Cage, John (1961). Silence. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press.
foxbok
(Hanover, N.H: Wesleyan University Press, 1961)
The text below was written for Julian Beck and Judith Malina,
directors of the Living Theatre, for use in their program booklet when
they were performing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Greenwich Village,
New York.
Written in response to a request for a manifesto on music, 1952:
instantaneous and unpredictable
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music
nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music
our ears are now in excellent condition
-JOHN CAGE
The following text was delivered as a talk at a meeting of a Seattle
arts society organized by Bonnie Bird in 1937. It was printed in the
brochure accompanying George Avakian's recording of my twenty-five-
year retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York, in 1958.
THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: CREDO
I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore
it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The
sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations.
Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as
sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a
library of "sound effects" recorded on film. With a film phonograph it
is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of
these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of
the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and
perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful
term: organization of sound.
WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED
THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS
Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have
attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments,
just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord
and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather
than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with
genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make
the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly
sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces
from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of
sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act
as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will
like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.
The special function of electrical instruments will be to
provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as
opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency,
amplitude, and duration.
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL
SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS
FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
It is now possible for composers to make music directly,
without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated
often enough on a sound track is audible. Two hundred and eighty
circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a
portrait of Beethoven repeated fifty times per second on a sound track
will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality.
WILL BE EXPLORED. WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF
DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE,
IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE
WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE
FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER, WHO WILL BE FACED
WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.
The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only
with the entire field of sound but,also with the entire field of time.
The "frame" or fraction of a second, following established film
technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time.
No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION
TO SCHOENBERG S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM
Schoenberg's method assigns to each material, in a group of
equal materials, its function with respect to the group. (Harmony
assigned to each material, in a group of unequal materials, its
function with respect to the fundamental or most important material in
the group.) Schoenberg's method is analogous to a society in which the
emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the
group.
AND PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING PERCUSSION MUSIC
Percussion music is a contemporary transition from keyboard-
influenced music to the all-sound music of the future. Any sound is
acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the
academically forbidden "non-musical" field of sound insofar as is
manually possible.
Methods of writing percussion music have as their goal the
rhythmic structure of a composition. As soon as these methods are
crystallized into one or several widely accepted methods, the means
will exist for group improvisations of unwritten but culturally
important music. This has already taken place in Oriental cultures and
in hot jazz.
AND ANY OTHER METHODS WHICH ARE FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A
FUNDAMENTAL TONE.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION
WITH THE PAST. ALTHOUGH THE GREAT FORM OF THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE AS IT
WAS IN THE PAST, AT ONE TIME THE FUGUE AND AT ANOTHER THE SONATA, IT
WILL BE RELATED TO THESE AS THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER:
Before this happens, centers of experimental music must be
established. In these centers, the new materials, oscillators,
turntables, generators, means for amplifying small sounds, film
phonographs, etc., available for use. Composers at work using
twentieth century means for making music. Performances of results.
Organization of sound for extra-musical purposes (theatre, dance,
radio, film).
THROUGH THE PRINCIPLE OF ORGANIZATION OR MAN'S COMMON
ABILITY TO THINK
It was a Wednesday. I was in the sixth grade. I overheard
Dad saying to Mother, "Get ready: we're going to New Zealand
Saturday." I got ready. I read everything I could find in the school
library about New Zealand. Saturday came. Nothing happened. The
project was not even mentioned, that day or any succeeding day.
M. C. Richards went to see the Bolshoi Ballet. She was
delighted with the dancing. She said, "It's not what they do; it's the
ardor with which they do it." I said, "Yes: composition, performance,
and audition or observation are really different things. They have
next to nothing to do with one another." Once, I told her, I was at a
house on Riverside Drive where people were invited to be present at a
Zen service conducted by a Japanese Roshi. He did the ritual, rose
petals and all. Afterwards tea was served with rice cookies. And then
the hostess and her husband, employing an out-of-tune piano and a
cracked voice, gave a wretched performance of an excerpt from a third-
rate Italian opera. I was embarrassed and glanced towards the Roshi to
see how he was taking it. The expression on his face was absolutely
beatific.
A young man in Japan arranged his circumstances so that he
was able to travel to a distant island to study Zen with a certain
Master for a three-year period. At the end of the three years, feeling
no sense of accomplishment, he presented himself to the Master and
announced his departure. The Master said, "You've been here three
years. Why don't you stay three months more?" The student agreed, but
at the end of the three months he still felt that he had made no
advance. When he told the Master again that he was leaving, the Master
said, "Look now, you've been here three years and three months. Stay
three weeks longer." The student did, but with no success. When he
told the Master that absolutely nothing had happened, the Master said,
"You've been here three years, three months, and three weeks. Stay
three more days, and if, at the end of that time, you have not
attained enlightenment, commit suicide." Towards the end of the second
day, the student was enlightened.
