonal thinking,
various procedures in electronic music research, and has even begun to include an academic
chance music. Believe it or not, there is such a thing - and they've got it.

On the whole, however, the campus composer allies himself with the Germanic musical
tradition. This is perfectly understandable. Twelve-tone music, while it may not be great fare
for the concert hall, is perfect for the schoolroom. Besides, the Hofbra~u has always been a
popular feature of life on an American campus.

If all this music has a decided German accent, the open pragmatic spirit that accepts it is
purely American. To really understand its deeper meaning, one should take a look not only at
William James, but at his family, too. There was William himself, looking out of his ivy tower,
and deciding the most practical thing of all was to stay put. There was a brilliant, morbidly
intellectual, letter-writing sister. There was Henry, who felt there was something fishy
somewhere and escaped to England. And then there was a younger brother - I think his name
was Bob - who at his mother's newly dug grave exclaimed, "I am so happy for her". Bob is the
one who interests me. He really lived it.

One wonders if these eccentric, distinguished ghosts still haunt the corridors of Harvard? Can
this be the reason Harvard has remained somewhat detached from the Schuller-esque "hard
sell" going on elsewhere? Perhaps. For while our article describes all this healthy activity as
being in the "great tradition of American philosophic thought", it is not Emerson or Thoreau or
even James who is its guiding spirit. It is someone called Hermann Weyl. The intellectual
principle behind this music is based on the writing of this same Hermann Weyl, whose theme
seems to be the "rational subjugation of the unbounded". Oh, Lukas Foss, do I hear you
laughing?

Our article assures us that this "rational subjugation of the unbounded" is "totally sufficient to
justify the activity" of these advanced composers, and that they make no "qualifying
apologies" about such things as sensibility or communication.

One gathers that the moral virtue and unshakable confidence of these university groups stem
mainly from one thing. Responsibility. A key word, apparently. They assume and demand this
responsibility not only for their self-contained musical life, but also for every last note of their
compositions. But what does this word "responsible" mean? Let us suppose that a young
campus composer, in a state of intellectual delirium, commits a murder (non-musical). If he is
found guilty in a court of law, it will be just because he is responsible! In fact, the measure of
his responsibility will be the measure of his guilt. Responsible is clearly the wrong word. They
should replace it with ÔÔconsolidation'', if they don't like the old word -"academic".

What it all boils down to is this. If a man teaches composition in a university, how can he not
be a composer? He has worked hard, learned his craft. Ergo, he is a composer. A professional.
Like a doctor. But there is that doctor who opens you up, does exactly the right thing, closes
you up - and you die. He failed to take the chance that might have saved you. Art is a crucial,
dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.

It becomes increasingly obvious that to these fellows, music is not an art. It is a process of
teaching teachers to teach teachers. In this process it is only natural that the music of the
teacher will be no different from that of the teacher he's teaching. Academic freedom seems to
be the comfort of knowing one is free to be academic.

A painter who continually turned out paintings exactly like Jackson Pollock would soon be on
his way to Rockland State Hospital. In music they make him the chairman of a department.
What happens to the young man who comes to the university to learn his craft as a composer?
Like every young man, he is a romantic. One of the things he's romantic about is originality.
That is, after all, the ultimate success. But he soon forgets this dream because it is so remote,
so unattainable. He studies, he works hard. After, say, six years of intensive musical training,
if he has luck, we can call him a survivor.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a survivor from the composition department of
Princeton or Yale? He is on his way to tenure, but he's a drop-out in art.

All the same, he continues. He goes to Darmstadt, but feels somewhat hopeless there in the
midst of so much tradition. All he's got are pitch relationships, while Stockhausen uses five
centuries of every conceivable musical tradition simultaneously in three seconds!
Nevertheless, our young man goes on. He writes a piece occasionally. It is played occasionally.
There is always the possibility of a performance on the Gunther Schuller series. His pieces are
well made. He is not without talent. The reviews aren't bad. A few awards - a Guggenheim, an
Arts and Letters, a Fulbright - this is the official musical life of Amercia.

You can't buck the system, especially if it works. And this system does work. You can put it
through a test tube and prove it. You can feed it to a synthesizer, and hear Foundations
shake. These men are their own audience. They are their own fame. Yet they have created a
climate that has brought the musical activity of an entire nation down to a college level.

The other night I received a telegram summoning me to Princeton. I was expecting this. Once
again I made the monotonous trip over the Jersey flats, once again was charmed by the
utterly lovely stretch from Princeton Junction to the campus. My old colleagues were all
assembled, waiting to hear what I had to say. I was perfectly prepared. "Comrades and
honored Chairman", I began. "Unknowingly and unwittingly I have brought a cosmopolitan
element into our noble national tradition of music. How can I explain, how excuse this internal
wandering -?" But there is no need to go on with this; it occurred in a dream.

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. He
has something of which he is proud. What is that something of which he is proud? He calls it
education."

Thus spake Nietzsche

A COMPOSITIONAL PROBLEM

It all began with the Greeks. They were the ones who said that for something to be beautiful,
it must also be sensible. Nothing has ever demonstrate& this idea more perfectly than music.
As we listen, we are impressed by the precision of its choices. At the same time, music sings
to us of things transcendental. We are given simultaneously the two essential things - that
which is beautiful, and that which is logical. Yet we cannot say music changes our lives. It
carries us to exalted heights perhaps, but when it is over, we are exactly where we were
before our journey. All we are left with is just this duality - of precise means creating
indeterminate emotions.

All this, of course, does not refer to the present situation. What music rhapsodizes in today's
"cool" language, is its own construction. The fact that men like Boulez and Cage represent
opposite extremes of modern methodology is not what is interesting. What is interesting is
their similarity. In the music of both men, things are exactly what they are - no more, no less.
In the music of both men, what is heard is indistinguishable from its process. In fact, process
itself might be called the Zeitgeist of our age. The duality of precise means creating
indeterminate emotions is now associated only with the past.
Of course, many composers - notably Stravinsky - felt the most compelling aspect of music
has always been its architecture, its forms. They do not admit to this duality, this dichotomy.
But we do - don't we? If these men want such purity, such freedom from all ambiguity, why
haven't they invented a new art form - as Malevich did so many years back? They invent
nothing new, nothing really original. They steal other people's thunder, and then refuse to
admit it thundered for other purposes than their own.

But let's make things clear. I am not lamenting the death of poetry and emotion. This is my
generation as well as Boulez and Babbitt's, and I, too, want things to be "what they are". I,
too, am interested in facts, not philosophy. I, too, like Boulez, wanted music to be an
autonomous object.

But it was all too good to be true, you see. It was all much too good to last. No dichotomy? It
was almost like a state of grace. Something had to happen - and it did. The closer I came, on
my own terms, to a really autonomous situation, the more I felt the first warning that a new
dichotomy was about to take place. The form this warning took was a strange resistance of
the sounds themselves to taking on an instrumental identity. It was as though, having had a
taste of freedom, they now wanted to be really free.

Franz Kline once told me it was only rarely that color did not act as an intrusion into his
painting. Guston, too, felt this. Most crucial to him was the immediacy of where the forms
were placed; his color had to continually go through states of erasure to get to that visual
rightness.

In music it is the instruments that produce the color. And for me, that instrumental color robs
the sound of its immediacy. The instrument has become for me a stencil, the deceptive
likeness of a sound. For the most part it exaggerates the sound, blurs it, makes it larger than
life, gives it a a meaning, an emphasis it does not have in my ear.

To think of a music without instruments is, I agree, a little premature, a little too Balzacian.
But I, for one, cannot dismiss this thought. In creating this indeterminate situation I began to
feel that the sounds were not concerned with my ideas of symmetry and design, that they
wanted to sing of other things. They wanted to live, and I was stifling them. It is not a
question of a controlled or a de-controlled methodology. In both cases, it is a methodology.
Something is being made. And to make something is to constrain it.

I have found no answer to this dilemma. My whole creative life is simply an attempt to adjust
to it. There is very little concern, very little involvement with anything else. It seems to me
that, in spite of our efforts to trammel it, music has already flown the coop . . . escaped. There
is an old proverb: "Man makes plans . . . God laughs". The composer makes plans . . . Music
laughs.

IN MEMORIAM: EDGARD VARESE

What would my life have been without Varese? For in my most secret and devious self I am an
imitator. It is not his music, his "style" that I imitate; it is his stance, his way of living in the
world. And so, periodically, I would go to the concert hall to hear one of his compositions, or
telephone to make an appointment to see him, feeling not unlike those who make a pilgrimage
to Lourdes hoping for a cure.

Instead of inventing a system like Schoenberg, Varese invented a music that speaks to us with
its incredible tenacity rather than its methodology. When listening to Varese, we ask
ourselves, "How did he do it?" and not "How was it done?"

Suddenly, toward the end of his life, Kierkegaard began to worry what his answer might be if
he were asked in Heaven: "Did you make things clear?" He realized that in order to make
things clear, he must make it known that of all those serving the Church of Denmark, not one
had any feeling for God.

And ourselves? What if we were faced with the same question? Being that music is our life, in
that it has given us a life - did we make things clear? That is, do we love Music, and not the
systems, the rituals, the symbols - the worldly, greedy gymnastics we substitute for it? That
is, do we give everything - a total commitment to our own uniqueness?

Have we no examples of this? Is this not Varese? Do we only have models for scale tinkering
and instrument clinking? Do we think Varese is now something to dissect? Are we making
ready the test tubes? Remember, there was no funeral. He escaped.

ESSAY

I question the appropriateness of writing about something other than this exhibition. But to
write about it, some effort should be given to research. And I have resistance in talking to
anyone who could tell me why Guston assembled these last works the way he did. My attitude
is not unlike my father"refusing to ask for directions the time we were lost in Hoboken.

For me, the real research would be in re-enacting that special kind of loneliness Guston shared
with others throughout the Seventies: A concern that something just might last a little longer,
that our lifespan would not be a measurement of time documented on early, middle, late
horizon. Two rabbis, who were very close friends, survived the Holocaust. One went alone to
London, the other, to somewhere in South America. The rabbi in London wrote his friend, "Too
bad you're so far away". "From where?" was the reply.

It was in the early months of 1951 that Philip and I first met, at one of those numerous
gatherings John Cage gave at that time. A few weeks earlier, Cage had pointed out my first
Guston - a mysterious red painting - at the now historic show of American abstract art at The
Museum of Modern Art. After thirty years, I can still conjure up where it hung, as well as the
distance between me and the painting. Guston's paintings tell you instinctively where to stand.

I have profited from this in how I maneuver my music into its acoustical space, not to imply
one calculates an element of success by this projection. Rather than evoking a linear, vertical,
or all-over reading in the viewer, Guston's time would be moving outward. To a great extent
we respond to a painting as a visual replica of how it was painted. For example, Mondrian's
plus-minus series neutralizes our visual completion of these paintings. It is all there, so to
speak, but where, or how to look at them, is not.

If we pursue this, then Guston has always been a "public" artist. By that I mean, if he says
something, he wants it to be heard, as it non-aggressively walks onto the stage of his picture
plane. It is in the inflection of his "voice" that we discover the encyclopedic nuances of mood,
regardless what imagery he was painting at the time. Both of these important factors - the
artist's voice and the stage it speaks from - have their ancestry in the painter Guston loved
most of all, Piero della Francesca. One of the most memorable afternoons I spent with Guston
started off with, "So I'm not Michelangelo", as I was walking up the stairs to his studio. I
looked at the start of a new painting for some clue to his depression. The clue wasn't there.
"O.K. so you're not Michelangelo, you're El Greco." Guston's face lit up with relief.

A small Guston painting dating from 1967 hangs over my desk: On a white ground, just two
elongated black shapes about seven inches from each other. Their positioning in the field is
characteristic of how Guston freezes a painting during the Sixties. "That one on the left", he
said, "is telling the other one his troubles."

The fact that Guston's stage became barer in his abstract paintings of the Sixties before the
figurative period of the Seventies is significant. But I don't think of it as the end of something
with Guston, nor as the usual tendency to bring work to the pitch of "high style", and then
begin anew. It appears to go back full circle to the early abstract paintings of the Fifties, but
now modulated to another key. In music the key or pitch center of a composition is akin to the
picture plane of the painter. It determines the degree of audibility (visibility) as well as its
timbre (color). Color was underscored in both Guston's earliest and late abstract painting,
more to light the stage, the way I once observed Beckett light his stage.

A connection with Beckett is not remote. Beckett's voice is also so prevalent on his stage that
it is difficult to distinguish what ist being said from who is saying it. As in Guston's painting we
seem to be hearing two voices simultaneously. For a composer, this is a crucial problem: that
the means or the instruments you use are only to articulate musical thought and not to
interpret it. The composer, as the dramatist or the painter, is not "performing", but he creates
a situation as if he were. I was first made aware of the painter in the dual role of actor by
Mark Rothko, while we were standing in front of the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick.
"What a great Jewish actor Rembrandt was, as if a tear could come from the corner of an eye
at any moment."

In recent years I have become preoccupied with oriental rugs, discovering quite soon that
what I was looking for had little to do with either the study or the collecting of rugs. I am
mostly drawn to special examples of the nomadic Yoruk rugs from Anatolia. What the choice
19th Century Yoruk has that is unique is mood. This mood is closer to Jasper Johns that to
Mark Rothko, tips over to Van Gogh rather than Piero. Kierkegaard both has it and writes
about it. You rarely come across it in music.

The mood I'm trying to describe, like a fingerprint, is in all of Guston's work. One might argue
that the figurative painting of the Seventies is a more appropriate language for it. Yet whereas
the enigma in the earlier paintings was how this mood coexisted with abstract shapes, the
same distance between mood-object is now present with an identifiable mythology of images.

If Guston's earlier abstractions seem pregnant with a content of sorts, without giving us a
resolution into what might be considered concrete, the figurative work for me only tells some
kind of closing statement, without giving us the beginning. After all, where did these images
come from?

The oldest example of an early 18th Century Karakecili (Bergama area) rug keeps the design
intact with all detail towards that end. The later or traveled versions weaken what was
originally a powerful geometric shape. One does not think of "design" per se in the earlier
rugs, but more of a totem-like image. The impact of the last Guston paintings in this exhibition
is that they have about them the exhilarating feeling of not as yet being copied by others.
They are like an isolated rug culture at its most unbridled peak of development.

One of the problems of an abstract art is that the solutions available are more determinate
than one might imagine - some system or other, like radar, is guiding it along. Stravinsky
came to this conclusion just in time to write what he felt were two of his most important
works, in which a serialistic approach became more subordinate to his ear and consequently
used as a tool rather than as a device. Late Stravinsky is another fascinating style change.
With his plunge into the elegant abstractions of serialist thinking we need only ask how he did
it, whereas in most of his earlier music you are kept busy with just why he might do
something.

Guston's maneuverings, neither a device nor pre conceived, do have about them an
inevitability: that things could only be this way and no other for them to work. Like
Stravinsky, this achievement operated early and late. It has to do with the fact that neither of
them lost sight of the nature of his material.
As a teacher of composition the most important thing I can convey to the young composer is
an awareness of what exactly is material. There is a crucial discrepancy between having
"ideas" and a sense of what the material is in one's own music. Stravinsky is a great example
where material reigns supreme. Construction is kept at a minimum. The material is always "on
camera." Schoenberg approaches the concept of material quite differently. With Stravinsky his
material suggests the composition, while with Schoenberg his material is the composition.
Essentially both approaches are the only two ways that have been devised as yet to compose
music. This review of a composer's alternatives is important to my understanding of what
Guston might have meant when he talked about the "impossibility of painting".

In most music you are either locked into adjusting historical alternatives as Stravinsky was, or
to invent a process that more or less takes over, as Schoenberg did. In either case you do
relinquish a great deal of potential insight, existing on still other levels of implication to your
material. If "painting" is your material, then how you paint could mean more than what you
paint. I don't think a happy balance can exist any longer between the two, unless there is a
bull's-eye simultaneity which is so much in evidence in the recent Gustons in this exhibition.

Another reason I dwell on both Stravinsky and Schoenberg in this essay is that they both
consciously attempted to arrive at various decisions within a given historical context. On the
one hand, it added to their genius; on the other, it diminished it. Schoenberg's two voices
were trying to reconcile traditional classic forms with an expressionistic language. It is a very
uncomfortable battleground to hear, and one seriously questions if it was worth the effort.

With Philip Guston I arrive at other conclusions. There is not attempt in these last paintings
towards any aspect of reconciliation with his past concerns. It was a new life, in which his past
skills helped him survive on the new ground he immigrated to. All it meant for Guston was to
pack only what he needed and go in search for the country of his heart.

CONVERSATIONS WITHOUT STRAVINSKY

(An Informal talk in New York between Morton Feldman and a friend)

Since I've come back from England it's been as much as I can do to catch up with things.
Right now I'm finishing up an orchestral piece. When that doesn't go too well I turn to an
article I started this summer. That doesn't always go too well either. The problem is to
establish a certain continuity, but if you put too much emphasis on continuity, you can be left
with nothing else.

