CHRISTIAN WOLFF
April 24, 1990
ALVIN LUCIER
I first met Christian Wolff in the late 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At that time he was a tutor in classics at Harvard. From time to time he organized concerts of new music at Kirkland House, all-day affairs that included works of John Cage, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Frederic Rzewski, myself, and others, as well as films by Tony Conrad.
In 1965, when I invited John Cage to perform a concert in the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, where I was teaching at the time, John suggested that we include a work of Christian’s. I was delighted to do so. In that concert, John, Christian, and I performed his for 1, 2 or 3 people, an early signature piece that used cuing as a way to produce indeterminate results. Many of you know this work; I include it in Music 109, Introduction to Experimental Music. It is a democratic idea—a player not having to be a prodigious performer but one who requires an acutely aware social attitude toward performance. Amateurs as well as professionals share the stage. I have often thought of Christian’s works for small ensembles as a perfect form of chamber music; each player depends on the playing of the others. Following Christian’s lecture, three of our graduate students will perform this work as a surprise gift to Christian.
Artists and composers, as well as scientists and engineers, often stumble upon great new ideas. I have often thought that innovative or shocking ideas in art—cubism in painting, for example—do not come about through deep analytical thought on the part of the artist but come about by accident, in the actual or whimsical process of working on a painting or musical composition. One story goes that Picasso was so upset with his then mistress that he drew a distorted picture of her by moving her nose to one side. Christian’s breakthrough technique of cuing among players came about as he was working on a piece for two pianists. He was running out of time and needed to finish the piece for an upcoming performance, so he developed this shorthand notation. This solution to a practical problem became a philosophical idea in his subsequent music.
By the early ’70s, Christian decided to write in a more traditional style, in order to make his music more accessible to everyday musicians. For several years I have struggled to figure out where his earlier ideas of indeterminate processes might be lurking in his more traditional notation. Perhaps one answer lies in the quirkiness of the narrative, the syntax and grammar of the flow of his pieces. Often one phrase doesn’t seem to follow logically from what came just before; it seems totally unrelated. The choice of instruments in many of his works is free and sometimes produces strange bedfellows. During visits to art colleges in England in the ’70s, he made a series of prose scores for nonmusicians. Students in Music 109 are well acquainted with Stones, which we perform in class every year. “Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds …”
Christian’s approach to political works is direct and gentle. He often uses texts and workers’ songs, sometimes hidden in the texture of a work, similar to the use of folk music by other American composers, including Aaron Copland. Many are about women (Rosa Parks, Rosa Luxemburg, Harriet Tubman, the female workers in a shirt factory in Lowell, Massachusetts). He quotes from songs of Holly Near.
When European composers visit Wesleyan, they often ask to go to three places in New England: Union Cemetery in nearby Killingworth, to visit Hermann Broch’s grave; Concord, Massachusetts, to visit Henry Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond; and Hanover, New Hampshire, to visit Christian Wolff, who currently teaches music and classics at Dartmouth College. Tonight, he is here in Middletown, Connecticut, to talk to you in person. The title of his lecture is “What Is Our Work?”
CHRISTIAN WOLFF
Thank you, Alvin.
What is our work? What I mean is, What are we—composers, producers of music—doing and, perhaps, what should we be doing? I also mean, how are we doing it?
Who are we? Well, I’ll have to speak mostly for myself, if only because I have more of the material at hand, than for anyone else. But I’ve said we and our because the musical enterprise is inevitably social or, if you will, political, in one way or another. We all need to survive materially to start with, and our work, whatever it is, will be affected by that, while our material survival obviously depends on social networks. (For example, the extraordinary character of John Cage’s work in [the] 1950s and early ’60s, the alarming and beautiful blend in it of power and danger—in addition to, almost in spite of, the music’s refusal of rhetoric—must owe something to his continuously endangered economic life at the time. Over roughly the same period, Elliott Carter, in total economic security, evolved his characteristically hypercomplex and hyperdeterminate hermetic music. Somewhere in between, a larger number of us have been employed by universities and colleges: How has that affected our work?)
Apart from this aspect of the material environment in which we work, there is the wider social one of an economy geared to mass consumption, on the one hand, and therefore to a homogenizing of our cultural experience, and, on the other hand, an economy that feeds on a privatizing technology: recordings, Walkmans, videos, VCRs, all are for individual, private use because no doubt more will be sold if everyone is persuaded that he or she must have this equipment, or, indeed, they must have it if they want any access to the main currents of the culture. In this way, the technology is antisocial and objectifies cultural products, makes them consumer items, and so suppresses the liveliness they might have in a particular social setting of audience and performer(s). Of course, technology can be useful and mind-stretching; it’s a human creation, and it’s extended extraordinarily access to both cultural products and cultural work. In music, for instance, if you can get hold of or construct or modify equipment, with some intelligence and with information that is more or less available, you can make music, and you can do it in ways that may alter notions of what music might be. Technology, too, may offer means of us for our making connections between popular and so-called art music.