The following statement was given as an address to the
convention of the Music Teachers National Association in Chicago in
the winter of 1957. It was printed in the brochure accompanying George
Avakian's recording of my twenty-five-year retrospective concert at
Town Hall, New York, in 1958.
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC
Formerly, whenever anyone said the music I presented was
experimental, I objected. It seemed to me that composers knew what
they were doing, and that the experiments that had been made had taken
place prior to the finished works, just as sketches are made before
paintings and rehearsals precede performances. But, giving the matter
further thought, I realized that there is ordinarily an essential
difference between making a piece of music and hearing one. A composer
knows his work as a woodsman knows a path he has traced and retraced,
while a listener is confronted by the same work as one is in the woods
by a plant he has never seen before.
Now, on the other hand, times have changed; music has
changed; and I no longer object to the word "experimental." I use it
in fact to describe all the music that especially interests me and to
which I am devoted, whether someone else wrote it or I myself did.
What has happened is that I have become a listener and the music has
become something to hear. Many people, of course, have given up saying
"experimental" about this new music. Instead, they either move to a
halfway point and say "controversial" or depart to a greater distance
and question whether this "music" is music at all.
For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those
that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated
appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the
music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment. This
openness exists in the fields of modern sculpture and architecture.
The glass houses of Mies van der Rohe reflect their environment,
presenting to the eye images of clouds, trees, or grass, according to
the situation. And while looking at the constructions in wire of the
sculptor Richard Lippold, it is inevitable that one will see other
things, and people too, if they happen to be there at the same time,
through the network of wires. There is no such thing as an empty space
or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.
In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain
engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as
possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls
made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at
Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high
and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he
informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the
low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And
they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the
future of music.
But this fearlessness only follows if at the parting of the
ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not,
one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning
is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything
that belongs to humanity--for a musician, the giving up of music. This
psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually
or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in
this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given
away. In fact, everything is gained. In musical terms, any sounds may
occur in any combination and in any continuity.
And it is a striking coincidence that just now the technical
means to produce such a free-ranging music are available. When the
Allies entered Germany towards the end of World War II, it was
discovered that improvements had been made in recording sounds
magnetically such that tape had become suitable for the high-fidelity
recording of music. First in France with the work of Pierre Schaeffer,
later here, in Germany, in Italy, in Japan, and perhaps, without my
knowing it, in other places, magnetic tape was used not simply to
record performances of music but to make a new music that was possible
only because of it. Given a minimum of two tape recorders and a disk
recorder, the following processes are possible: 1 ) a single recording
of any sound may be made; 2) a rerecording may be made, in the course
of which, by means of filters and circuits, any or all of the physical
characteristics of a given recorded sound may be altered; 3)
electronic mixing (combining on a third machine sounds issuing from
two others) permits the presentation of any number of sounds in
combination; 4) ordinary splicing permits the juxtaposition of any
sounds, and when it includes unconventional cuts, it, like
rerecording, brings about alterations of any or all of the original
physical characteristics. The situation made available by these means
is essentially a total sound-space, the limits of which are
eardetermined only, the position of a particular sound in this space
being the result of five determinants: frequency or pitch, amplitude
or loudness, overtone structure or timbre, duration, and morphology
(how the sound begins, goes on, and dies away). By the alteration of
any one of these determinants, the position of the sound in sound-
space changes. Any sound at any point in this total sound-space can
move to become a sound at any other point. But advantage can be taken
of these possibilities only if one is willing to change one's musical
habits radically. That is, one may take advantage of the appearance of
images without visible transition in distant places, which is a way of
saying "television," if one is wiring to stay at home instead of going
to a theatre. Or one may fly if one is willing to give up walking.
Musical habits include scales, modes, theories of
counterpoint and harmony, and the study of the timbres, singly and in
combination of a limited number of sound-producing mechanisms. In
mathematical terms these all concern discrete steps. They resemble
walking?in the case of pitches, on steppingstones twelve in number.
This cautious stepping is not characteristic of the possibilities of
magnetic tape, which is revealing to us that musical action or
existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve or what
have you in total sound-space; that we are, in fact, technically
equipped to transform our contemporary awareness of nature's manner of
operation into art.