- Is your article about England? -

Yes. Cardew and his circle interested me very much. In fact, the whole atmosphere there, the
whole situation, was interesting to me. There's agenuine involvement, a genuine excitement
about the new ideas coming from New York. I found the same talk, the same climate I
remember here in the early fifties. It's just the groundwork, but one feels a change, a break
with the rhetoric of France and Germany. "Renaissance" is the wrong word; it always implies a
reference to the past. What's going on in England these days is not a return to the past or a
rebellion against it. It's what I've described elsewhere as a getting out of history. The young
intellectuals I met . . . they're not looking to New York for a "Guernica" or a "Gruppen". What
they identify with is the whole spirit coming out of the New York scene, the fantastic paradox
of down with the masterpiece; up with art.

France was so involved with the new that it passed them by. Germany is too eclectic, America
too taken over by the academic avantgarde . . but in England you really feel it. Even the
students I spoke to were willing to suspend their own values, willing to listen.

- You speak of intellectuals. Did many composers share this excitement you talk about? -
Aside from Bedford, Cardew and a few others of that group, I didn't meet composers in
England. I met people who wrote music, but when they weren't in the pay of the B.B.C. they
referred to themselves only as students or teachers. There's an incredible modesty about
being in the arts. It's something that's not mentioned, like one's bravery in battle. Only one
man reluct~ntly confessed to me that he had "dabbled" in music. I found out later that he had
written an orchestral work that had been performed with some success by a major orchestra
in London. No one admits he's a composer. I think the composers are shut up somewhere in
Dickens-like orphanages and allowed out only to write operas for children.

- What about someone like Cardew? -

Cardew is talked about, but he's not played very often. It's not that he's up against any
special condition, it's simply that there's less money. Here we're performed, but it's hard to
get published; there it's just the reverse. Concerts of that kind are a luxury, you see . . . a
luxury they can't afford. In the States the young composer usually enters the professional
world through the University. In England it's apparently the B.B.C. that serves this function.
Since Cardew is rarely performed by the B.B.C., I had to go to Paris before I heard an evening
of his music.

I know Cardew chiefly as the man who "realized" the performance material for Carre' -

Yes, he was part of Stockhausen's atelier in Cologne for several years. Like Dunstable a few
centuries before, he's had to spend a good part of his life just getting to "where the action is".
At one point he taught himself to play the guitar simply in order to take part in the
performance of a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read
Kierkegaard. He still has copies of the piano music David Tudor brought from America in the
early fifties, copies he himself made at that time. The public knows very little about all that,
about the way the artistic community acts and interacts. By the time the public gets there, all
it hears is the funeral oration. They have the impression that a certain artistic faction is
representing them to the world, but more often than not they've picked the wrong men.
Cardew and his friends have much more prestige in the rest of Europe than they do at home,
but that just thickens the plot. They're making their own scene in England, very much as Cage
and the rest of us made ours here in America back in the fifties. If anything, they're more
"out-of-a-movie" than we were. I always think of Cardew, Tilbury and Bedford making that
night train across the Channel to Warsaw. Cardew in his Victorian ulster, Tilbury in that black
raincoat he wears, Bedford in a leather jacket . . . three conspirators right out of Eric Ambler,
on their way to represent England at one of the most important avant-garde music festivals in
Europe!

- I get the feeling that Cardew is quite important -

Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew,
because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in
England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral center. Without him, the young "far-
out" composer would be lost. With him, he's still young, but not really lost.

- Did you find any reflection of all this in the universities? -

The emphasis is really more on a certain type of musicology in the universites . . . the ones I
saw. You find a good deal of this passionate appreciation of some piece because it was written
in the 17th century, or the 18th century, or before the first World War - especially before the
first World War. Once I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of
eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain
abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a
celebrated monkey. "That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific." That's not specifically
English, of course. We all marvel at Purcell's daring harmonies as though they were written by
a monkey.

- That's quite true. In fact, it all doesn't sound too different from the average American
university. -

The research here is better; but again, that's just a question of money. The real difference to
me was in the gossip media. American music departments are hotbeds of intrigue. I once had
a talk with Leon Kirchner in the labyrinthine darkness of a New York concert hall. I'm told that
the following morning at Harvard all Kirchner's students knew of our te'te-a'-te'te. Now, that's
what I call ''musicology''. If it exists over there, it's all beneath the surface. Nobody seems
impatient, nobody asked me for letters of introduction. When students out of graduate school
come to visit me here, they want something. As one of our less esteemed presidents has said,
"the business of America is business Well, in England it isn't, or doesn't seem to be. What you
feel is something else . . . an unmistakable atmosphere of waiting.

The word "Establishment" is, of course, just a music-hall joke. No country is free of it, and it's
constantly changing; so much so here in America that William Schuman once introduced me to
his wife as a composer who was "both in and out". But seriously, this thing you feel in
England, this waiting for the Establishment, waiting to be taken in, taken up, it's stronger
there than any place I know. Maybe that's what creates that odd immature atmosphere, as
though everyone were looking at the handwriting not on the wall, but on the blackboard.

You see, it's not obvious, the way it is in Paris, where the art is bourgeois, the food is
bourgeois, the artist himself is bourgeois. Or America, for that matter, where the middle class
owns, literally owns the Ballet and the Philharmonic. In England it's different; you still feel an
association with Kings, still feel a sort of mustiness of that patronage of days of old. It's
almost as if they've let it slip, any possibility of an upsurge artistically . . . let it slip with this
current of the Empire going, everything going. All they have, and all they need, is tradition. In
New York all one has and needs is art. Nothing else can survive in such a soil-less waste.

Philip Guston once told me about visiting an Italian painter in Venice. After finding his way to a
darkened alley and climbing to the top floor of an ageless palazzo, he knocked, entered, and
on the easel was a gigantic painting of a futuristic city. The New York landscape doesn't make
for dreams of other worlds, but in return we have something else - we are not deceived by
progress. We are the arch-modernists with no feeling whatsoever for modernity.

And yet, sitting in that train, looking out of that window, I thought of Rimbaud coming back to
France to die. How thankful he must have been that so little had changed. Even as a stranger,
I felt a need that England should be the same, if and when I might return. Then I understood
the ambivalence, understood how difficult, how problematical it would be for them to enter a
20th century sound. England is so beautiful, so very beautiful that everything brought forth
there becomes, of itself, inviolable.

- If that's your feeling, what possible advice can you have for the young English composer? -

I have very little advice to give and very little to suggest. If a student is perplexed and
mystified, all I can tell him is, "Go to a good school, start learning from the beginning, if you
can ever find that beginning, and never, never stop." You may even get there if you never
stop. Brahms did.

For the rest, what's lacking in the music is what music everywhere has always lacked, a Blake
or a Hopkins who would bring to it a more personal syntax, more involed with its own
meaning, its own vocabulary. Reading letters of Keats or Byron, you discover they were often
quite discontented with poetry. Puschkin has a marvellous, long poem where, after several
halting lines, he breaks off to say, "Hey! What's wrong with my Muse? She's limping!" What
composer has ever complained about music? The composer is always euphoristic, smug. He's
married to a perfect Muse, a perfect bore, a blue-stocking! Today especially, when science and
mathematics enjoy such prestige, he wants his music to be with the times. In America he
reads Max Planck. In England. . . I don't know what he reads in England, but I'm sure there,
too, he would like to feel that if something can't be measured it doesn't exist.

Like the tailor, the composer everywhere is always busy with the yardstick. He doesn't have
the problem of truth. What I mean is, he doesn't work with the impossibility of ever reaching
it, like the painter or the poet. For the composer the truth is always the process, the system.

-The general professional feeling is that you're evading the problem when you work without
compositional ideas, without what you call systems . -

I'm evading their problem. I'm not evading my own. The difference is that, since my problem
is not historical, it seems "fanciful". I just read an article in an English magazine called Tempo
questioning certain views of mine. Well, according to this man in Tempo, it's more difficult to
find "new but intelligible pitch relationships" than to write a music that "concentrates on
sound". But why is it more difficult? He knows nothing of a music that concentrates on sound.
He speaks of Ives; he doesn't understand Ives, doesn't understand his tragic frame of
reference. The main thing about Ives - never forget it - is that he hardly ever heard his music
played. All his life he was branded an amateur. An amateur is someone who doesn't stuff his
ideas down your throat.

But he has nothing to worry about, that chap in Tempo. He's going to have it all. Pitch
relationships, plus sound and chance thrown in. Total consolidation. Those two words define
the new academy. You can tie it all up in the well-known formula, "You made a small circle
and excluded me; I made a bigger circle and included you". A kind of Jonah-and-the-whale
syndrome is taking place. Everything is being chewed up en masse and for the mass. Until
recently, unless you worked in the avant-garde mainstream (which is to say, in the
SchoenbergiWebern orientation), nobody knew what you were doing. Then, as serial music
began to utilize and incorporate chance techniques, they became acceptable, too.

It may seem strange to call Boulez and Stockhausen popularizers, but that's what they are.
They glamorized Schoenberg and Webern, now they're glamorizing something else. But
chance to them is just another procedure, another vehicle for new aspects of structure or of
sonority independent of pitch organization. They could have gotten these things from Ives or
Varese, but they went to these men with too deep a prejudice, the prejudice of the equal, the
colleague.

- Is the music public in England sophisticated enough to accept chance? -

I'm told the well-bred Englishman eats what is set before him without complaint. On the other
hand, not every artist is tuned into a mass sensibility, and where else does consolidation lead?
Such artists must find another road, the road of Kafka, Mondrian, Webern. For me, these men
are what the Oral Law must have been to the early Hebrews, a sort of moral legend of the
uninfluential, handed down by word of mouth. It may sound paradoxial, but Kafka, Mondrian,
and Webern have never been influential. It's their imitators that are influential. That's what
gives every artist his real prestige - his imitators.

The truth is, we can do very well without art; what we cant't live without is the myth about
art. The myth-maker is successful because he knows that in art, as in life, we need the illusion
of significance. He flatters this need. He gives us an art that ties up with philosophical
systems, an art with a multiplicity of references, of symbols, an art that simplifies the
subtleties of art, that relieves us of art. Whether it does this by the power of persuasion or the
persuasion of power, I leave to the social pathologists.
I'm looking for something else now, something that will no longer fit into the concert hall. If
music would ever take that road, that direction, that would be the real composer's paradise.
It's only in the movies that he sits there beaming while 10,000 extras sing his requiem. I don't
wish to press the point too strongly at this time, but I do feel the concert hall leads only to
cross purposes for the composer. I would not only welcome its demise, it would be my dream.
I never fully understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme
quietude, would be happiest with a dead one. It would be different if the concert hall were
more like a museum that ended arbitrarily, say, with Debussy. Until recently many museums
ended with the Impressionists, and they certainly had a lively look about them. The new
confuses the old. Sometimes they enhance each other, sometimes they do just the opposite.
Manet, for instance, because of the "new", no longer looks so unfinished. Webern, on the
other hand, has to compete with the stereotyped complexities of his imitators. The result is
that his music no longer has the same shock. Take Opus 21, for example. It doesn't sound the
same today as it did in 1950 when I first heard it performed. Why? Varese retains the same
impact. Why not Webern? Is it because his art is an objective art or, shall we say, an art too
subjective in its objectivity? Is this why his image is now so blurred, so almost submerged in
the cultural mundation that has engulled it? It must be so ... Look at Josquin ... at Della
Francesca. Through the centuries their work has never lost its intense focus on its own
particular moment. It hasn't grown old and finally dropped dead of culture. At the exact
moment, probably before it was seen or heard by anyone else, the artist in some mysterious
way embalmed it. When Della Francesca painted the cross in the background, it had nothing to
do with subjectivity, or objectivity -it was memory. There's something almost a little scary
about this kind of art. Other artists keep away. They don't understand this "strange simplicity"
in relation to anything as dramatic as the Crucifixion. They leave it alone ... intact.

The thing is, it's not only individuals like Webern ... culture itself can reach a saturation point.
Let's say that art as we like it began its swift march during the Renaissance with painting,
appeared not too long afterward in England as literature, and emerged in post-Lutheran
Germany as music. And then let's be fashionale and add, art died. It died a long time ago and
what came after was analysis or sociology. Balzac, Proust - all that is sociology. Art became
critical. Most music of the 20th century is criticism of past music. Just as we've been given an
Existentialism without God, we are now being given a music without the composer. We want
Bach, but Bach himself is not invited to dinner. We dont't need Bach, we have his ideas.

- You spoke of the article in Tempo. Do you agree with its basic assumption, that a musical
composition can be conceived independent of the sound? -

It's an assumption that puts me in the classical position of the one sane man in the lunatic
asylum. On a recent radio program with John Cage I mentioned Semmelweiss, who was
stoned in the street because he asked doctors to wash their hands before they deliver women
in childbirth. May I identify with this Jewish doctor? All I ask is that composers wash out their
ears before they sit down to compose. How can I possibly answer so many authorities, so
much talk about Beethoven's "logical sequences of ideas"? The fact is Beethoven himself was
once very annoyed when someone called him a composer. He wanted to be referred to as a
tone poet.

If the article accused me of killing melody, I would hang my head. But pitch relationships? I
can't get that excited about pitch relationships. I don't deny the validity of the pitch set ... but
in relation to the sonic experience today, it seems to me the equivalent of a baby's playpen,
and just as full of toys and pacifiers.

It's true, generally speaking, that what gives us confidence in a composer is a certain
uniformity, a certain consistency of tone felt throughout his work. We get this sense of a
"world" in the Gregorian Chant, in Debussy, in the twelvetone. But in recent serial music, with
aspects of timbre becoming more prevalent, with the objet sonore more included, more
extended in terms of pitch organization, the music itself has become nothing more than a
game of acoustical chance.
But how can you argue with logic? I have no real quarrel with that man in Tempo. I agree with
everything he says about music . . . with one difference. I don't like it. I want to change it.

When you are involved with a sound as a sound as a limited yet infinite thought to borrow
Einstein's phrase, new ideas suggest themselves, need defining, exploring, need a mind that
knows it is entering a living world not a dead one. When you set out for a living world you
don't know what to take with you because you don't know where you're going. You don't know
if the temperature will be warm or cold; you have to buy your clothes when you get there.
Wasn't there a renowned anthropologist who insisted one must go into the field alone,
unobtrusive, in order to enter the environment without disturbing it and discover its true
essence? That's not quite the way the Princeton University Music Department embarks on its
expeditions into the new sound world. There are such crowds of them, they take so much with
them. All their equipment, all their machines. They come to hear, but all they hear are their
own machines.

- A world famous composer said on television not long ago that the one unforgivable thing in
art is anarchy. One must learn the rules, he said, if it's only to break them. -

Yes, everybody keeps saying that. I've never understood it. I never understood what I was
supposed to learn and what I was supposed to break. What rules? Boulez wrote a letter to
John Cage in 1951. There was a line in that letter I will never forget. "I must know everything
in order to step off the carpet." And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only
to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream . . . to crown himself Emperor. Was it love of
knowledge, love of music, that obsessed our distinguished young provincial in 1951? It was
love of analysis - an analysis he will pursue and use as an instrument of power.

And where did it all lead? It led to his writing an article in which he said Schoenberg was dead.
I ask you, was that nice? "Schoenberg is dead", says Boulez. What need of Schoenberg now?
But Stravinsky, that's quite another matter. Stravinsky, you see, is alive, and Boulez now
"knows everything". He knows how to be silent about Stravinsky. He has learned everything,
hasn't he? Yes, indeed. Everything to his advantage. Forgive me for injecting this jeremiad,
but your question really carried me away.

You were asking about the rules. There's a parable of Kafka about a man living in a country
where lie doesn't know the rules. Nobody will tell him what they are. He knows neither right
nor wrong, but he observes that the rulers do not share his anxiety. From this he deduces that
rules are for those who rule. What they do is the rule. That's why all my knowledge doesn't
make me understand what Mozart did that I should also do in order to reach a state of artistic
grace.

The composer's dilemma seems inseparable from the medium itself. He dreams of a music
that will transcend the instruments and still remain magnificently idiomatic. To achieve this
dream, lie naturally turns to the technical materials at hand. This is what Beethoven did with
such great success in the last quartets. Boulez, in a latter-day vocabulary, repeats this
performance, which has come to be considered the reality of music, the criterion of what
"great" music should be. We have a choice, however, between this reality, and the reality,
say, of William Byrd. Simply by having the genius to know his music was coming from those
voices. Byrd has left us with an unfathomable mystery. Listening, we surmise that not
"musical meaning" but human breathing brought music into the world. For me, it is the music
of Byrd that is truly idiomatic, where much of Beethoven, always excepting the built-in suavity
of the String Quartets, is acoustically out of control.