I also refer to our work in the plural because, though I know rather less of other music that’s being made than I would like, I try to think about it, respond to it in some way in my own work. At times, I have worked closely with—and performed with—others, and that’s affected my work: for instance, David Tudor, John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Gordon Mumma, the members of the English improvising group AMM, John Tilbury, Garrett List. Other musics have affected me all my life. Some musics I admire and don’t know what to do about it, but because they exist I have the feeling that they allow me to get on with what I am doing: for example, the music of Nancarrow, Tudor, Oliveros, Lucier, Nono, Ashley, Feldman. As for the other musics that have affected my work, I should mention that they include musics of the past, Western classical music (on much of which I was raised from an early age), going back to the medieval period; musics of other traditions—African Ba-Benzele Pygmy, for instance; and some jazz (for example, Ornette Coleman)—and I have drawn, for musical material, considerably from folk music, particularly North American and black and politically connected.
All these musics could be called “influences,” although, except for the use of tunes (from political folk music), there is no deliberate, conscious use of them, no effort to adapt or imitate. In many cases, I think of them after the fact of my own writing, as though having come away from a conversation with them (or one or more parts of them). I carry on the talk on my own, and perhaps they are listening. They can also provide a kind of corroboration and encouragement. While working on the first set of Exercises, which are mostly single- or double-pitch lines to be played by a variable number of unspecified instruments in a freely heterophonic way, for example, I happened to hear part of a performance of the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa Maria, which sounded to me at once various, rich, and clear; and then I found out that it was all based on a single notated pitch line. After making the piece Stones (a prose instruction for an improvisation using stones as the basic sound source), I brought a copy of it to Cornelius Cardew, who, when he had looked at it, reached over and handed me his score-in-progress of The Great Learning, paragraph I, in which members of a chorus must make sounds with stones, according to a graphic notation based on Chinese characters. Cornelius had thought to use stones because, beautifully cut and tuned, they are often used in Chinese classical music. My piece had originally come about after a long afternoon on a stone-covered beach, discovering and trying out the range of sounds that a variety of stones are capable of producing. In the case of each of these pieces, you could say an area of community of interest was discovered and identified. With the Cantigas, initially a formal procedure—heterophony and flexible instrumental realization—was shared, but, then too, some of the conditions underlying this way of making the music: collaborative performance (nonhierarchical), the mix of popular and so-called high cultural elements (the Cantigas draw widely from folk tunes; the Exercises are full of diatonic bits; both require a more-than-simply-popular formality of performance presentation). In the case of Stones, common interests in the exploration of new (or so we thought) sound sources intersected, coming in the one case from a piece’s content—The Great Learning sets texts of Confucius—and in the other from experiment with natural objects.
I think of the contemporary musical work I have referred to and my own work as experimental. What does that mean? Or what can we suggest it usefully to mean?
It’s first of all partly a question of circumstances, as with the related notion of “new music.” That is, it’s a sliding notion. The earliest new music I know about appeared at the end of the fifth century before Christ in Athens (people complained at the time that it undermined the traditional modes or “harmonies”; that it misused, by extending them, instrumental techniques; that it was directionless—zigzagging about like ants—and rhythmically unstable; that it obscured the words of texts which it set; that it corrupted the young). In the early fourteenth century, a “new art,” ars nova, of music (or, more precisely, of musical notation) was identified. And so forth down the centuries. And evidently by the beginning of the twentieth century, the beginnings of “our” new music emerged, most characteristically, it seemed, around the figure of Schoenberg. By the mid-1950s, one of Schoenberg’s greatest apologists, Theodor W. Adorno, wrote about the “aging new (modern) music,” a powerful essay in which he claimed that this aging was due to the fact that “the young no longer dared to be young.” By the late ’60s (shortly before his death), he wrote, more generally, and perhaps more suggestively, that “the new [in art] is the longing for the new, not the new itself.”
Adorno follows up this observation by remarking that modern art (or twentieth-century music), identifying itself as new, assumes a notion of progress, assumes that the new constitutes an improvement on the old. Yet, he also observes, the world around us doesn’t seem to be improving; it is, in fact, in a state of extraordinary crisis—the gap between rich and poor, violence, the use of torture, the abuse of the environment are reaching unprecedented proportions (I update his examples somewhat). If, then, Adorno argues, art would be linked with progress, it must represent a utopian impulse, an expression or image of, or desire for, a better world. But such a representation, insofar as “social reality increasingly impedes Utopia,” will implicate art in the fostering of delusion and false comfort, will make it a lie.