Again there is a parting of the ways. One has a choice. If
he does not wish to give up his attempts to control sound, he may
complicate his musical technique towards an approximation of the new
possibilities and awareness. ( I use the word "approximation" because
a measuring mind can never finally measure nature. ) Or, as before,
one may give up the desire to control sound, clear his mind of music,
and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather
than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of human
sentiments.
This project will seem fearsome to many, but on examination
it gives no cause for alarm. Hearing sounds which are just sounds
immediately sets the theorizing mind to theorizing, and the emotions
of human beings are continually aroused by encounters with nature.
Does not a mountain unintentionally evoke in us a sense of wonder?
otters along a stream a sense of mirth? night in the woods a sense of
fear? Do not rain falling and mists rising up suggest the love binding
heaven and earth? Is not decaying flesh loathsome? Does not the death
of someone we love bring sorrow? And is there a greater hero than the
least plant that grows? What is more angry than the flash of lightning
and the sound of thunder? These responses to nature are mine and will
not necessarily correspond with another*. Emotion takes place in the
person who has it. And sounds, when allowed to be themselves, do not
require that those who hear them do so unfeelingly. The opposite is
what is meant by response ability.
New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand
something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the
sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the
activity of sounds.
Those involved with the composition of experimental music
find ways and means to remove themselves from the activities of the
sounds they make. Some employ chance operations, derived from sources
as ancient as the Chinese Book of Changes, or as modern as the tables
of random numbers used also by physicists in research. Or, analogous
to the Rorschach tests of psychology, the interpretation of
imperfections in the paper upon which one is writing may provide a
music free from one's memory and imagination. Geometrical means
employing spatial superimpositions at variance with the ultimate
performance in time may be used. The total field of possibilities may
be roughly divided and the actual sounds within these divisions may be
indicated as to number but left to the performer or to the splicer to
choose. In this latter case, the composer resembles the maker of a
camera who allows someone else to take the picture.
Whether one uses tape or writes for conventional
instruments, the present musical situation has changed from what it
was before tape came into being. This also need not arouse alarm, for
the coming into being of something new does not by that fact deprive
what was of its proper place. Each thing has its own place, never
takes the place of something else; and the more things there are, as
is said, the merrier.
But several effects of tape on experimental music may be
mentioned. Since so many inches of tape equal so many seconds of time,
it has bfflme more and more usual that notation is in space rather
than in symbols of quarter, ha]f, and sixteenth notes and so on. Thus
where on a page a note appears will correspond to when in a time it is
to occur. A stop watch is used to facilitate a performance; and a
rhythm results which is a far cry from horse's hoofs and other regular
beats.
Also it has been impossible with the playing of several
separate tapes at once to achieve perfect synchronization. This fact
has led some towards the manufacture of multiple-tracked tapes and
machines with a corresponding number of heads; while others--those who
have accepted the sounds they do not intend--now realize that the
score, the requiring that many parts be played in a particular
togetherness, is not an accurate representation of how things are.
These now compose parts but not scores, and the parts may be combined
in any unthought ways. This means that each performance of such a
piece of music is unique, as interesting to its composer as to others
listening. It is easy to see again the parallel with nature, for even
with leaves of the same tree, no two are exactly alike. The parallel
in art is the sculpture with moving parts, the mobile.
It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are
welcome in this new music. But so is the dominant seventh chord if it
happens to put in an appearance.
Rehearsals have shown that this new music, whether for tape
or for instruments, is more clearly heard when the several loud-
speakers or performers are separated in space rather than grouped
closely together. For this music is not concerned with harmoniousness
as generally understood, where the quality of harmony results from a
blending of several elements. Here we are concerned with the
coexistence of dissimilars, and the central points where fusion occurs
are many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are. This
disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is
simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.
Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more
than music resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is
our business while we are alive to use them.
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course,
not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must
take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a
purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not
an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in
creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living,
which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out
of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
When Xenia and I came to New York from Chicago, we arrived
in the bus station with about twenty-five cents. We were expecting to
stay for a while with Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst. Max Ernst had
met us in Chicago and had said, "Whenever you come to New York, come
and stay with us. We have a big house on the East River." I went to
the phone booth in the bus station, put in a nickel, and dialed. Max
Ernst answered. He didn't recognize my voice. Finally he said, "Are
you thirsty?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, come over tomorrow for
cocktails." I went back to Xenia and told her what had happened. She
said, "Call him back. We have everything to gain and nothing to lose."
I did. He said, "Oh! It's you. We've been waiting for you for weeks.