The tragedy is that Beethoven himself, contrary to all the evidence brought forward in the
Tempo articles, was not essentially driving toward technical mastery, technical manipulation.
He was a man who was going toward sound - and failed.
But who cares about all these rational arguments and rational authorities. Hindemith
especially . . Hindemith, who couldn't write a note without going back to his Bach, really
should have kept out of it altogether.

Quite the contrary, I claim the past. Beethoven, Bach, Schoenberg, Webern. If the pedant
wants to understand me, he must understand my past. I'll take on all comers. I'll use the right
language, call chords tn-tones. There will be no embarrassment as to my intellectual abilities.
In fact, there will be surprises! Pierre . . . Karlheinz . . . Milton . . . are you ready?

MORE LIGHT

We acknowledge the term subjective when applied to Mahler's music. Cage on the other hand
demonstrates an equally startling objectivity towards musical phenomena, the extreme "outer
life" so to speak, in comparison to the Mahlerian "inner life". Mahler, a distorted house of
mirrors, evoking the highly stylized mood drenched landscape of a Munch painting; Cage, as in
Monet's later paintings, has us look into the sun, so to speak: the refraction of his sound, like
Monet's light, slips from our ears into a non-delineated sound world. However, what is equally
true for both Monet and Cage, "going into the sun" was predicated by the ability of both to
accept change that is not of their making, rather than the transformation of ideas based in
part on the psychology of hierarchical decisions unrelated to the unpredictable factors of say
Monet's ever changing refracting light. Composers of course do not use light, but sound, which
historically is fixed into systems of sorts, which adhere to varying degrees of predictability or
adventurous relationships.

In painting, how light is utilized distinguishes one painting from another regardless of when it
was painted; while in music, how pitch was organized, from the more empirical pre-tonal era
until serialism, characterized chronologically the history of western music. A brief breakdown
of light structures adopted by painters since Giotto might best describe what I mean:

Light from nature: raking light: Caravaggio, Vermeer overhead light: Watteau, Courbet,
Pissarro refracted light: Monet intellectualized light: Seurat

Pictorial light, not from nature: constructed light: Giotto, Mantegna, Picasso, de Chirico
invented light: Piero della Francesca, Rothko non-modulated light: Mondrian, Pollock light
without source: Rembrandt.

With the advent of Cage, one by necessity must ask questions that previously were avoided,
never thought about when composing a musical composition. My preoccupation with the
fascinating aspect of how painters deal with light is only because of Cage. In effect, what I am
suggesting is not that music should explore or imitate the resources of painting, but that the
chronological aspect of music's development is perhaps over, and that a new "mainstrem" of
diversity, invention and imagination is indeed awakening. For this we must thank John Cage.

SOME ELEMENTARY QUESTIONS

I knew I was going to be a professional the day I first became practical. Practicality took the
form of copying out my music neatly, keeping my desk tidy and organized - all the
unimportant things that seem unrelated to the work, yet somehow do affect it. Through the
years that passed since then, I have always found it more beneficial to experiment with
fountain pens than with musical ideas. I remember for a time I had an idee fixe that if I found
the right chair to work in, all compositional problems would become non-existent. I actually
found that chair . walking in Chinatown one day with Robert Rauschenberg. It was an old-
fashioned accountant's chair, tall and sturdy, with the word "Universal" printed in gold letters
across the back. Rauschenberg found a chair, too, I remember. An elegantly lean chair with a
fast-moving swivel seat. I thought it was very much like him.
I don't want to imply that practicality is another word for comfort. I rather mean that it brings
us closer to the work establishing a rapport with it, rather than encouraging a network of ideas
that keeps us outside it.

This is where the practical differs from the technical. The technical, no matter how fool-proof,
is always in the realm of the speculative - a notion about perfection - the system. But what
happens when these gods fail us?

Kierkegaard says that all speculative philosophy cannot equal in complexity the dialectic of a
woman who has been deceived. He goes on to explain that such a woman cannot find an
object for her pain, because love cannot grasp the thought that it has been deceived. In art, it
is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that
art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his
work goes badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into
the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma - the paradox. Is it
lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence
against it, because lie needs this lie to exist in his art. This brings up the question we thought
we had decided earlier in our life: What is technique? Is it just the ability to hit a nail into a
piece of wood? This needs very little practice. But to take a Mozart concerto, or a work by
Webern, and to re-write it - now, that does need practice! So maybe we have the answer, and
technique is simply imitation. But who did Mozart imitate in order to write his own concerto?
Haydn? But suppose one is so unluckily constituted that he does not, or cannot, imitate?
Where then is technique? Is it perhaps a question of hitting the nail, but at an impossible
angle? But we all know this is just a poor, honest country-cousin called Craft.

Let us allow this question to stand for a while. Recently I chose some pictures by Mondrian for
an exhibition at St. Thomas University, in Houston. Clearly Mondrian envisions a Utopia. He
endlessly reduces, endlessly simplifies in the attempt to get at this Utopia. Yet the way it is
painted is hesitant and slow . . . anything but the absolute certainty of this absolute state, this
Utopia. Mondrian is in the painting, though in terms of his conception, one would think he
would have chosen to remain outside.

In Guston we see a different aspect of the same duality. Here the visible structure (the part of
the structure that we see, really see) is arrived at very slowly, very precariously. Yet the way
it is painted is Chassidic - exalted.

On yet another level, Guston's conflict is between the personal, which is anti-process, and the
impersonal, which is process. Where he differs from a painter like Picasso is that with Guston
the historical is not an analysis of history, but a sort of distillation of hundreds of years of
seeing, touching, observing, watching, waiting, deciding. Where Picasso analyzes, Guston
continues. Where Picasso is saturated in a history lesson, Guston is saturated in history.

This duality I speak of - this contradiction -does not exist in music. There is nothing in music,
for example, to compare with certain drawings of Mondrian, where we still see the contours
and rhythms that have been erased, while another alternative has been drawn on top of them.
Music's tragedy is that it begins with perfection.

Renoir once said the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different
tones. In music, the same note, written by two different composers, gives us - the same note.
When I write a B flat, and Beno writes a B flat what you get is always B flat. The painter must
create his medium as he works. That's what gives his work that hesitancy, that insecurity so
crucial to painting. The composer works in a pre-existent medium. In painting if you hesitate,
you become immortal. In music if you hesitate, you are lost.

All activity in music reflects its process. This has always been true, and it is more and more
true as time goes on. Whether it is too late to change this remains yet to be seen. But the
question here is not pre-determinate or indeterminate. If I have a resistance to process, it is
because I don't want to give up control. Control, of the material is not really control. It is
merely a device that brings us the psychological benefits of process - just as relinquisting
quishing control brings us nothing more than the psychological benefits of a non-systematic
approach. In both cases, all we have gained is the intellectual comfort of having made a
decision - the psychological comfort of having arrived at a point of view. The question at hand,
the real question, is whether we will control the materials or choose instead to control the
experience. Varese expressed the same idea in a different way when lie said of himself and
another man that he wanted to be in the material, while the other man wanted to remain
outside.

How true this is of Varese! His musical shapes respond to each other, rather than "relating" in
any sense that the word is used today. This is what gives his music that almost stationary
grandeur, like a sun standing still at the command of a latter-day Joshua.

Mondrian, Guston, Varese - three artists who are in the work, artists who chose control not of
the materials at hand, but of the experience. The system cannot help us here. Can we really
say it is just a reductive, simplistic image Mondrian gives us? How can we think so, when we
feel we are entering it? There is no thesis here, no antithesis, no synthesis. On the deepest
level there is no contradiction because the work has been done on its own terms. This is really
speculative. The only criterion for this kind of art is, how truly personal, how truly omniscient
is it.

CRIPPLED SYMMETRY

I enjoyed painting flowers, not bouquets, but a single flower at a time, in order that I might
better express its plastic structure. (Mondrian)

A growing interest in Near and Middle Eastern rugs has made me question notions I previously
held on what is symmetrical and what is not. In the Anatolian village and nomadic rugs there
appears to be considerably less concern with the exact accuracy of the mirror image than in
most other rug-producing areas. The detail of an Anatolian symmetrical image was never
mechanical, as I had expected, but idiomatically drawn. Even the classical Turkish carpet was
not as particular with perfect border solutions as was its Persian counterpart.

A disproportionate symmetry, whether rhythmic or in phrase lengths, characterizes twentieth-

century musical development. Webern's Spiegelbild (mirror image) in his last works was
integral to his twelve-tone procedure and any imbalance had to do with a slight variation of
rhythmic or chordal distribution in its mirror. The post-Webern tendency with rhythm was to
effect a compromise between symmetrical and asymmetrical beats. A typical example would
be five notes played in the time of four equal beats (5:4), or other similar patterns. Unlike
Stravinsky, whose raw syncopation articulated tight harmonic rhythm patterns, post-Webern
rhythmic usage stemmed from a twelve-tone polyphonic concept of continuous variation in
which a rhythm - not dependent on harmony - varied the motivic shape of the music.

Rugs have prompted me in my recent music to think of a disproportionate symmetry, in which

a symmetrically staggered rhythmic series is used: 4:3, 6:5, 8:7, etc., as the point of
departure. For my purpose, it "contains" my material more within the metric frame of the
measure; while in post-Webern arhythmic language, lopsided acceleration results from the
directional pull of one figure to another. What I'm after is somewhat like Mondrian not wanting
to paint "bouquets, but a single flower at a time."

There are musical examples where the juxtaposition of asymmetric proportions (all additive)
becomes the form of the composition. It is interesting that all three of the composers I will
briefly discuss use repetition or reiteration to achieve this additive form and, as a result, are
anchored in a fixed pitch-world, whether dissonant or consonant. In one of the movements of
Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles there is a continuous play between A and B, where the smaller
"border" of A remains unchanged in every detail, while B varies slightly in length when
repeated. Varese, in the striking and uncommonly extended "opening" of Integrales, also
utilizes an additive scheme, but dispenses with Stravinsky's characteristic juxtaposition of A
and B. Like the formation of crystals which so fascinated Varese, this opening statement -
created out of three notes - undergoes a continual transformation of rhythmic shapes and time
proportions. In Reich's "Four Organs", the rhythmic patterns are more acoustically oriented
and are based on the pitch-components of a chord that never changes position. The music
begins with a 3+8 pattern in which certain pitches from the basic chord are then varied
rhythmically. Reich's first structural rhythmic move is to continue to use the same elevenbeat
measure, but now divide it into patterns of 4+4+3; then 4+3+4. What follows is the gradual
addition of more beats to the structural frame of now longer measures: 4+3+2+4=13;
4+3+2+2+4=15; then to 18; 20; 23; 24 beats; until Reich does away with the barlines. As
the measures grow progressively longer, the oscillation of the recurring pitches can no longer
be said to have any marked rhythmic profile.

The moment a composer notates musical thought to an ongoing ictus, a grid of sorts is
already in operation, as with a ruler. Music and the designs or a repeated pattern in a rug
have much in common. Even if it be asymmetrical in its placement, the proportion of one
component to another is hardly ever substantially out of scale in the context of the whole.
Most traditional rug patterns retain the same size when taken from a larger rug and then
adapted to a smaller one. Likewise, the character of Stravinsky's patterns does not seem to
differ if a work of his is either long or short. If we examine asymmetric phrasing - whether in
Stravinsky's "hardedged" "Sacre", Satie's "soft-edged" "Socrate", or in Schoenberg's
duplication of the irregular prose of "Erwartung" -we find that the partitioning is concentrated
enough in time to hear the mosaic-like process of the grid at work. We also recognize a
historically reminiscent "conversation" between the phrases. In this regard, these three early
twentieth century asymmetric masterpieces were an outgrowth of the symmetrical
antecedent/consequence building blocks of the Classical era.

A music in which all properties functioned independently and autonomously from each other
was achieved by John Cage in the early 1950s. What Cage did was to compile a table of
sound-events - some just a note or two, others arabesque-like figures of different proportions.
Included in other charts was information pertaining to the gamut of musical parameters.
Through the tossing of coins and consulting the I Ching as oracle, the ordering and subsequent
combination of all this material was arrived at. The music was then "fixed" through the same
method of tossing coins into a nonprogressive, rhythmic "spatial" notation, not unlike a
distance scale on a map. Because this music is subject to the multiplicity of disciplines
inherent in its detailed assemblage, its musical shape is only discernible at the moment of
hearing - like images in a film. It is not involved with the grammar of design, and is perhaps
the only music known to us in which concepts of symmetry/asymmetry cannot be applied.

I was once in Rothko's studio when his assistant restretched the top of a large painting at
least four times. Rothko, standing some distance away, was deciding whether to bring the
canvas down an inch or so, or maybe even a little bit higher. This question of scale, for me,
precludes any concept of symmetry or asymmetry from affecting the eventual length of my
music. As a composer I am involved with the contradiction in not having the sum of the parts
equal the whole. The scale of what is actually being represented, whether it be of the whole or
of the part, is a phenomenon unto itself.

The reciprocity inherent in scale, in fact, has made me realize that musical forms and related
processes are essentially only methods of arranging material and serve no other function than
to aid one's memory.

What Western musical forms have become is a paraphrase of memory. But memory could
operate otherwise as well. In "Triadic Memories", a new piano work of mine, there is a section
of different types of chords where each chord is slowly repeated. One chord might be repeated
three times, another, seven or eight - depending on how long I felt it should go on. Quite soon
into a new chord I would forget the reiterated chord before it. I then reconstructed the entire
section: rearranging its earlier progression and changing the number of times a particular
chord was repeated. This way of working was a conscious attempt at "formalizing" a
disorientation of memory. Chords are heard repeated without any discernible pattern. In this
regularity (though there are slight gradations of tempo) there is a suggestion that what we
hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize that this is an illusion; a bit like walking
the streets of Berlin - where all the buildings look alike, even if they're not.

I'm being distracted by a small Turkish village rug of white tile patterns in a diagonal repeat of
large stars in lighter tones of red, green, and beige. Though David Sylvestei*) is right in
commenting that our appreciation of rugs such as this was enhanced by our exposure to
modernistic Western art, still, this "primitive" rug was conceived at almost the same time that
Matisse finished his art training. Everything about the rug's coloration, and how the stars are
drawn in detail, when the rectangle of a tile is even, how the star is just sketched (as if drawn
more quickly), when a tile is uneven and a little bit smaller - this, as well as the staggered
placement of the pattern, brings to mind Matisse's mastery of his seesaw balance between
movement

*) Islamic Carpets from the Joseph V. McMzillan Collection. Art Council of Great Britain. 1972.

and stasis. Why is it that even asymmetry has to look and sound right? There is another
Anatolian woven object on my floor, which I refer to as the "Jasper Johns" rug. It is an arcane
checkerboard format, with no apparent systematic color design except for a free use of the
rug's colors reiterating its simple pattern. Implied in the glossy pile (though unevenly worn) of
the mountainous Konya region, the older pinks, and lighter blues - was my first hint that there
was something there that I could learn, if not apply to my music.

The color-scale of most nonurban rugs appears more extensive than it actually is, due to the
great variation of shades of the same color (abrash) - a result of the yarn having been dyed in
small quantities. As a composer, I respond to this most singular aspect affecting a rug's
coloration and its creation of a microchromatic overall hue. My music has been influenced
mainly by the methods in which color is used on essentially simple devices. It has made me
question the nature of musical material. What could best be used to accommodate, by equally
simple means, musical color? Patterns.

Rug patterns were either abstracted from symbols, nature, or geometric shapes - leaving clues
from the real world. Jasper Johns's more recent paintings cannot be placed into any of these
categories. Johns's canvas is more a lens, where we are guided by his eye as it travels, where
the tide -somewhat different, somewhat the same - brings to mind Cage's dictum of "imitating
nature in the manner of its operation." These paintings create, on one hand, the concreteness
we associate with a patterned art and, on the other, an abstract poetry from not knowing its
origins. We might even question in Johns whether they are patterns at all. When does a
pattern become a pattern?

This persistence of pattern which runs throughout the art of the East is due to the inclination
of the craftsmen to let well alone. (A. F. Kendnck and C. F. C. Tattersall) Hand-woven Carpets,
London 1922)

Why Patterns is a composition for flute, glockenspiel, and piano consisting of a large variety of
patterns. The work is notated separately for each instrument and does not coordinate until the
last few minutes of the composition. This very close, hut never precisely synchronized,
notation allows for a more flexible pacing of three very distinct colors. Material given to each
instrument is idiomatically not interchangeable with that of the other instruments. Some of the
patterns repeat exactly -others, with slight variations either in their shape or rhythmic
placement. At times, a series of different patterns are linked together on a chain and then
juxtaposed by simple means.
The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not
one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one
pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on
which pattern should be reiterated and for how long, and on the character of its inevitable
change into something else.