There are, of course, more familiar notions of the new. Bach, you remember, had to provide a new cantata every Sunday—which recalls that the idea of performing old music, of musical reruns, is relatively recent (and as it happened, Bach was one of its first beneficiaries). Nowadays when you use the term new music, it can mean what is currently on the pop charts or refer to groups just emerging on the scene, whatever their musical style or sound happens to be. Here the new is associated with novelty, with what is fashionable, up-to-date, not yet passé, an association easily connected to marketing strategies looking to extend and expand consumption.
There is a beautiful moment early in Homer’s Odyssey (we are back in the early eighth century before Christ) in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, asks the singer who is entertaining unwelcome guests in her house not to sing the heartbreaking song of her husband’s absence. Her son, Telemachus, however, checks her, saying, “Why, my mother, do you begrudge this excellent singer / his pleasing himself as the thought drives him? It is not the singers / who are to blame, it must be Zeus [the all-powerful of the gods] is to blame, who gives out / to men who eat bread, to each and all, the way he wills it. / There is nothing wrong in his singing the sad return of the Danaans [the Greeks, including Odysseus]. / People, surely, always give more applause to that song / which is the latest to circulate among the listeners.” And he continues, “So let your heart and let your spirit be hardened to listen. Odysseus is not the only one who lost his homecoming / day at Troy. There were many others who perished, besides him.” The passage is beautiful in part because of its intricacies: we (the audience) know, in fact, that Odysseus has not lost his homecoming but is on his way, and the song from which this passage is taken, the “Odyssey,” is the song of that homecoming, which will complete, or continue, the new but in fact not-yet-completed song, which is so painful to Penelope and which Telemachus defends on the grounds of its newness. He also defends the new song on the grounds of the singer’s inspiration, or need to sing what he sings; on the grounds that the song represents reality (what Zeus has dispensed), which affects a far larger group than just Odysseus—though, as said, Telemachus misapprehends some of that reality; and on the grounds that the present company (however unwelcome and threatening they happen to be) has a claim on the song’s newness that outweighs consideration of the private grief it causes Penelope.
We might mention in passing that the performance of orally transmitted and of improvised musics, which are in many cases traditional musics, is always, strictly speaking, new. Such performance, one could say, exists only for the present, albeit in some cases as a kind of foreground on that particular music’s traditional background.
When all is said and done, we need and want, in some sense that matters, what is new. What will it be? How will it be determined?
Before continuing with those questions, I’d like to suggest a schematic outline of how one might see the need for what is new. Under one general heading of subjective or personal there is (1) an appetite for novelty somehow in each of us; and (2) another way of seeing that appetite, as at once the ineluctable fact of our individual, continual changing, becoming always new, growing and decaying, and our individual desire, variously and activated, to grow, change, renovate, change our skins—it is a matter of reminding ourselves that we are alive. The second general heading I would label objective or social and locate there; (3) the capitalist market economy, driven by the need for continuing and increasing profits and intent, with all the resources of mass communication, on exciting in us unending desires for its products and services; and (4) the larger condition of the world and its crises (some of whose manifestations were mentioned earlier), crying out for change and transformation. All four of these elements interpenetrate; all of them are either changeable or capable of instigating change.
Of course we have deep needs for stability and gentle continuity. Change is work and can be scary as well as exhilarating. And there are always those who have, or imagine themselves to have, some advantage of power or privilege and who will resist change by every means, including in the extreme case, their own destruction. In fact, stability is not a given, not a choice as such. It, too, has constantly to be re-created through the processes of change. As for the notion that there is nothing new under the sun, while sobering, it seems to me useless, all too conducive to inertia and passive resignation.
Now, what about music? It seems to me that everything said so far about the new and about change points to experimental music. Not, of course, that music as such will somehow save us. Obviously there are enormous gaps between social and musical problems. But they are also linked, a linking that at the very least urges us to take our musical problems seriously.
What is experimental? In some ways it is, as said before, a variable notion, differently realized at different times or by different works. The word suggests something that you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. It can have an apologetic sound to it—“this is only an experiment”—implying a displacement of the real thing, or that one is only on the way, more or less groping, toward the real thing, that the point is to establish something else, more important, on a firm foundation: to prove it. From this I would eliminate the apologetic tone but retain the suggestion of exploration. I would also put on hold the notion that there is something out there that we can ultimately prove. Experiment implies working amidst the unknown. It acknowledges the unknown, respects it, but is not frightened by it. Experiment should be such as to involve genuine risk, that is, truly acknowledging the unknown in which it operates, and so establish its seriousness.