Your room's ready. Come right over."
Dad is an inventor. In 1912 his-submarine had the world's
record for staying under water. Running as it did by means of a
gasoline engine, it left bubbles on the surface, so it was not
employed during World War I. Dad says he does his best work when he is
sound asleep. I was explaining at the New School that the way to get
ideas is to do something boring. For instance, composing in such a way
that the process of composing is boring induces ideas. They fly into
one's head like birds. Is that what Dad meant?
This article, there titled Experimental Music, first
appeared in The Score and I. M. A. Magazine, London, issue of June
1955. The inclusion of a dialogue between an uncompromising teacher
and an unenlightened student, and the addition of the word "doctrine"
to the original title, are references to the Huang-Po Doctrine of
Universal Mind.
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC: DOCTRINE
Objections are sometimes made by composers to the use of the
term experimental as descriptive of their works, for it is claimed
that any experiments that are made precede the steps that are finally
taken with determination, and that this determination is knowing,
having, in fact, a particular, if unconventional, ordering of the
elements used in view. These objections are clearly justifiable, but
only where, as among contemporary evidences in serial music, it
remains a question of making a thing upon the boundaries, structure,
and expression of which attention is focused. Where, on the other
hand, attention moves towards the observation and audition of many
things at once, including those that are environmental--becomes, that
is, inclusive rather than exclusive--no question of making, in the
sense of forming understandable structures, can arise (one is
tourist), and here the word "experimental 'is apt, providing it is
understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of
success and failure, but simply as of an act the outcome of which is
unknown. What has been determined?
For, when, after convincing oneself ignorantly that sound
has, as its clearly defined opposite, silence, that since duration is
the only characteristic of sound that is measurable in terms of
silence, therefore any valid structure involving sounds and silences
should be based, not as occidentally traditional, on frequency, but
rightly on duration, one enters an anechoic chamber, as silent as
technologically possible in 1951, to discover that one hears two
sounds of one's own unintentional making (nerve's systematic
operation, blood's circulation), the situation one is clearly in is
not objective (sound-silence), but rather subjective (sounds only),
those intended and those others (so-called silence) not intended. If,
at this point, one says, "Yes! I do not discriminate between intention
and non-intention," the splits, subject-object, art-life, etc.,
disappear, an identification has been made with the material, and
actions are then those relevant to its nature, i.e.:
A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as
needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has no time for
any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its
characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly
exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure,
the precise morphology of these and of itself.
Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond
the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, its becoming is
unimpeded, energetically broadcast. There is no escape from its
action. It does not exist as one of a series of discrete steps, but as
transmission in all directions from the field's center. It is
inextricably synchronous with an other, sounds, non-sounds, which
latter, received by other sets than the ear; o per ate in the same
manner.
A sound accomplishes nothing; without it life would not last
out the instant.
Relevant action is theatrical (music [imaginary separation
of hearing from the other senses] does not exist), inclusive and
intentionally purposeless. Theatre is continually becoming that it is
becoming; each human being is at the best point for reception.
Relevant response (getting up {n the morning and discovering oneself
musician) (action, art) can be made with any number (including none
[none and number, like silence and must, are unreal]) of sounds. The
automatic minimum (see above) is two.
Are you deaf (by nature, choice, desire) or can you hear
(externals, tympani, labyrinths in whack)?
Beyond them (ears) is the power of discrimination which,
among other confused actions, weakly pulls apart (abstraction),
ineffectually establishes as not to suffer alteration (the "work"),
and unskillfully protects from interruption (museum, concert hall)
what springs, elastic, spontaneous, back together again with a beyond
that power which is fluent (it moves in or out), pregnant (it can
appear when- where- as what-ever [rose, nail, constellation, 485.73482
cycles per second, piece of string]), related (it is you yourself {n
the form you have that instant taken), obscure (you will never be able
to give a satisfactory report coas to yourself of just what happened).
In view, then, of a totality of possibilities, no knowing
action is mensurate, since the character of the knowledge acted upon
probibition but some eventualities. From a realist position, such
action, though cautious, hopeful, and generally entered into, is
unsuitable. An experimental action, generated by a mind as empty as it
was before it became one, thus in accord with the possibility of no
matter what, is, on the other hand, practical. It does not move in
terms of approximations and errors, as "informed" action by its nature
must, for no mental images of what would happen set up beforehand; it
sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an
infinite play of interpenetrations. Experimental music--
QUESTION: ?in the U.S.A., if you please. Be more specific.
What do you have to say about rhythm? Let us agree it is no longer a
question of pattern, repetition, and variation.