I enjoy working with patterns that we feel are symmetrical (patterns of 2, 4, 8, etc.) but
present them in a particular context:

Example 1 is characteristic of a vertical pattern framed by silent beats; in this instance the
rests on either end are slightly unequal. Linear patterns are naturally more ongoing, and could
have the "short breath" regularity of Example 2 or anticipate a slight staggered rhythmic
alteration such as in Example 3. Another device I use is to have a longish silent timeframe
that is asymmetrical; in this instance, with a quixotic four-note figure in the middle:

or a symmetrical silent frame around a short asymmetric measure: (A. F. Kendrick and C. F.
C. Tattersall) Hand-woven Carpets, London 1922)

Why Patterns is a composition for flute, glockenspiel, and piano consisting of a large variety of
patterns. The work is notated separately for each instrument and does not coordinate until the
last few minutes of the composition. This very close, but never precisely synchronized,
notation allows for a more flexible pacing of three very distinct colors. Material given to each
instrument is idiomatically not interchangeable with that of the other instruments. Some of the
patterns repeat exactly -others, with slight variations either in their shape or rhythmic
placement. At times, a series of different patterns are linked together on a chain and then
juxtaposed by simple means.

The most Interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not
one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one
pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is solely on
which pattern should be reiterated and for how long, and on the character of its inevitable
change into something else.

I enjoy working with patterns that we feel are symmetrical (patterns of 2, 4, 8, etc.) but
present them in a particular context:

Example I is characteristic of a vertical pattern framed by silent beats; in this instance the
rests on either end are slightly unequal. Linear patterns are naturally more ongoing, and could
have the "short breath" regularity of Example 2 or anticipate a slight staggered rhythmic
alteration such as in Example 3. Another device I use is to have a longish silent timeframe
that is asymmetrical; in this instance, with a quixotic four-note figure in the middle:

Repetitive chordal patterns might not progress from one to another, but might occur at
irregular time intervals in order to diminish the close-knit aspect of patterning; while the more
evident rhythmic patterns might be mottled at certain junctures to obscure their periodicity.
For me patterns are really self-contained sound"groupings that enable me to break off without
preparation into something else.

In String Quartet there is an almost obsessive reiteration of the same chord - dispersed in an
overlay of four different speeds:

The rhythmic structure of the block consists of four uneven bar lengths with four permutations
that incorporate the instrumentation of the quartet. I must caution the reader not to take the
barlines here at face value. This passage becomes rhythmically obscured by the complicated
nonpatterned syncopation that results. Only after rehearsals, and by following the score, could
I catch an individual pattern as it crisscrossed from one instrument to another.
In Spring of Chosroes for violin and piano, the "pattern" of one section consists of heightening
the effect of the plucked violin figure (encompassing three pitches) by not establishing any
clear-cut rhythmic shape except for its constant displacement within the quintuplet. This
allows for five permutations, which are then juxtaposed in a helter-skelter fashion as the
series continues. The use of three pitches against five uneven beats created, in my ears, a
crippled symmetric constellation of "eight" as I was writing it. Aginst the violin's pattern, the
piano has an independent rhythmic series of the same three pitches, played in a symmetric
unit of four equal beats to a measure. This functions as still another deterrent to the natural
propulsion of the quintuplet.

If my approach seems more didactic now - spending many hours working out strategies that
only apply to a few moments of music - it is because the patterns that interest me are both
concrete and ephemeral, making notation difficult. If notated exactly, they are too stiff; if
given the slightest notational leeway, they are too loose. Though these patterns exist in
rhythmic shapes articulated by instrumental sounds, they are also in part notational images
that do not make a direct impact on the ear as we listen. A tumbling of sorts happens in
midair between their translation from the page and their execution. To a great degree, this
tumbling occurs in all music - but becomes more compounded in mine, since there is no
rhythmic "style", a quality often crucial to the performer's understanding of how and what to
do. I found this just a true in my music of the fifties - where rhythm was not notated, but left
to the performer.

The attempt to find a suitable notation for musical ideas has been a major preoccupation of
Boulez throughout his career. There is a significant revision of Le Soleil des Eaux that comes
to mind. The original version is in the "Klangfarben" manner: brief segments of the musical
line distributed from one instrument to another. The revised version has the individual
instruments follow through with a more continuous line. The notation of the earlier version
looks "good" in the manner of the times; but the revised score sounds better - rather, it
sounds like Boulez. In contrast, my notational concerns have begun to move away from any
preoccupation with how the music functions in performance.

It is difficult to describe what characterizes notational imagery."If we could suspend for just a
moment all the reasons we think distinguish one era from another - and briefly glance at the
pages of the last movement of the Hammerklavier, or a florid bar or two from Chopin, or any
work of Webern's - we will observe that these pages do not visually resemble the music of
their contemporaries. The degree to which a music's notation is responsible for much of the
composition itself, is one of history's best kept secrets.

The following example from Trio for violin, cello, and piano might best illustrate this, as well as
my increasing move away from the practicality of how the music will come off in performance.
Starting with the metronome indication ( = ), there is a difficult coordination problem between
the three instruments. The performers must pace seven beats into six equal ones, and
subdivide another rhythmic idea in which each pitch of the four-note piano chord, and the
separate notes of the double-stops in the violin and cello are all of different, finicky durations.
This "machine" goes on for thirty-six measures, with other problems developing along the
way. Technically, the music is both idiomatic and playable; but depends, to a taxing degree,
on the performer's concentration.

Many composers and theorists will disagree with the almost hierarchical prominence I attribute
to the notation's effect on composition. They would argue that new musical concepts, resulting
in innovative systems, necessitated changes in notation. This is then referred to as, say, a
new "piano style", as Leibowitz did in discussing an important early piano piece (Op. 11, 1909)
by Schoenberg. This interpretation cannot be refuted, but some room should be left open to
question it. My speculation over how a ,,notational look" may have contributed this, since at
that time I remember I was dangling between various procedures that I knew didn't apply to
my music. And as yet, I had not met the painters whose tactical solutions were to contribute
so much to this problem that confronted me. In no way do I want to imply that youthful
arrogance ignored all that I could learn from the study of composition. But my approach,
which was not conscious at the time and only revealed itself many years later, was: work first,
study later. Recently I was in a bookstore in Berlin where the clerk, not understanding English,
found it impossible to help me find certain German books on rugs. A distinguished man
intervened, and from our conversation it turned out that he too was an avid rug enthusiast. He
then took out of his pocket sheets of paper with singlespaced columns of his countless rug
books in many languages. "Could it be possible for me to see your rug collection while I'm in
Berlin?" I asked with some hesitation. "I haven't collected any rugs as yet, only books about
them. You see, I first want to learn all there is to know about them", he replied. I remember
Boulez saying something similar: "I must know everything before I step off the carpet."

My first lucky encounter with a painter who was to become crucial to my music occurred soon
after meeting John Cage in the latter part of 1950. Cage knocked on my door and announced
that he had just met an extraordinary young artist and that "we're going down to his studio".
The artist was Robert Rauschenberg. While looking at a large black painting in which
newspapers (also painted black) were glued to the canvas, Rauschenberg jokingly suggested I
buy it. "How much do you want for it?" "Whatever you have in your pocket." I had about
seventeen dollars and change - which I happily gave him, and which he happily accepted. We
put it on the roof of Cage's old Ford and off we went. I'm looking at it now (thirty years later)
as I write this. After living with this painting and studying it intensely now and then, I picked
up on an attitude about making something that was absolutely unique to me. To say that the
Black Painting could be relegated to "collage" simply did not ring true. It was more: it was like
Rauschenberg's discovery that he wanted "neither life nor art, but something in between". I
then began to compose a music dealing precisely with "inbetween-ness": creating a confusion
of material and construction, and a fusion of method and application, by concentrating on how
they could be directed toward "that which is difficult to categorize".

Soon after meeting Rauschenberg I met Jackson Pollock, who asked me to write music for a
film about him that had just been completed. I was very pleased about this since it was just
the very beginning of my career. Pollock lived way out on Long Island and only came to the
city sporadically, making it difficult to establish a real continuity to our relationship. In thinking
back to that time, I realize now how much the musical ideas I had in 1951 paralleled his mode
of working Pollock placed his canvas on the ground and painted as he walked around it. I put
sheets of graph paper on the wall; each sheet framed the same time duration and was, in
effect, a visual rhythmic structure. What resembled Pollock was my "all over" approach to the
time-canvas. Rather than the usual left-to-right passage across the page, the horizontal
squares of the graph paper represented the tempo - with each box equal to a preestablished
ictus; and the vertical squares were the instrumentation of the composition.

As I came to know Pollock better - especially from those conversations where he would relate
Michelangelo's drawings or American Indian sandpainting to his own work - I began to see
similar associations that I might explore in music. I must point out here that the intellectual
life of a young New York composer of my generation was one in which you kept your nose
glued to the music paper. Wolpe was intimate with many painters and constantly spoke of
other things besides music. Varese, too, was a composer with vast interests in other areas.
Unless you came to know creative people in other fields, your own intellectual and artistic
development was not the same. How a painter - who walked around a canvas, dipped a stick
into a can of paint, and then thrust it in a certain way across the canvas - could still talk about
Michelangelo was, and still is, baffling to me.

My edification in offstage references continued during my friendship with Mark Rothko. On

numerous occasions we went together to the Metropolitan, where his favorite haunts were,
surprisingly, not the painting galleries, but the Near Eastern collection and especially a small
room of Greco-Roman sculpture. Rothko always followed through his reaction to something
that would catch his attention with a brief, reflective commentary. I remember his absorption
one afternoon with the Greco-Roman sculpture: "How simple it would be if we all used the
same dimension the way these sculptures here resemble each other in height, stance, and the
distance between one foot and the other." Rothko was leaning toward a possible answer in the
more subliminal mathematics of his own work. And I agree artistically. It seems that scale
(this subliminal mathematics) is not given to us in Western culture, but must be arrived at
individually in our own work and in our own way. Like that small Turkish "tile"rug, it is
Rothko's scale that removes any argument over the proportions of one area to another, or
over its degree of symmetry or asymmetry. The sum of the parts does not equal the whole;
rather, scale is discovered and contained as an image. It is not form that floats the painting,
but Rothko's finding that particular scale which suspends all proportions in equilibrium.

Stasis, as it is utilized in painting, is not traditionally part of the apparatus of music. Music can
achieve aspects of immobility, or the illusion of it: the Magritte-like world Satie evokes, or the
"floating sculpture" of Varese. The degrees of stasis, found in a Rothko or a Guston, were
perhaps the most significant elements that I brought to my music from painting. For me,
stasis, scale, and pattern have put the whole question of symmetry and asymmetry in
abeyance. And I wonder if either of these concepts, or an amalgamation of both, can still
operate for the many who are now less prone to synthesis as an artistic formula.

DURATIONS (1960/61)

In Durations, I arrive at a more complex style in which each instrument is living out its own
individual life in its own individual sound world. In each piece the instruments begin
simultaneously, and are then free to choose their own durations within a given general tempo.
The sounds themselves are designated.

FALSE RELATIONSHIPS AND THE EXTENDED ENDING (1968)

False Relationships and the Extended Ending uses two instrumental groups (piano, violin,
trombone; two pianos, cellos, chimes). They begin together but thereafter are independent of
one another. The work alternates between exact time proportions in the pauses and a free
time (slow) duration for the sounds. Except for a recurring broken chord in all three pianos,
the material for each group is different and non repetitive. The dynamics are very low
throughout."

THE VIOLA IN MY LIFE (1970/71)

The Viola in My Life (dedicated to the Pierrot Players) was begun in Honolulu in July, 1970 and
completed after my return home to New York in late August.

Scored for flute, violin, viola, cello, percussion and piano, the compositional format is quite
simple. Unlike most of my music the tempo is quite precise. I needed the exact time
proportion underlying the gradual and slight crescendo characteristic of all the sounds the
viola plays. The rest of the ensemble remains constantly soft throughout.

Since 1958 (not unlike an aspect of minimal painting) the surface of my music was quite
"flat". The viola's crescendos are a return to a preoccupation with a musical perspective which
is not determined by an interaction of corresponding musical ideas - but rather like a bird
trying to soar in a confined landscape.
The Viola in My Life III (composed especially for Karen Phillips) was begun in Honolulu in July,
1970 and consists of individual compositions utilizing various instrumental combinations (small
and large) with viola.

"The compositional format is quite simple. Unlike most of my music, the complete cycle of The
Viola In My Life is conventionally notated as regards pitches and tempi. I needed the exact
time proportion underlying the gradual and slight crescendo characteristic of all the muted
sounds the viola plays. It was this aspect that determined the rhythmic sequence of events.

The Viola in My Life IV, was commissioned by the Venice Biennale for its 1971 Festival, and
could be described as an orchestral "translation" of material used in the three chamber pieces
preceding it. My intention was to think of melody and motivic fragments somewhat the way
Robert Rauchenberg uses photographs in his painting - and - superimpose this on a static
sound world more characteristic of my music.

ROTHKO CHAPEL (1972)

The Rothko Chapel is a spiritual environment created by the American painter Mark Rothko as
a place for contemplation where men and women of all faiths, or of none, may meditate in
silence, in solitude or celebration together. For this chapel, built in 1971 by the Menil
Foundation in Houston, Texas, Rothko painted fourteen large canvasses.

While I was in Houston for the opening ceremonies of the Rothko Chapel, my friends John and
Dominique de Menil asked me to write a composition as a tribute to Rothko to be performed in
the chapel the following year.

To a large degree, my choice of instruments (in terms of forces used, balance and timbre) was
affected by the space of the chapel as well as the paintings. Rothko's imagery goes right to
the edge of his canvas, and I wanted the same effect white the music that it should permeate
the whole octagonal-shaped room and not be heard from a certain distance. The result is very
much what you have in a recording - the sound is closer, more physically with you than in a
concert hall.

The total rhythm of the paintings as Rothko arranged them created an unbroken continuity.
While it was possible with the paintings to reiterate color and scale and still retain dramatic
interest, I felt that the music called for a series of highly contrasted merging sections. I
envisioned an immobile procession not unlike the friezes on Greek temples.

These sections could be characterized as follows: 1. a longish declamatory opening; 2. a more

stationary "abstract" section for chorus and chimes; 3. motivic interlude for soprano, viola and
tympani; 4. a lyric ending for viola with vibraphone accompaniment, later joined by the chorus
in a collage effect.

There are a few personal references in Rothko Chapel. The soprano melody, for example, was
written on the day of Stravinsky's funeral service in New York. The quasi-Hebraic melody
played by the viola at the end was written when I was fifteen. Certain intervals throughout the
work have the ring of the synagogue.

There were other references which I have now forgotten.

FOR FRANK O'HARA (1973)

For Frank O'Hara was composed in 1973 especially for the tenth anniversary of the Center of
the Creative and Performing Arts.

My primary concern (as in all my music) is to sustain a "flat surface" with a minimum of
contrast. Frank O'Hara was the "Poet Laureate" of the New York art world during the 1950s.
He was gravely wounded (at forty) by a beach taxi on Fire Island on July 24, 1966, and died
the following day.

ABOUT SONIA SEKULA (1971)

She was totally charming, beautiful, witty, tiny; the silent movie star type.

She had a fantastic, unusual facility with words.

She was unusually gifted; her work had a conviction, an authenticity that made you wonder
who this person is and what is going to happen to all this talent.

She was an addition to that world, that whole cast of Hemingway characters; she was very
gifted, that little spice that added to the scene tremendously.

STATEMENT (1975)

Until about ten years ago I wrote often about music. I no longer do. The writing was usually
polemical in content. In recent years I do not want to argue with talent. I want to be thankful
for it regardless from where it comes.

NEITHER/NOR

Recently in the Sunday papers an article about Messiaen appeared in which a great virtue was
made of his political "disengagement". Reading this article, we learn how deeply religious this
composer is, how much he looks forward to his vacations in Switzerland, how proud he is of
Boulez, and how involved he is with bird calls. Can we say this man is really disengaged? His
chief occupation seems to be this very disengagement. There is something curiously official in
the way his interests and views are described - as though nothing could now disturb all this.
Events do, after all, enter into our lives, often take over our lives in fact. The impression one
gets from this article is that of a living obituary, or a diary written in advance.

In contrast, let's take a man like Thoreau. A small town boy, he never felt it necessary to
categorize his retreat into the woods as a "disengagement". And actuahy, he had no trouble at
all finding a path from Walden right into jail on the big-time issue of his day: slavery.

At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I want to point out that when an American like Thoreau
acts - and there have been thousands of Thoreaus - he acts out of moral indignation, not
political indignation. That is, he acts humanly, without the mythology of a system.

What I am really trying to say here is only that I feel we have been victimized. For centuries
we have been victimized by European civilization. And all it has given us - including
Kierkegaard - is an Either/Or situation, both in politics and in art. But suppose what we want is
Neither/Nor? Suppose we want neither politics nor art? Suppose we want a human action that
doesn't have to be legitimized by some type of holy water gesture of baptism? Why must we
give it a name? What's wrong with leaving it nameless?

Perhaps I can make my point clearer. Some years ago a good friend who was a painter asked
me to write the Forword to his new show. One of the things I remember writing was that he
was the kind of artist who was content just to "breathe on the canvas". Which actually means
that he was a beautiful artist with a very modest statement. As a result of this remark, my
relations with this friend cooled considerably, and, needless to say, my article did not appear
in the catalog of his show.

There are two subjects everyone gets excited about. One of them is politics, and the other is
art. Both present themselves as all-encompassing. Both range themselves as opposed to all
other interests. Given this type of situation, how could my painter friend not resent the
implication that his artistic statement was modest? It must have seemed like saying he was
not an artist at all. Yet a modest statement can be totally original, where the "grand scale" is,
more often than not, merely eclectic.

zPasternak tells us that something false came into every Russian home when a man and his
wife, in the privacy of their own household, would talk about such large and important things.
Art can inject the same kind of lie into one's life. Like politics, it is dangerous insofar as it is
Messianic. Nono wants everyone to be indignant. John Cage wants everyone to be happy. Both
are forms of tyranny, though naturally, we prefer Cage's. At least I do. But if art must be
Messianic, then I prefer my way - the insistence on the right to be esoteric. I confess to the
fact that whatever describable beauties may arise from this esoteric art have always been
useless.

But is this what was asked of me on this occasion? Supposedly, I am contributing a paper on
"Art and Social Life". So far as I understand it, the question before us is, to what extent do the
two belong together. Before determining just how much art should or should not infringe on
social life, let us remember that social life never infringes on art. In fact, social life doesn't
give a damn about art. Social life, as I see it, is a sort of vast digestive system that chews up
whatever finds its way into its mouth. This vast appetite can swallow a Botticelli at a gulp, with
a voraciousness frightening to everyone but a zoo custodian. Why is art so masochistic, so
looking for punishment? Why is it so anxious to find its way into this huge maw?

To speak more seriously, we do recognize that the trend for many gifted composers right now
is toward more and more of this "infringement". There is, in fact, a movement afoot to make
an art that "sabotages" its own complacency, or, rather, that sabotages its own service to a
complacent society. This idea is attractive to the politically oriented or the socially oriented
artist, whether it be a Nono or a John Cage, though it will naturally be seen from different
angles by two such very divergent personalities. Nono, who finds the social situation
intolerable, wants art to change it. John Cage, who finds art intolerable, wants the social
situation to change it. Both are trying to bridge the gulf, the distance between the two. The
modern artist, whose tendency is to use everything at his disposal without any truly personal
contribution, naturally reaches for salvation toward whatever he feels is real. But how can you
bridge what is real with what is only a metaphor? Art is only a metaphor. It is solely the
personal contribution -that "nameless" sensation mentioned earlier - that can give the artist
those rare moments when art becomes its own deliverance.

Among my contemporaries, who knows this?

DARMSTADT-LECTURE

If you talk in as many classrooms as I do, it has less of an educational aspect and becomes
more like Las Vegas, so you'll have to forgive me if I appear comfortable.
An interesting friend of mine defines tragedy as when two people are right. So you all can
relax and enjoy your tragic position. And don't take it out on me.

And growing up with that particular problem, it will either break you or make you. When I was
a kid, there was a big controversy in America between Nicolas Nabokov and Stravinsky, Rene'
Leibowitz and Schdnberg, and it was an awful situation. I was like an orphan child with
divorced and separated parents. I loved both of them. I didn't take Scho"nberg's position that
both of us can't be right; one of us has to be right. They were both right.

And I think it's a tragic situation, perhaps in this part of the world - and I told Metzger that it
was his teacher's fault, Adorno, with the hatchet job he did on Stravinsky - and speaking to a
lot of students, not only here (remember, I go from one classroom and blackboard to
another), their lack of familiarity of interest in Stravinsky is very, very sad. And I would tell
every young composer in this room that without Stravinsky in your life, you're living in a
peculiar type of exile. Without Stravinsky in your life, you have no feeling for instruments.

O.K., let's get specifically to the piece, the "II. Stringquartet" last night. And I want to tell you
the way I work and the way I think, a little bit about it. And my own confusion, linguistically,
and in every other sense of the word, between terminology and what things really mean.

Is the young woman who was unhappy about not getting a more precise answer about tonality
in the room?

- Answer: "'She isn't here" -Is she here? (She'll never admit it if she is.) Oh, there you are!
(Laughter) It would be more interesting if you're here. (More iaughter.) I want to quote two
people. Lord Byron: "And who was to define the definition." And then m" friend the painter
Willem de Kooning, who was a very interesting person. He said: "History does not influence
me:I influence history."

So in talking about something like tonality now, things have changed so much, you see. It was
like talking aout airplanes. Now in Lindbergh's time, one of the most exciting things you could
ever see was going down to Washington and seeing the "Spint of St. Louis", with only a few
little gauges on the dashboard. It was an incredible thing to see. So at that time you could talk
about airplanes.

Very important for all my younger colleagues is to find out how people work because many
times you're living in a phantasy. For example, you think I'm loose. I might have been stricter
than the people you thought were strict. The people who you think are radicals might really be
conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really he radical. I remember
some young man working in Salabert some years ago wanted to get Takemitsu and myself
together. And so he had this nice dinner, and he had a radio on, very quietly, and then it got
louder and louder, and then we heard da-di-da-da-di-di-da (intonates Sibelius "4th
Symphony"), and he wanted to turn it off, and Takemitsu and I jumped up, "Leave it on!
Leave it on!" He looked at us, it was Sibelius. At the cheapest moment, we got excited. It
wasn't the opening of the "4th Symphony"!

I remember a graduate student of mine, I'm raving about the "4th Symphony" of Sibelius, and
he says, "You really like that?"

I remember once we had Aaron Copland talk, and all the students were surprised at his radical
mind. They couldn't put it together with what they thought his music was. You see? And things
like that.

Well, my favorite story that Takemitsu told me was about Xenakis doing an electronic piece in
a Tokyo studio. After it was all over, they were in a room, and they were playing it there, and
Xenakis, was walking back and forth in his marvelous-fitted jacket, and he said: "I'll take this;
I'll take that; I want to put this with that; I want this here with that piece there." That's the
way he put the piece together, as an assemblage, you see. There immediately we get involved
with a certain interesting terminology, assemblage, as opposed to a word like composition.
And there I mentioned it, words. You must believe me that I try not to give anything a name.

Many years ago, I met a very young pianist Frederik Rzewski, and he said with the peace of
mind available, he said, "You know that canon for two pianos?" Canon, me, my canon? Oh
yes, that free-durational piece. It was a canon, I suppose. To tell you the truth, if I'd thought
it was a canon, it would have caused me to commit suicide. (Laughter)

I don't call a thing by a name. For example, if I'm repeating something, I don't say I'm
repeating something. In fact, I don't let my students use repeat-signs. I say something might
happpen right at the end of the measure.

What is my music? What is the piece last night? The piece last night is involved with two
aspects which I feel are less conceptual and more realistic. I'm insterested in realistic things,
actually. We'll talk about concepts.

So I try not to give something a name. That's very, very, very important for me.

Actually, I'm really addressing myself to the younger, less experienced composers, and I'm
trying to convey that for those who a?e using models - and how can you not use models - you
have to understand that since two Greek characters many, many years ago would have an
argument together about those two points of view - it was the conceptual and the perceptual -
and the whole history of our thinking and our understandting has to do with either a fight
against the both, or the amalgamation of the both, and is both, or some standoff, whatever.

But if we take Henri Bergson seriously, he reminds us that there are essentially only two ways
of expressing ourselves; one is conceptually, and the other by way of images.

Einstein would always mean an image.

The DNA-formula came about of an image. And the character in the sense that made that
image talked about his students trying to arrive at problems mathematically, and they get into
a mess. He talked about how important to him it is to have the image, and then -being that
he's a great mathematician, of course - he describes what it is mathematically.

So that's essentially how I work. I don't know which is which, and what is what. There's a
confusion between the conceptual and the images.

What's interesting about images is that you can't say, "I'm going to make an image", unless
it's programmatic, and that's why 85 percent of the world's music is programmatic. You just
can't say, "I'm going to make an image, an instrumental image."

Try and think of the history of contemporary music. At the beginning of the 20th century, how
many instrumental images do you find? Do we ever get together what an instrumental image
is? Say the opening of the Stravinsky "Violin Concerto", the slow movement. Try and locate it.
Think of the high tessiture registers. You remember the low flute cutting in at the bottom? If
you don't remember, and if you don't know what an image is, you've got a problem.

Now how I work is this way, especially for the past twelve years, and it's not original. There
are many, many people who work this way, but in other fields. Samuel Beckett, not in
everything he does, but in a lot of things he does. He would write something in English,
translate it into French, then translate that thought back into the English that conveys that
thought. And I know he keeps on doing it. He wrote something for me in 1977, and I got it.
I'm reading it. There's something peculiar. I can't catch it. Finally I see that every line is really
the same thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else is
happening. Nothing else is happening. What you're doing in an almost Proustian way is getting
deeper and deeper saturated into the thought. What I do then is, I translate, say something,
into a pitchy situation. And then I do it where it's more intervallic, and I take the suggestions
of that back into another kind of pitchyness - not the original pitchyness, and so forth, and so
on. Always retranslating and then saying, now let's do it with another kind of focus.

The word here is focus. Under suggestion, through another kind of - I don't like the word
-variation. But I have to say something. The thought said in another way. And many times
another language. The language of another register, the language of another color. And I want
to use "differentiation" for those things, you see.

Then after all, you can't take instruments seriously enough. To me they're an accommodation.
I mean, Moses didn't give us instruments.

Oh, I said something very funny. I was telling about Moses the other night, and instead of
saying the Ten Commandments, I said the Twelve Commandments. (Laughter)

You can't tell jokes. I lost my thought.

Then another aspect will come in. The parameters are always floating. The focus is always
floating. It's like a light here, then a light here, then a light there. Because you can't have
everything, unless you're writing a work in a sense with that focus, and then you might have
something terrific. Another colorful friend of mine, the late, wonderful American painter,
Barnett Newman, once said, "If you want everything in a work of art, what you're left with is
everything." Ruinage.

If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble.

For example, I could think of a term ,,Voice leading", could become a focus. Then, I would,
say do without voice leading. Or I would set up my own obstacle course.

I have ideas that I throw away in two minutes that the poorest one in this room would give
me at least, 10000 Marks for. And the reason I do that is because I don't want to be
influenced with my own thought. That might divert me from the focus of that moment.

But I don't think that that moment is essentially a kind of a one-night stand with an idea. I
wo"ldn't say that it's a short term commitment. I just have to be focused and doing my best at
that particular moment because it's a very serious operation.

There are a lot of questions to ask, and some of the most important questions are: your
attitude as a composer. Sch6nberg once wrote in a letter that some days he gets up in the
morning, and he can't even do a simple little exercise. Composing is so difficult. To write
something lousy is so difficult. And a lot of the difficulty is not so much whether your idea is
right or wrong. It doesn't make a difference what the idea is.

Chekhov once said that even a lie leads to salvation. Anything, it doesn't make a difference
what you do: number 1, you have to believe in it; and number 2, you have to be absolutely
focused on it.

So I don't like to talk about concepts, and I don't like to talk about ideas. Twelve tone is not a
concept. It's a method of working with twelve tones. And something always goes wrong in
understanding how you're going to work with those twelve tones.
Webern came for a lesson. The minute he left the lesson and got on a trolley car to go from
one part of Vienna to another, everything was all screwed up. (Laughter) Sch6nberg writes
how naive Webern is, and his concept of the twelve tones. That he uses it like a lead. But the
minute he got on a trolley car, and Vienna is small, it goes wrong.

In that sense, everything you do, and everything I do, I feel is essentially not mine.
Everything is a found object. I mean, I didn't invent the major 6th. I didn't invent a minor 7th.
When I hear these things going, how I use them. Watching these found objects.

Everything is a found object. Even something that I do invent is a found object. You're dealing
with found objects. You're all amateur Duchamps, and you don't know it. And in realizing that,
you must loose your vested interest in ideas.

I'm a European intellectual. I'm not an American iconoclast! And it's very, very interesting.
Look at my background. When I was a young boy, who was my teacher? My teacher was a
fantastic woman. She went to school with Skriabin's second wife. She was her girlfriend. She
studied with Busoni in Berlin. That was my paino teacher. She taught the Czar's children. I
had a piano teacher that taught the Czar's children. (Laughter) She'd tell me everything about
Busoni. Certain attitudes. That was history for me. Certain attitudes people had.

Who was my first teacher? Wallingford Riegger studied in Leipzig. And he would go over the
Beethoven. He loved the variation movement in the "Eroica". He would always forget that he
was raving to me about it because it's as if he developed a senility about the variation
movement. And he'd take out that bounded volume from Leipzig with that marvelous paper,
and I remember I didn't believe it, where the clef went the other way, you know. (Laughter)
Incredible. The other way. I thought this was the way it was really done.

And sometimes when I'm really depressed and I'm working 15 or 20 hours and falling asleep,
I make that, and I have a little laugh, and I wake up, and then I put in my bass clef the wrong
way. That was my teacher. The first twelve-tone composer in America. Never talked to me
about twelve-tones.

I wrote a modal little piece when I was 14 years old I wrote a modal little melody and an
elegant piano accompaniment, and I put it in my little briefcase, and Riegger says, "Morty,
could you leave it here? I'd like to show it to Henry Cowell. He wasn't interested in the fact
whether my music was chromatic or not.

But before I forget it, there's a charming little story about Stravinsky and John Cage. John
Cage got very friendly with Stravinsky in Stravinsky's last days, and Stravinsky didn't know
his background, and he asked John who he had liked as a young man, and John said,
"Scho"nberg". And Stravinsky said, "Why?" And John said, "Because he's chromatic." And
Stravinsky said "But I am too!"

So what I'm really trying to say is how do you represent history? How close to a model do you
move? How much is really needed? What are the leaps that you yourself could make? How
have you used the model? What questions do you use about the model?

Jackson Pollock, he has this marvelous summer home, and I was invited there for a weekend,
and all he had was books on Michelangelo. And what he liked about Michelangelo was the
drawings, the unending rhythm. Like his "Autumn Rhythm", if you know that. That's a leap.
That unending rhythm. That incessant, unending rhythm that you find. And that's a leap.

I once went to the Metropolitan with Mark Rothko, and we'd look at a Rembrandt painting and
the way Rembrandt bleeds to the edges. Take a look at Rothko, the way he bleeds to the
edges. That's a leap.
Or mood. A certain type of mood that is transfixed on the canvas. Fixed onto the canvas, in
the sense that one might get from Piero della Francesca. That's a move. An historical move.
And so forth and so on. An atmosphere of Schubert. When we had the rehersal in Toronto, and
I walked in, andI wanted to convey the mood of the piece to ten musicians I said to the
marvelous Kronosquartet, "Well", I said to them, "Play it like 'Death and the Maiden'." And
they played. That's it. That kind of hovering, as if you're in a register you'd never heard
before. That's one of the magics of Schubert.

To give you something in a register you all tinkle with, and it sounds terrific, and you hit that
register, you'll make an image of that register, you'll focus into that register; you hear the
notes in that register, and it's some place. Where is it? You go to the piano and you can't find
it. That sense of place. (Hums a tune.) Where is it? Fantastic composing.

Another very close friend of mine that I learned perhaps more about art and attitudes from
than from anybody else was somebody connected with the Bauhaus as a young man. He went
to the Bauhaus. He was quite a character. He was a visionary and architect, by the name of
Freddy Keisler. And I met Keisler on a Village street one day, I was about 25, 24, and he said
"I'm just coming back from a big architectural department in Texas." And he tells this story.
He said, "I went into this tremendous room, and on every desk there was an electric
sharpener. So all the kids there were sharpening their pencils." Keisler went, and he sat down
at a desk, and he took out his old Viennes penknife, and he started to sharpen a pencil. And
he said to them, "All you did was sharpen a pencil." He said, "I just had an idea for a
building." (Laughter)

I don't think I ever heard anything interesting from an American in New York.

But you have to know what New York was like at that time. There were all these emigrants
and refugees from Europe. Mondrian was there. He affected the whole climate. Max Ernst was
there. Although not necessarily in New York. He was out West. Leger was living there. And
then those really classy surrealists. Very important to the intellectual attitudes of New York in
1947, 1948, 1949. Very important was Andre' Breton.

And John Cage's connection as a young man coming from New York to the West Coast was in
that particular world. Very, very interesting people.

The whole European intelligentsia dominated. Some of them felt that in the sense that they
came from very autocratic backgrounds, like Albers, that created a kind of place somewhat
like the Bauhaus. Black Mountain College. And you just think of this Bohemian place with this
kind of very proper man, and he once told John Cage that he thought that he went too far. In
other words, he was too permissive at Black Mountain College, because of the
nonauthoritarian background, you see.