ANSWER: There is no need for such agreement. Patterns,
repetitions, and variations will arise and disappear. However, rhythm
is durations of any length coexisting in any states of succession and
synchronicity. The latter is liveliest, most unpredictably changing,
when the parts aro not fixed by a score but left independent of one
another, no two performances yielding the same resultant durations.
The former, succession, Iiveliest when (as in Morton Feldman's
Intersections) it is not fixed but presented in situation-form,
entrances being at any point within a given period of time.--Notation
of durations is in space, read as corresponding to time, needing no
reading in the case of magnetic tape.
QUESTION: What about several players at once, an orchestra?
ANSWER: You insist upon their being together? Then use, as
Earle Brown suggests, a moving picture of the score, visible to all, a
static line as coordinator, past which the notations move. If you have
no particular togetherness in mind, there are chronometers. Use them.
QUESTION: I have noticed that you write durations that are
beyond the possibility of performance.
ANSWER: Composing's one thing, performings another,
listening's a third. What can they have to do with one another?
* * *
QUESTION: And about pitches?
ANSWER: It is true. Music is continually going up and down,
but no longer only on those stepping stones, five, seven, twelve in
number, or the quarter tones. Pitches are not a matter of likes and
dislikes (I have told you about the diagram Schillinger had stretched
across his wall near the ceiling: all the scales, Oriental and
Occidental, that had been in general use, each in its own color
plotted against, no one of them identical with, a black one, the
latter the scale as it would have been had it been physically based on
the overtone series) except for musicians in ruts; in the face of
habits, what to do? Magnetic tape opens the door providing one doesn't
immediately shut it by inventing a phonogene, or otherwise use it to
recall or extend known musical possibilities. It introduces the
unknown with such sharp clarity that anyone has the opportunity of
having his habits blown away like dust.--For this purpose the prepared
piano is also useful, especially in its recent forms where, by
alterations during a performance, an otherwise static gamut situation
becomes changing. Stringed instruments (not string-players) are very
instructive, voices too; and sitting still anywhere (the stereophonic,
multiple-loud-speaker manner of operation in the everyday production
of sounds and noises) listening . . .
QUESTION: I understand Feldman divides all pitches into
high, middle, and low, and simply indicates how many in a given range
are to be played, leaving the choice up to the performer.
ANSWER: Correct. That is to say, he used sometimes to do so;
I haven't seen him lately. It is also essential to remember his
notation of super- and subsonic vibrations (Marginal Intersection No.
1).
QUESTION: That is, there are neither divisions of the
"canvas" nor "frame" to be observed?
ANSWER: On the contrary, you must give the closest attention
to everything.
* * *
QUESTION: And timbre?
ANSWER: No wondering what's next. Going lively on "through
many a perilous situation." Did you ever listen to a symphony
orchestra?
* * *
QUESTION: Dynamics?
ANSWER: These result from what actively happens (physically,
mechanically, electronically) in producing a sound. You won't find it
in books. Notate that. As far as too loud goes: "follow the general
outline the Christian life."
QUESTION: I have asked you about the various characteristics
of sound; how, now, can you make a continuity, as I take it your
intention without intention? Do not memory, psychology--
ANSWER:"--never again."
QUESTION: How?
ANSWER: Christian Wolff introduced space actions in his
oompositional process at variance with the subsequently performed time
action Earle Brown devised a composing procedure in which events,
follow tables of random numbers, are written out of sequence, possibly
any which in a total time now and possibly anywhere else in the same
total time . I myself use chance operations, some derived from the I-
Ching, others from the observation of imperfections in the paper upon
which I happen to writing. Your answer: by not giving it a thought.
QUESTION: Is this athematic?
ANSWER: Who said anything about themes? It is not a question
of having something to say.
QUESTION: Then what is the purpose of this "experimental"
mode
ANSWER: No purposes. Sounds.
QUESTION: Why bother, since, as you have pointed out, sounds
continually happening whether you produce them or not?
ANSWER: What did you say? I'm still--
QUESTION: I mean--But is this music?
ANSWER: Ah! you like sounds after all when they are made up
of vowels and consonants. You are slow-witted, for you have never
brought your mind to the location of urgency. Do you need me or
someone else to hold you up? Why don't you realize as I do that
nothing is accomplish by writing, playing, or listening to music?
Otherwise, deaf as a door you will never be able to hear anything,
even what's well within earshot.
QUESTION: But, seriously, if this is what music is, I could
write as well as you.
ANSWER: Have I said anything that would lead you to think I
thought you were stupid?