And Yale University became a fantastic school for young painters. Many famous painters came
out of Yale, only because Albers had such a marvelous attitude about a kind of laissez faire
and not trying to be doctrinaire and make it like one school, a one-concept school.

There's a marvelous book by Stan Dell an Napoleon, and I always remember the opening line.
He said, "I'm writing this book to refute a lie." Not that anybody was lying about Napoleon,
and so he went and wrote this book. And I'm kind of like that in the sense that because you
might speak German, and your Goethe, and have certain ideas about culture or European
civilisation, I want you to drop it. (Hesitant laughter.) And not have that feeling that you're so
to speak, in possession of the truth. I'm not talking about Darmstadt. I'm talking about the
fact that you're Europeans, and you have mainstream interests and ideas. It's very important
to drop it. And instead of thinking of concepts, ask questions that are more flexible.
Another very interesting man, the father of cybernetics, of the computer, had a marvelous
phrase. Norbert Wiener "Hardening of a categories". You know hardening of the arteries?
Hardening of the categories. And that's what happens. They get very hard. Which gets us,
believe it or not to, why I use the spelling, more microtonal spelling. The hardening of the
distance, say between a minor 2nd. When you're working with a minor 2nd as long as I'v
been, it's very wide. I hear a minor 2nd like a minor 3d almost. It's very, very wide.
(Laughter) So that perception of hearing is a very interesting thing. Because, conceptually you
are not hearing it, but per ceptually, you might be able to hear it.

So it depends on how quickly or slowly that note is coming to you, like Mc Enroe. I'm sure that
he sees that ball coming in slow-motion. And that's the way I hear that pitch. It's coming to
me very slowly, and there's a lot of stuff in there. But I don't use it conceptually. That's why I
use the double flats. People think they're leading tones. I don't know. Think what you want.

But I use it because I think it's a very practical way of still having the focus of the pitch. And
after all, what's sharp? It's directional, right? And a double sharp is more directional.

But I didn't get the idea conceptually from music at all. I got the idea from "Teppich", rugs.
Walter already told you about my interest in "Teppiche". But one of the most interesting things
about a beautiful old rug in natural vegetable dyes is that it has "abrash". "Abrash" ist that
you dye in small quantities. You cannot dye in big bulks of wool. So it's the same, but yet it's
not the same. It has a kind of micro-tonal hue. So when you look at it, it has that kind of
marvelous shimmer which is that slight gradation.

I also got my feeling of doubling and how I want to double, or how I want to hear a certain
note, from music as well, of course, from my ears. But also from something that's very, very
beautiful in that "Teppich", rug. If you want a very deep blue, you cannot get it on the first
dye. It has to be redyed, over and over again. And the whole idea of someone doing it
outdoors where I know how long it took her to redye and redye because she was very fussy on
the timbre about her dye is something that influenced me.

Now getting back to the timbre, another thing I want to mention to my young colleagues:
"Know thy instrument!" Know thy instrument better than you know yourselves. It's very, very
important. And one of the interesting things that helped me write this piece was another
focus: a little more what I would feel is a more matching relationship between the instrument
and the pitch, its timbre and the register it's presented in. And that's very, very important. I
would feel that the late Webern was a very bad influence in that sense, and it's a little
disconcerting because the matching of his colors, for example, in the "Six Pieces for
Orchestra" cannot be bad, focus. It is sensational. But when he became more conceptual and
had an idea that he was going to use a saxophone for a cantus firmus. Someone from the
audience "Why not?" -No, that's not the function of instruments. Because you don't need it;
you don't have to write something as crazy as "Opus 24". Yo don't need the double basses and
the piccolo to tell you about a few notes. And he doesn't need it in "Opus 28", which is a
magnificent quartet. It's a magnificent piece. One of my favorite pieces. So you don't need It.
Why would one feel that he has to use instruments these? I don't know. I just don't
understand. I'm confused.

I mean pitch is a gorgeous thing. If you have a feeling, a tactic feeling for the instrument,
what you can do with just your finger - something I learned from my teacher that taught the
Czar's children. The way that she would put her finger down, in a Russian way of just the
finger. The liveliness of the finger. And produce a "b" flat, and you wanted to faint. (Laughter)
When she'd sit down and show me how to play - I'll do it in slow motion. (Mr. Feldman plays a
few notes on the piano.) Now when she'd do that, a "b" and a "d", now look at that marvelous
registration. I'd faint. (Laughter) Again that's a leap in learning what is the 20th century.

That's why I don't like electronic music. I think pitch is too beautiful for that electronic sound,
to get near it, too beautiful to be played on an accordian. (Laughter)
So if we want to have a look at history, let's forget about concepts. Concepts come and go.
They're like the planets in the universe.

- Question asked by a woman in the audience: "But what do you think if you had..." -(Mr.
Feldman interrupts the question.) It's not the question time, and if you're coming to Buffalo,
you'll have plenty of time to talk to me. (Laughter) - Same woman: "I'm not sure I'll come.
-O.K., then talk. (Laughter) "If you had nothing else than an accordian, on what would you
play then?" -Play on your skull. I don't care. But listen tome, will you? Listen. I'm saying to
make a leap. What is our, tradition? What do we have? I want to tell you what I feel is our
tradition, I am saying our Western tradition. I think if we leave it with slumming, it's like me
going to Harlem. (Laughter) In fact, I don't even feel I'm in the West here. The tuning is too
high. (Laughter) I feel I'm in some underdeveloped country with some crazy...

- Remark from the audience.' "You are!" -(Laughter)

I was in Vienna, and I heard my, music, and I didn't recognize it, it was so high-tech.
(Laughter)

What I'm really trying to say is this: instead of the twelve-tone as a concept. I'm involved with
all the 88 notes. I have a big, big world there.

I remember in the 60s when I was seeing a lot of Stockhausen, who was in New York, and he
says to me, "Morty, you mean to tell me that every time you have to choose a note, you have
to choose it out of the 88 notes?" So I looked at him, and I said, "Karlheinz, it's easier for me
to find a note on the piano and handle it (the choice of the note) than to handle one woman."
(Laughter) To be married, or to have one girlfriend, is more complicated than to find notes.

I hear them. Of course, maybe you don't hear them. Maybe you didn't know that was music.
Maybe you thought music was words without music. I don't know. Talk without music,
concepts without hearing. I don't know. Even John Cage said to me recently, "Morty, you
mean to tell me you hear all that?" And I said, "No, I write it down to hear it." And he said,
"Well, I understand that." (Laughter)

So actually when, say, I write it down to hear it, we get to another parameter. There are very,
few of you who see it. More and more, you're all involved in how to get your notes, which I
understand it is like how to make a living. (Laughter)

So there's an anxiety. How do I get my notes? There are other things besides notes, of course.
Registration. What's that? I would say that if I were forced to confess the one thing. . . I hat
to make hierarchal statements because the hierarchy is, alles zusammen. I'm serious!
Everything together.,.

In fact, I cant't hear a note unless I know its instrument. I can't hear a note to write it down
unless I know immediately its register. I can't write a note unless I know its suggested shape
in time. But that's another aspect in the sense that I retranslate. Once I hear it in the terms of
rhythmic shapes, almost in a kind of Stravinsky way; that is, the beat in relation to the meter.
Sometimes I hear it where it's just a kind of overall durational block, where it's almost a kind
of a cubist block. And I'm dissecting the time.

That's translation. Beat in relation to the meter. It's as if one minute I'm working in inches,
and the next minute I'm working in centimeters, and the next minute I'm working in
millimeters. And then I put them all together, and then I just use two, and then I just use one,
and then I just go into inches for example. And I use that very much as a md of rhythmic
images. And then I'm looking for, I'm really just hoping for, I'm panning for gold.
A term I like that Freud used... I don't think of myself as a composer, or have an obsession
with professionalism. De Kooning again, "I work; other people call it art." And I have that kind
of conflict.

But where was I?

- Member of the audience: CCFreud."" -Freud's great remark: he never referred to himself as
a scientist. He always called himself an adventurer. I always liked that. Because I'm an
adventurer. An interesting idea, isn't it?

I've spoken to a few of you here and a very, very serious problem is that you don't know how
to consult the criticism. You don't know how to study with anybody. You bring something, you
want to get some opinion, you get some opinion, you immediately don't want to hear it. And
so it's overly defensive, and then you realize you're walking on eggs. And remember, I'm
saying this and being a little rough sometimes.

I was invited to. . . - Well, let's say the kids weren't good enough to get into Julliard - the
Oberlin Conservatory. And just before I walked in to give my criticism, the chairman walked
over to me and said, "Morty, we're walking on eggs here". I said, "I understand".

So then a young fellow had a tape and played a flute piece. And the piece, like anybody would
like, a sweet piece, starts low, builts up high. You might not go that high "c" like in "Density"
and then you come down, and that's what this fellow did. And then I kind of used it. I got
turned on with the idea, and I said, "Isn't it interesting, the whole idea of going up and coming
down." I said, "Can anyone think of pieces that go this way, like a "V", start high and go
down?" The fellow walked out of the room. (Laughter) He was insulted. It's interesting. Do you
know any pieces that start high and go down? Don't write it! (Laughter)

Now as far as the pitches and the notes, I would say that the "II. Stringquartet",
intervallically, is essentially an interest in the minor 2nd and the major 2nd. Those three
notes. I like it that way because I could - in a sense - divide the octave better.

As far as why the piece is so long, or why I'm writing long pieces. . . In fact, I could find some
very interesting, either social idea, or whatever: I'm tired of the bourgeois audience; the
audience is for four movements. I mean, I could say that. But I think the reason I write long
pieces is that I have the time and the money to write long pieces. (Laughter)

That's what they asked Henry Moore. They said, "Why are these things so big?" "When I was a
young man, I didn't have any money", he said. "Soon as I would be able to afford it", he said,
"I really wanted to produce things big and send them to the foundry. And give them real
shape." So it's all a question of economics.

Sometimes it's no good to get money. For example, there was a great painter, Franz Kline.
And even De Kooning early pictures. They didn't have any money. They didn't have any
money at all. And so they used cheap house paint and had a great look. It didn't have an
educated look.

You have no idea. There are so many things working for you. The sound of a violin is
educated... You have no idea of all the work that's gone in before you even write. That's part
of our assemblage in Western civilization. Things are handed to us on a silver platter. We don't
even know it. We think it's raw materials.

I'd stop writing music unless I had a beautiful piano. I wouldn't be interested unless I had a
fantastic violin. To me, that's Western civilization. Perfected instruments. The chromatic scale
is to me Western civilization. All the other things, as I said, were satellites, planets on our way
to the grave.
O.K., genug. And now maybe 10, 15 minutes of questions.

I would like to give you something technical. But it's a question of words. I like words. Like tell
me, what's the chromatic scale? It's like saying to somebody, if I said "Look, you've got the
chromatic scale." My father said to me, "Morty. I'm going to give you what my father gave to
me, the world" (Laughter) You don't want the world.

What you want is money for a house. You want to go to Darmstadt. What good is Darmstadt if
you don't have the money to go to it? So you don't want the world. You might not even want
Darmstadt. (Laughter) You want the money to get to Darmstadt. (Laughter)

- Someone from the audience. -"Can you imagine you didn't have any money to get away
from it?" (Laughter and applause.)

See what a piano means to me? I saw that glass on the piano immediately. My reflex took the
glass off the piano. See that? It's not because I'm middle-class. It's because I love the piano!

- Voice from the audience: "How about the violin? You can't put a glass on the violin." -You're
right. You know how crazy concepts are, speaking of violins? I did a wonderful concert in
Padua with Aki Takahashi. We did some two piano pieces of mine. And we're sitting in a little
restaurant afterwards. And there was a nice young man sitting there, and I thought he was
friends of the people that invited us, but he's just a student who came along from the
university there and sat down with us. And I asked him about himself, "Who are you?" And he
said that he's writing a long paper. I said, "What's it on?" Get this! He wants to show with
diagrams and measurements that the violin was only made for man's hand. (Laughter)

I notice that even here - and I'm saying this in a humorous way - even people I like very
much, there's something when you start talking about your concepts, something happens. You
hear it in the background. (Mr. Feldman hums pathetically a tune.) And a look comes into the
eye, like a Jehovah's Witness. (Laughter) I mean, if you want to be modish, concepts are out
of style. They're based on the 5Os or 60s, and they're usually misunderstood. And they're
usually other peopls concepts.

Voice from the audience: ""Excuse me, I came to hear about your string quartet, and I've
heard predous little about it. This is supposed to be a question hour which is not even a
question hour." -You're not nice. (Laughter) I wouldn't answer anything you asked me. You're
horrible! You're hostile!

- "Oh come, buy me a drink and then you'll get to know me better." - (Laughter)

I don't want to get to know you at all!

You see, I actually can't give you that kind of information you want. When I sit down and write
a piece. I'm in thought. And as I'm moving, I'm focusing from one thought to another. And the
whole idea of being in thought is to find the right kinds of notation at that moment that
presents that thought.

How can I talk about my work? I'm intensely involved as I do it. And the minute I draw the
double-bar line and I wake up the next morning, I hardly remember anything about it. It's
over. A piece doesn't live when you finish it as a composer. When you draw the double-bar
line, the piece is ended, finished. The piece is dead. I don't want to be nostalgic. You know,
I'm not a person who goes around and says, my piece

So I spoke about certain basic, general attitudes. I was talking about Beckett, and now I'm
doing this. And those are analogies. It seems that they didn't give sufficient information.
- Voice from the audience: "'Well, I found that you threw up some very interesting concepts,
in a sort of jumbled style you use." -

I keep no sketches.

Most of the time I write in ink. And I don't write in ink because I feel the work is "ex
cathedra". I write in ink because it is a way of telling me how concentrated I am. That is, if I
start using my eraser, or if I start changing things, I get up and I have breakfast. I'm not
concentrated. I thought I was concentrated. I've got no plans for the day, but I put in a day's
work. And that's an intuitive feeling. I might work around the clock. I

might work 10 hours, 15 hours. I might work 2 hours. I have to feel I did a day's work, that I
shouldn't go on. But I don't leave the house. I'm waiting.

Another strategy I have to compose, which might mean nothing to you, but without that
advice, I never would have become a composer. Again, it might mean nothing to you.

When I met John Cage, I asked John how he works, the practical elements of how he works. I
asked him what kind of pen he used. It was through John Cage that I learned about a great
German pen, the Rapidograph. Before, I didn't know it. We didn't have that particular type of
precision pen at that time in New York. I looked. What kind of ruler does the man use? What
kind of an eraser does he use? If you would notice my early graph music, three graphic pieces,
he copied it. *) It's in his, in Cage's handwriting. He spent the whole week copying things,
showing me how to set up a page. His idea of professionalism was that things had to be
beautifully, and neatly, and cleanly presented.

But the advice he gave me was the most important advice anybody ever gave me, and I'm
going to give it to you. He said that it's a very good idea that after you write a little bit, stop
and then copy it. Because while you're copying it, you're thinking about it, and it's giving you
other ideas. And that's the way I work. And it's marvelous, just wonderful, the relationship
between working and copying. And what's marvelous about it to me is that even if I'm writing
long pieces, I don't feel that I got 60 pages which I then have to copy. And it worked out
beautifully.

All those things, having the right pen, a comfortable chair. I once wrote and article and said
that if I had the right chair, I'd be like Mozart. (Laughter) I mean, are you comfortable in your
chair? Do you think about your chair? I work at the piano as a desk. There's just something
about. (Waves around) This is low. I have a stool which is higher. (Sits down on a chair)
There's just something about the distance with the stool as you write. (Changes his stool) It's
fantastic now, very comfortable, just right. If I ever had a desk made, I'd take my stool and
measure it.

Those things are very important. Those are strategies to get you going. I mean, my ideas may
get you going.

If I can annoy you with another bon mot. Degas, you know, spent too much of his time writing
sonnets. So he meets Mallarme' on the street, and Mallarme' says, "How are the sonnets
going?" And Degas says, "I don't have any ideas." Mallarme' says, "You don't write poetry with
ideas. You write it with words." (Laughter) European, you know, Mallarme'.

Are there any questions?

- Voice in the audience: "Yes, there's a question here. Could you give us an idea of how you
knew you were approaching the end of the composition? When you were writing it. -
John, did you ever see that film with Boulez and Stravinsky in Hollywood? (Laughter) Boulez is
on camera, and he says, " Stravinsky", - you always had to call him Mr. Stravinsky. A friend of
mine who knew him for four years once called him Igor, and Stravinsky stopped talking to
him. (Laughter)

- Person in the audience who had asked the above question: ""Well, Mr. Feldman, how did you
come to the end of the. . ." - (General laughter.)

John (Laughter), I'm telling you about that film. So Boulez in the film, says, ""How did you
know hows many times to do "'Sacre" (11 beat passage from "Sacre du printemps")
(Laughter)

Stravinsky looks at him like (M. F. stares) and really couldn't answer the question.

Word the question just a little bit different.

- Same person in the audience: "Well, you're writing music, and you've heard the music
internally, I imagine, to some extent; and you've arrived at a certain point. Obviously,
physically, you have a number of manuscript pages on the right, but you must have a sense of
a kind of internal workings of your music to give you the feeling that you're coming towards
the last page. How did you know that the last page weas the last page? I must tell that I
thought the last page was the last page, musically - if I can use the word musically. It seemed
as if we were approaching the end of the piece, but I didn't know why. -Well it's what I said in
the conversation I had with Metzger. I find that as the piece gets longer, there has to be less
material. That the piece itself, strangely enough, cannot take it. It has nothing to do with my
patience. I don't know, my patience, how far it goes, you know. And I don't think about what
your patience would be. I don't know that. In other words, I don't have a kind of psychological
situation. Let's put it this way. I don't have an anxiety that I've go to stop. But there's less
going into it, so I think the piece dies a natural death. It dies of old age. (Laughter)

Like a cousin of mine said to his daughter, "Sweety, pull out the tube." So, that's what
happens. I decide, you know.

Little by little, as I got into middle age, I asked myself a question. I said, maybe music is not
an art form. After all, you don't see a congress of young painters like this. It must be
interesting that composers get together like this. Painters don't have their Darmstadt. Why?

- Voice in the audience: ""They're too rich." -(Laughter) - Another voice: " am a painter
and..."-Please, behave yourself. (Laughter)

So I asked myself that question. Maybe music is not and art form. Maybe music essentially
only has to do with music forms. And then I got involved with other ideas connected with
music forms, and I came up with memory forms. Then I spoke to an anthropologist friend of
mine, and he recommended a very good book, which I recommend to you. It's a paperback.
It's by an English woman by the name of Francis White - who just died recently -, and she
wrote a book called '"The Art of Memory". It will be as if you would have the history of the
computer written, 2,000 years from now. And I went out of my head with this book. It's
fantastic. The props that they would use for memory. For instance, the Globe theater,
Shakespeare, "all the world's a stage". 'All the world's a stage", was the Globe theater. With
reference to all the things.

The Palladium theater and the whole history of memory forms and what happened. And the
whole rigidity of memory forms. For example, Bruno (Giordano, 1548-1600, the transl.). An
interesting character. He was burned at the stake after a 17 year inquisition. His heresy was
that he included other memory forms other than the Holy Trinity. As a memory form he
brought in the Kabbala, Egyptian. He was very eclectic. He was an historian. He was a cultural
anthropologist. He was a philosopher. And that was the reason he had to justify his use of
other memory forms.

And then I felt that the memory forms in music were primitive. That they were based on small
attention. They were based on a convention. They were based on things that worked, and they
worked beautifully. I mean, I did say to my own students, say, the slow movement of the
Debussy quartet, the "A-B-A" construction. And Debussy is very interesting in his "Piano
Etudes". There's one piece where the "B" has nothing to do with the "A". It's just a marvelous
piece in relation to what what you can do in terms of the relationship of an "A-B-A". They
work. They're wonderful. And I said, "What would happen if you got rid of the "A-B-A" forms?
What happens?"

So what am I doing? I'm not doing anything different than Beethoven, who was writing a piece
which is getting longer. And he does something else that nobody else ever did. He threw in
another three tune.

I'm not throwing it in as a memory, I'm throwing it in in a more Proustian sense. When he
goes out in the car with, remember, his chauffeur to smell a little something and then goes
home and writes about it.

And many times I would turn and say, "Didn't I do this over here?" And I would go over and
look through it and use it and then use it in another way, of course. Like Proust, the novel.
This piece is also that when you first get material, you're idealistic. And what happens in this
piece, there's a disintegration of it, like in Proust. It's very much like it. I can compare it to
"Remember the Things Past", where you begin idealistically, and then you get more and more
into reality as you experience grows.

For example, there is one section in the "II. Stringquartet" which comes back all the time.
Every time it comes back now, the modules are different than any time before. But if I did it
the first time, it would be less acceptable for your ear. As it becomes saturated and saturated,
you accept it more and more and more. You're less idealistic. You are less willfull. You just let
it happen. You hang loose, so to speak, artistically. You just let it happen without trying to be
deterministic.

So what I try and do is make it close to, maybe not an art form, but to a metaphor, what I
would feel could be an art form in music.

Proust didn't even know the subject of his last book until the end of his life.

I think you do know what you're doing. I don't even know to what extent Immanuel Kant was
right when he talks about intuitive knowledge. I don't even know if I really believe in it.

But you have to know your instrument. You have to know what happens in registration. You
have to know how to notate very difficult images. Isn't that composition?

None of my students think so. I'm going to give up. (Laughter) They don't think it's music.
They don't think instruments are music, or notation is music, or registration is music. How to
get the notes is music.

- Question from the audience: '" would like to know why you keep saying to get the notes and
not get the sounds." -Because they're notes. (Laughter) They've got names.

They're pitches. The magic is to make sounds out of pitches. Or the magic is to bring back
pitches. They might be sounds. Of course, I do that in my quartet. I'm going from pitches to
sounds. Again it's a retranslation.
- Same member of the audience: ""Well, that's why I felt the word note was a little bit limited.
There's more in your piece than just notes." -Well, notes is the slang term. No more
questions?

- Question by a member of the audience: "Could I ask, please, what do you think of this
carpet that drawing Mr. Zimmermann did of your piece?")

It's not a painting. This is an analysis of the quartet where the information duplicates itself
and comes back in variation. -Same member of the audience: '"What do you think about it?" -
It's just a duplication graphically of the kind of material that comes and goes in the piece. It's
an aspect of something called the "new criticism", like counting commas. (Laughter) And I
learned a lot. I like to see it. I think you'll learn a lot. The only problem is that one might think
that what comes back is hierarchal material. What usually comes back is the material I wasn't
sure about and wanted to hear again, because of the taste. Another very important attitude I
have when I work is that - and again this might not help you -I ask myself all the time: what
is material? Which is a very interesting thing.

A student of mine came to study some place in Europe, and she mentioned to her teacher that
Feldman always uses the word material, and the teacher said, "We don't use that term here."
And I think that's a very interesting thing. And that also in translation. And my confusion
about definitions, the difference between material and an idea.

The young English boy that was talking about his material in relation to his process?
Evidentely we wouldn't agree on what material is.

There's an avant garde aspect which has a very religious, St. Thomas attitude about the "truth
of material". In that sense, I don't feel that material has any "truths". It has our truths. We
bring it in.

If you write a random piece, if we write it, we like it. We call it "material". If we hear someone
else's random piece, we don't like it.

But that's a very interesting thing. What is material in a piece? There are things in this piece
that I never would have put in a shorter piece. That's where the whole idea of material comes
in. Just four notes, chromatic little groupings. Just something banal, to some degree. And
when I first came across it - not that I know the difference between one thing and another -
and I said, "What am I doing: what am I interested in?" And I had a kind of curiosity as it
started going. As to how it starte to move. And that particular type of rhythm. And then with
the orchestration.

There are really no fancy syncopated offbeats to try to make it interesting. Just a change of its
color. Color itself and registration created the rhythmic shaping. The color was shaping out all
kinds of designs and shapes. And as I'm watching it, and as I'm listening to it, I just let it go.

Many times the reason the passage is very long is because it's not that I'm thinking about its
natural length. As if I have some idea about natural borders. I'm more or less like a scientist
or somebody looking at a slide, watching these microbes just go in this field. And I mean, our
music is not as complicated as what's going on inside a termite.

So that's a very interesting idea, about a termite. Now I'm trying to figure out why I was
interested in it as an analogy to music. I'm really thinking about it all the time, and I can't get
a handle on it. You know a termite. The one that eats wood. So it's very, very interesting. Who
chews the wood? The termite has no apparatus himself to chew the wood. But inside it there
are millions of these microbes and they're chewing the wood. There's some analogy about
composition, about something else doing the work. And I like that idea.
Of course, if you want to go ahead and make images, that's another problem. I don't go ahead
and have images.

Takemitsu once visited me, and he was showing me his sketchbook. He said that the Japanese
are embedded in nature images: that it's so much a part of their culture that they can't think
otherwise. That's why, you know, he has all those titles, "The Water", and "Sea", and that. So
he shows me a very nice drawing and it has a bunch of birds, and in the middle there's a
blackbird. And I said, "Tore, what's the blackbird?" He said, "Oh", he said; "That's 'b' sharp."
(Laughter)

I don't mean those kinds of images.

One last question. - Member of the audience: "I don't quite understand why you always avoid
the term variation. You said in the beginning, 'I hate the term variation."' -I don't hate the
term. I don't use it. I'm not varying anything. I don't feel I'm varying anything. I'm seeing it in
another language. It's another focus. It's not like I'm taking a tune and varying it. It's not that
I'm doing that (hums a tune with a variation). By the way, if I go for that as variation, then
Webern's Second Movement of "Opus 21" variation, how he got the Paganini thing to sound
backwards like Rachmaninoff. (Laughter)

No, I'm not involved with variation. Of course, it's variation: I'm doing it one way, and then
I'm doing it another way, with a different kind of focus. And I'm not involved with how I
understand variation. To me, variation is Beethoven and Schšnberg. I'm not doing it that way.

Oh, I did get distracted earlier when I said at the beginning of my talk that I'm working with
two aspects which I feel are characteristic of the 20th century. One is change, variation. I
prefer the word change. The other is reiteration, repetition. I prefer the word reiteration. So
I'm involved with both. I don't make a synthesis, but they're going on at the same time. The
change then becoming that which then becomes the reiteration, and the reiteration is
changing. So you have these both things going on all at the same time. And it's not a
calculated dialectic because I have to watch when it happens.

My music is handmade. so I'm like a tailor. I make my buttonholes by hand. The suit fits
better.

One of the most interesting things that I've heard recently, speaking of high-tech. I was
invited by one of the largest companies in the world that make farm equipment, called the
John Deere Company. And I was invited out to the Midwest to talk to their research
department. They invite artists because they feel that the engineers would want to hear how
an artist thinks: the leaps he makes, the conclusions he produces. So I was invited out, and I
walk into this room, and there were 50 people there. Many of them were exprofessors,
chemists, engineers, making very big salaries, very nice looking people. Everyone had a tie,
everyone very interested.

Later, they took me around, and they would have a computer on an axle (moves his hands).
And there's a computer, and there's a blackboard, and everything is geared for a ten-year
cycle. They feel it should work ten years. And they want it to be pretty good for ten years. You
would see a tractor going through a kind of simulated field. Just back and forth. And it goes on
and on, this cycle. So I said to one of the gentlemen, "How much do you know?" And he says,
"We begin with 85 percent. Think of it, 85 percent! That's what they know. The other 15
percent is where the millions of dollars in research go to.

So I just want to tell my young colleagues that John Deere Company only knows 85 percent.
Do I have to say it? (Laughter) I'll give you four percent! Thank you. (Applause)

EPILOG
CONVERSATION BETWEEN MORTON FELDMAN AND WALTER ZIMMERMANN

- Your pieces seem to me very enigmatic in a certain sense. If one tries to find out, he won't
find out. Your really don't know how MORTON FELDMAN composes. -

Well, I don't know how WALTER ZIMMERMANN lives and spends his time, and you don't look
to me like an enigmatic young man. Well, when I first started to work, that was my fault. Now
it's becoming my virtue. As a man gets older, his sins become charming.

One cannot help but notice in the course of writing a piece that some underlying principle
seems to be there. Now, the question is to what degree you want to embrace this underlying
principle. And also every piece has a different degree. Sometimes you meet it halfway.
Sometimes you just shake its hand and it leaves. Sometimes you decide not even to use it,
though the suggestion hovers over the piece. Why don't you do this? It's crying out for this.
And it's not done. And it is almost as if it's in. Only because of its impact... So I'm aware of
these things.

But all this in a sense is really not a compositional problem. I think I can make my pieces the
way I do. And recently in the past six years. I've been writing very long pieces... only because
of my concentration. My pieces are to some degree a performance. I'm highly concentrated
when I work. In fact I found ways to arrive at concentration. One of the most important ways
is that I write in ink. So if I begin to work and I see that I am crossing out ime, I realize in a
sense that I thought I was concentrated, but in fact I wasn't concentrated. So the writing in
ink is an inner parameter to how concentrated I really am. And then I go ahead and write the
piece, again using the ink as a parameter. And if I see that I'm crossing out, I just leave the
piece and go to it at another time. So to me that concentration is more important than
someone else's pitch organization or whatever conceptual attitude they have about the piece.
That's a very underlying all important approach.

- I see in your pieces that every chord which follows tries to establish a completely different
world from the former one. -

Yes. Actually now I just try to repeat the same chord. I'm reiterating the same chord in
inversions. I enjoy that very much, to keep the inversions alive in a sense where everything
changes and nothing changes. Actually before I wanted my chords in a sense to be very
different from the next, as if almost to erase in one's memory what happened before. That's
the way I would keep the time suspended... by erasing the references and where they came
from. You were very fresh into the moment, and you didn't relate it. And now I'm doing the
same thing with this relation. And I find it also very mysterious.

But let me play you a series of chords, which is exactly the same chord. Now, I'm not
improvising the time. The time is actually there. I'm playing exactly what happens.

(Feldman goes over to the piano and plays softly some chords.)

I think there are three things working with me: my ears, my mind and my fingers. I don't
think that it's just ear. That would mean that I'm just improvising, and I'm writing down what
I like, or I'm writing down what I don't like. But I think those three parameters are always at
work. Not that I write everything at the piano. Well, one of the reasons I work at the piano is
because it slows me down and you can hear the time element much more, the acoustical
reality.

You cannot hear these time intervals, especially if you work with larger forces like orchestras.
You can't hear the time between. Just sitting down at a table, it becomes too fancy. You
develop a kind of system, asymmetrical relations of time. You get into something that has
really nothing to do with acoustical reality. And I'm very into acoustical reality. For me there is
no such thing as a compositional reality.

- And exactly that's what distinguishes you from the European approach to making music. You
once said, "For centuries we have been victimized by European dvilization." So I see this
working together with Cage and Wolff in the fifties as one step out of the victimization. -

Yes, I think one of the interesting things in a sense where Christian Wolff and Earle Brown and
John Cage and myself met, I think we might have met in some kind of common field was one
week. But the week was important... was that we began to listen, we began to listen. . . for
the first time.

Jazz musicians they work within changes. They listen for the kind of change that might go into
a more innovative change, you know. But they're working in the confines of given situations
even when Ornette Coleman took the piano out, so it wouldn't influence the harmonic thinking
of the trip. But my argument with past music is. I noticed how... say with beat... even if you
want to say, say twenty-five years ago, "Let's get rid of the beat", you only got rid of the beat
by pulverizing it, which means... that you were finding ways to get rid of the beat... which
means... that you were working with the beat, you see. And I felt the thing about the beat
was to ignore it. And that's why alot of my early music at the time didn't look to interesting to
alot of people, American and European.

- But now you've regained a kind of a pulse through the experience of listening over the
years. -

Yes. One of the problems about my chance music is that essentially it was too conceptual.

- It's like one of the paintings hanging on the wall here, like Rauschenberg and those. -

Yes, well, they were my friends. They were my friends. But not only that. There's something
about a concept that is hard to break into. So you have an image. And then you leave it alone.
One of the big problems in my work was that, you know, as everything started to go into
motion, I always felt that the performers in a sense were sensitive as to how to play the
sounds, but they were not listening. And they were not sensitive to the pauses I give. So, the
reason my music is notated is I wanted to keep control of the silence, you see. Actually, when
you hear it, you have no idea rhythmically how complicated that is on paper. It's floating. On
paper it looks as though it were rhythm. It's not. It's duration.

- You just mentioned that there was one week, twenty years ago, where Cage, Wolff Brown
and you shared some experience together. And Wolff mentioned too that you have like
attachments to this time, and you look back onto it as a "Garden of Eden". -

Yes. . . You see, the difference between America and Europe in the relation to the Garden of
Eden could be best explained by Voltaire. Let's say Voltaire is Europe. You can't be more
Europe than Voltaire. And let's take a book like Candide. In Candide there were three gardens.
Each one, the first two were very sublime. In the first he discovered making love to somebody
else's wife. And he's thrown out of that garden, down the steps. Next we find him in Eldorado,
also the Garden of Eden. And he finally has to leave there. And in the end he's in a little
garden outside of Constantinople with a lot of junk. You see? (laughing) The Europeans
change, because they're thrown out of Eden. Plagues come, upheavals come, cultures come,
and they have to get out, from tonality, from atonality.

Well, Americans in a sense Leave the Garden of Eden. I'm a little too esoteric perhaps in my
thinking, but I think that Americans have the ability to get out while the getting is good.

- There's first more space. -

There's cultural space. There's artistic space.

- And also not this feeling of being embedded in a culture. -

I don't know to what degree we dont't have a culture.

- I didn't say that. -

No. Well, for example... we found beautiful substitutes for culture. For example, it would be
very interesting if you would look into nineteenth century painting. So we had no culture. No
matter how good you were, you were an amateur.

- But exactly that's the advantage. -

No, but it wasn't an advantage. It wasn't an advantage in American painting in the late
nineteenth century. Let me tell you a little bit about it. Because it's a field in a sense that most
Europeans don't know, American painting in the nineteenth century and what happened,
especially earlier. So no matter how good you were, you were an amateur. So, being that we
were still part of England, the young American, English American would go over and study in
London. And all he was doing here was he was painting portraits. And he goes to London and
he sees.. . Well, it's like me going to Europe for the first time. I'm painting portraits, and I see
that there's not enough information, that the portrait in England is out in the garden, that you
have to handle nature and the sitter or family, you see.

And what happened to most of the early American painters is that they started not only to
have more information, but they had to deal with significant material. So they started to paint
great things. They were told by important English painters that you must look for things
outside yourself. Otherwise you just repeat yourself. And then toward the middle of the
nineteenth century they still didn't have a history. And they discovered something else. They
discovered something in a sense that Europe really didn't discover. They discovered landscape
painting. So nineteenth century American painting is where landscape painting became a
subject. Now I'm not just talking about a field and a cow. I'm talking about a whole landscape
became a kind of philosophical and aesthetic prerogative. They discovered what someone
called a kind of pantheistic idealism, where nature became the ideal, not as a subject for art.
But it became. perhaps not as great as a Courbet, but philosophically it became a little more
interesting. Well it was still a work of art, but it was little more. It started to get involved with
the metaphysical aspect of nature. Now this metaphysical aspect of nature, I think began to
effect the literature -Hawthorne, Melville - that's all strange stuff in relation to nature.

And I think it had a lot to do with the music in the fifties. That is that pantheistic idealism. If
you substitute sounds for nature, and try to arrive at some philosophical truth about it. But
Cage and myself are more lucky than the nineteenth century painters, because we know as
much as the European, and we're just as smart as the European. . . We are on equal footing,
you see. And that's why the work, you see, has a terrific survival element. There's no question
about it. If we wrote this music like Ives did, I think in a sense we wouldn't be able to survive.
We would take too much. It would be too literary. One of my problems about Ives is that the
work is just too literary. It's like an objective Mahler. You know, where Mahler was subjective,
and yet it's literary. But even that objectivity has to do with the fact that a self surrenders into
this kind of phanteistic idealism.

- Ya, because it was never important for Ives to write just music. It "was only important to
transport thought through his muszc. -

Right. But unfortunately for me it was really not musical thought.I think where Cage and
myself differ from Ives in a sense is we're writing Music. In fact, one of the most interesting
things is perhaps at the time we were the only ones writing music.
- Because you didn't use anything which was transported by historical. . . -

Well, that's right. We weren't fed in. . . Well, let's say Cage's relation to Duchamp is
completely misunderstood. So they're the other side of the coin. I mentioned it to Cage, I
mean just in conversation. And he didn't say anything. He just listened. They're the opposites.
For example, the interest of Duchamp for so many young people is that he took the
experience out of the eye, out of the retina, and he made a concept. Cage took it out of the
past conceptual nonhearing aspect, formal aspect of putting music, and he put it directly to
the ear. So that's absolutely the difference, you see? For all I know the greatest musical
Duchamp was Beethoven.

- And it's true with Ives. He's transporting thought within historically and musically accepted
structures. -

Well, that was the historical period. Let's not hit him over the head because he was born in
that time. I mean he was just an outstanding person. But to what degree would he have
existed without his literary references . . . is very difficult to ascertain.

- But he at least stimulated, and I think he is still stimulating the practice of living where you
are and finding there universals, even if you're in the midst of a cultural desert. And that's a
typical advantage in America for doing art. - Well, you're certainly more successful than
Hauer, you know, the Viennese twelve-tone architect. But there is this difference I think in
America the references are more hidden.

- Another thing that I like, or just what I see here in American individuals is the aspect of
being a Rousseautype, living in a Rousseau like situation. -

I think that's a mistake. We're not primitives.

- I don't know if that's the only thing which characterizes Rousseau. -

I think Rousseau is a very dangerous, very dangerous... ah... There's only one Rousseau.

- And then there is another one, Thoreau, who is more and more refered to now. -

Well Cage is...

- But I see your music as a kind of living on your own, and that goes along with Thoreau. -

I think one of the things has to do with identity. Either I have no identity as a composer,
which makes me do what I do, or I have so much identity that I could open up and not worry
about my identity. And I think the latter is true. I feel that I have a lot of identity as a person.
And so I don't ask myself, "Is this music?" For years I didn't even ask myself, "Ah, how could I
be a composer and not living a professional life?" But the Americans I know, even of other
generations, never thought of composition as a profession. Yesterday's amateurs become
today's professionals. Yesterday's professionals become today's amateurs. But I always felt
that the European needed that identity in order to survive. And consequently they had to pay
tribute to historical processes.

And of course this attitude also produces very funny and at the same time very tragic
attitudes. Like Carl Ruggles. He just didn't write enough music. He painted water colors for
forty years, you see.
But what I asked you earlier, when you came into the house, about why is Cage and myself
and Wolff in this whole series of conversations that you will be having. Most of the people you
mentioned to me have completely different interests. Where do you see the tie-up?

- First of all, I don't care if you are from a different generation. It's just that your music is still
interesting. And all these people I'm going to visit demonstrate in their work being real
American composers insofar that they are as independent of European-like historical thinking
as American-like commercial thinking. And because of the present situation these musicians
are challenged to think again about basic forms of music making. And that's what I want to
find out. On the other hand, I'm presenting you at the very beginning because I would like to
have a "summing up of an experienced man .

Ha, "a summing up of an experienced man"... That sounds like the title for the summing up of
an experienced man. Well, who am I supposed to sum up?

- Well, if you especially compare the early fifties where you were together with Cage and so
on, how the music developed and how you see the situation now. And how do you think the
music will grow in the future? -

I feel that the lesson that Cage and myself at least. . . well, let's not even speak for Cage.
How could I speak for Cage?. . . I would feel that whatever implications in my own music is, I
was telling other composers that they could be absolutely themselves. And I feel in a sense
that this message I was giving them in a sense has failed.

- How come? -

Well, I feel a failure because. . . One of my complaints about the younger generation... is that
for me at least sound was the hero, and it still is. I feel that I'm subservient. I feel that I listen
to my sounds, and I do what they tell me, not what I tell them. Because I owe my hfi to these
sounds. Right? They gave me a life. And my feeling is in a sense is the young people... instead
of thinking of sound as a hero, of experience as the hero, you get to think that they're the
heros. And I find a little bit too much drawing attention to themselves . . . in their work,
drawing attention to their ideas, whether they're anti-society, or whether it's political.

In other words, I wanted to give them the freedom to be esoteric. But evidently it's not
considered a virtue. Now, I'm not absolutely clear. And one of the reasons I'm not clear is
because I'm not mentioning any names. I will not mention names. In a sense this is not really
a criticism. It's the way things are. And they're all fine men and women.

I feel that the whole idea was a little too hot to handle, and that one of its manifestations was:
if sounds are free, then people are free. And if sounds and people together... you know ring
around the sound with society, hand in hand.

- This concept of art in fact doesn't work any more. Today it's more urgent to think about the
people who should be free than the people who are free. -

To take a militant attitude towards society means that you're involved with that aspect of
society. You're not involved with life. To take a militant action in relation to life, that's more
mysterious. That needs thought. To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted
sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That
was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe. . . not to be used for the vested
interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know
how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything
about it. . . except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your
life. . . if you're into it.
I don't know what a composer is. I never knew as a young man, I don't know now, and I'm
gonna be fifty next month, in two months.

And I think that whole business of control is very important. One wants to be in control of
society, one wants to be in control of art. One wants to be in control, control, control. Now,
just because the control is for something that's on the good side, it's still control. . . . See,
when you get into society, you see the big dilemma in society I think was expressed
beautifully by Camus, where he says that one man, when he desires freedom, will be at the
expense of others. In other words, one man 5 freedom makes someone else a victim. You
understand? And I-feel the same way in music, that if you're idealistic, and you insist that
music be a certain way, then it's at the expense of the music. If you use the music for means,
then it becomes a polemical thing.

- And do you think that any kind of social reality could make this understanding of what music
has to be livable? -

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

- Besides devoting yourself to the music to make it to a pure space in the world, you'll have to
reach this point where you can afford it. -

But you have to make the distinction between social realities and social anxieties. I mean, we
could always be socially anxious. I mean if you think New York is bad, you should go to
Calcutta!

I feel that music should be left alone and not be used as a tool for peoples' ideas. . . to make
propaganda, to make masterpieces, to force it to live in skyscrapers, to force it to live in mud
huts. But a person should have a rapport with the sound world around him. And actually, I am
manipulated. I hate manipulation. Every time I try to manipulate my work, for what I think is
a terrific idea, the work drops dead. After working so many years, I'm not even allowed to
manipulate. I know in a minute I'd hear my music screaming

HELP!

In that sense I have a very philosophical sense for my work.

- How does it influence the thinking of the younger generation? -

I don't think it influences it at all. . . I think new music now again is used to draw attention to
themselves or their ideas.

Sound perhaps is dead. Maybe sound was just the fifties and the sixties. Maybe sound just
dropped dead, or will drop dead with me, or will drop dead with Cage. Anyway, it was a
marvelous period as long as it lasted. For the first time in history sound was free. But, like
most people, they don't want freedom.

They don't know how to handle it. With Cage freedom became license, so they could act like
idiots.

With me, my freedom was misinterpreted as taste, as an elitist approach. . . What I want to
say is I feel very isolated from everybody you are going to interview. I don't feel any
connection at all. And to be connected with them, as if you would bring me a photograph of
someone, and say, "Do you recognize it? I mean it's your daughter." ... And I would say,
"'Well, it almost looks like my daughter, but it's not my daughter." And some of them work 5
closely together, you know. I think, there is nothing wrong there. There is a kind of
sociological need, a phenonemon.

- Maybe you have the most patience of all of them. -

Also a lot of them are very ambitious. Now, if the time says everybody loves each other,
everybody's good to each other, everybody has to help each other. I find that as true. At the
same time I find that an aspect of careerism at its height. When I was young, nobody liked
each other. Nobody loved each other. And careers just happened. Even to Stockhausen, it just
happened. Versteb? He was a young man with fantastic energy, with fantastic intellectual
curiosity. He wasn't arrogant. He didn't think of himself as a hero. I think he'll wind up a hero.
You don't begin as a hero... I think that's essentially the difference. . . that everybody waited.

- And so you're the peifect example of one who is true to himself over the years then. But you
see, time changes. -

Listen! This is a big problem. Obviously things change. See, I lived with the thought that my
whole life might be a mistake. But if someone who is writing a piece for Attica, I don't think
that their life is a mistake.

I feel that the young people, and this is also related to the whole sociological change, the
young people just don't want to compete. That's a big mistake amongst young people now
anyway.

- Because they have seen where competition leads. -

Not that much in a sense, that I was competing or that I am competing. But when you
recognize very strong voices around you. You are on another consciousness level. I had to
bring myself into a certain creative pressure, and concentration. But what I do is what I mean,
not just some idea that is gonna knock off in the afternoon. The word competition is not right.
But I was perhaps one of the last survivors in a kind of art arena. And I think the young
people are not in an arena...

You see it comes from within. They think about society because they are directed by society
And they get their cues from society. And when society says, "'Well, that needs changing!"
they cannot be oblivious to this change. I think the big problem in a sense is that they've been
victimized and manipulated by society. And their whole thinking in a sense apes, reflects
society in terms of what they want to manipulate.

So they are not competing with art. They are competing with society. And the values of
society. Remember, society changes. To compete with art is like competing with life. It's too
much of a force. The dynamic is too powerful. Understand? It's like jumping into a volcano.

- So, people who want to establish this idea have to remove themselves from society. -

No! I never remove myself from society. These people have to depend on themselves. They
need an inner strength. . . to function in life and society and art at the same time. It's an
escape. That's my question. Das ist die Frage. It's an escape.

The big problem is that we have to differentiate too between culture and art. Art is done just
by a few people. Culture is the manifestation. Publishers, students, teachers is culture. I'm a
volunteer of culture, not art. And one of the things about culture, and I feel the young people
are more ligned to culture, which again is society, than they are to the other things. Because
in culture one has to have the illusion that one understands. You see?
I'm in a situation for example where a situation has to exist, where a twenty-four year old
student has to assume that he can understand what I'm doing. That's almost insane. He must
be my equal. He must be with me. That's culture. Culture is mutual understanding.

That is not communication. Communication is what I have in my music, with myself. Do you
know what communication is for me? Communication is when people dont't understand each
other. That's what communication is. Because then there is a consciousness level that is being
brought out of you, where an effort is made.

- But there are situations where this not understanding is such a gap that any effort
evaporates. -

But you're not supposed to understand art. You are supposed to understand culture... And
culture is just a department store which allows you to go and take what you want, if you can
afford it.

- Ya, if you can afford it, that's the thing. -

And I feel that too many of the young people are involved in a manifestation of culture. The
thing is, how does one remove oneself from culture?

- Not remove. But I see first the necessity to reestablish new department stores, like
department stores where you get your food somewhere else. -

But that's the whole basis of department stores. You're going to Bloomingdales, and the
merchandise is a kind of middle class okay. You want a little better things, you go to Lord &
Taylor. And if that's not good enough for you, go to a boutique.

- I just remember when I arrived in New York I lived at Washington Square in Greenwich
Village, and there was a delicatessen store. And in the evenings it was surrounded by people
that held out their hands every time someone came out the door. So there are some people
who don't have access to stores. And then I actually heard that there are more and more coop
stores, where people from a block organize their weekly grocery shopping. And they go out to
buy it from the country. So it's cheaper and it doesn't go through the regular channels. It's
exactly that what I mean when I talk about reestablishing new department stores, to make art
possible again. So I don't know if it's enough if you have enough strength and identity in
yourself... how you mentioned before... -

You can do it. You don't have to have strength. You can have weakness. Go away and suffer
that it's a weakness, rather than try to tell yourself that it's a strength. I mean I don't think
it's a question of one or the other. I think it's a question of. . . - of learning what it is to be
lonely.

I remember down in the Village when I was, you know, in my time. There was never muzak
on.

- Golden times. -

We talked. And I remember once I was in Berlin for a year or so, and I came back to the same
place I used to go to. And I walked in... There were new people there young people..., but
there was muzak. The weren't talking. They were mumbling. I don't know what they were
doing.

And that's one of the things what interested me when I was living in Berlin, is that you walked
into a Kneipe and there is no music.
- But then there is too much talking. -

Oh, I don't think there could be too much talk. It's just about politics. Too narrow. The political
life is too narrow. And you cannot attack it. You see, you cannot attack a political life. One is
on the defensive, because the goals, the aims, are so noble, you see? So how could you attack
noble aims? It's impossible. Of course I'm at a disadvantage, because...

because I'm involved in a political life. I'm involved in a revolutionary life. Any time I want to
get up in the morning I'm making a revolution. I'm making either a revolution against history
by deciding to write a certain type of music, or I'm making a revolution even against my own
history. Many times I've put myself up against the wall and shot myself. I'm into a continual
perpetual revolution in my own personal response to my work, which means action, immediate
action, immediate decision that only I can make, and that I have to be responsible for. I don't
like hiding behind issues, running to society is running back to Mama.

- That's very true. But sometimes you need your Mama. -

That's why, who said it recently? I think it was Paul Valery, that when something is beautiful,
it is tragic. And I think the implication for me as I see it is that something that is beautiful is
made in isolation. And tragedy in a sense is a kind of psychic flavor of this loneliness.

And I don't think it's a reaction of some of the young people against art. And I don't think it
makes any difference really what kind of art they make, or whom they follow. I think the
reaction is against being lonely.

And I think that the whole social change among young artists and their concerns for being
together has a lot to do with this. They can't bear this loneliness.

- I can very much imagine that you're lonely, because that's the basis aura of your music. -

I mean it just in a sense of divorcing oneself from just the kind of cameraderie and group
spirit in the sense that the young people seem to share together...

Just the idea of just going into a room and having to work six or seven hours because he has
to do what he has to do. That's the price we have to pay. And I don't feel they want to pay
that price. And it has nothing to do with art. They're always on the phone. They're either here
or they're there.

- There's certainly righteousness in what you're saying. -

But God bless them, and good luck to them...and all I could wish them in life is to be lonely.