One way to consider the experimental character of music is to notice its effect on listeners (though I don’t want to stress this point: as a composer, I’m more concerned with production than reception; though of course I’m not indifferent to the latter, but consideration of it doesn’t enter into the actual processes of making my work, except to the extent that it might allow listeners to be free to do their own listening). Effects such as surprise, shock, astonishment, irritation, boredom, bemusement, I find this very difficult to talk about, but I thought it should be mentioned. One of the most encouraging things I have heard said about my work was that although this person didn’t really like what she was hearing, the performance of the music made her feel that she wanted to be a musician. David Behrman once said after a concert that he liked the music because it was honest and it was funny (humorous).
I would like to think of bemusement as a good result of this music, bemusement at what was heard, mixed in with, variously, pleasure, perhaps exhilaration, and bemusement in the mind, waking it up also to the social world around it. Of course music—experimental music—may be allowed a variety of functions. Henry Brant thinks of music as “medicine for the spirit.”
Let me give you an example of how context can affect the experimental character of a piece of music. In 1975, I was asked to provide music for a Merce Cunningham Company “event,” one of those evening-long performances put together out of material from various dances. As usual, no specifications were indicated about the music except for the total length of time within which it could take place. No information was provided about the character of the dance. Merce Cunningham’s work is of course experimental, and part of that experimentalism is to allow the music that accompanies the dance to be itself rather than an accompaniment. The music that I provided included a new piece that used material from a song, originally a popular song of the 1920s (I think) called “Redwing,” which was later (in 1940) adapted by Woodie Guthrie to make a political song called “Union Maid.” We—the musicians (there were four of us altogether)—decided to include in the performance a singing of “Union Maid.” Not, I may say, without some previous anxious deliberation. At any rate, the song, roughly sung (none of us were polished singers), coming at a point in the dance—unpredictably—where Merce Cunningham was performing one of his beautiful solos, was shocking (I even remember hearing the odd gasp from the audience). An ordinary, perky tune was shocking in a context that routinely absorbed musics like John Cage’s, David Tudor’s, Pauline Oliveros’s, Alvin Lucier’s, and, for that matter, my own. My sense of what might constitute an experimental music performance has never been the same.
The usual view is that experimental music is distinguished by the presence of new sound or (and) new ways of arranging sound and (or), we might add, new contexts (which might well be social) for sounds. (As another example of the latter, consider the performance by some of New York’s best players, members of the Philharmonic, et cetera, of Mozart’s woodwind quintet at a concert sponsored by the Musicians’ Action Collective, a politically oriented organization, as a benefit for the Farm Workers’ Union, a concert including political folk music, jazz, and new music and attended by an audience including the various followers of these musics, most of whom were also supporters of the farm workers’ cause. Mozart’s piece in this context became a political piece in, I would claim, a new, experimental way.)
Something of the feeling of this newness is also suggested by John Cage’s remark that “the trick is suddenly to appear in a place without apparent means of transport.” More explicitly, Cage has also insisted that the essential meaning of experimental is unpredictability. He urges work of such a kind that its realization (sometimes as a musical composition, sometimes as a performance, sometimes both) will surprise the one who made it, in some cases the one(s) who perform it, and, in a rather different way, those who listen. In the case of those who listen, the sense of hearing something surprising is different because they don’t really know the conditions of the experiment—the experimental conditions of a particular work. If a certain sound has been arrived at by chance (either in the composition process or the performing), how can you tell just from hearing it? To be sure, if the sound is unlike any you have heard before, you will appreciate its experimental character; but you do so in the context of all your experience of listening to music; and if you should hear this sound again, it will, in this view, cease to be experimental. Well, perhaps. The example of the single sound is a bit overly simple. The experimental character of a piece, as it involves unpredictability (and not necessarily just new sounds), is more likely to be found in the way the piece makes its own context: the piece as a whole may or may not seem new or surprising, but it will create a setting within which its surprises take place. You could think of background (the piece as a whole) and foreground (the things that affect you as surprise). It may also be that foreground and background—surprisingly—change into one another.
To return to John Cage just once more, he has a reason for stressing the notion of unpredictability. It’s to allow you, the listener, but also himself and the players to be more alert and attentive in this way: the unpredictability is a result or symptom of compositional techniques (in his case the use of chance in the process of composing and sometimes in the overlaying of independent individual performers’ parts or of several independently made compositions for a given performance), techniques intended to free up the music from extramusical pressures, such as the desire to express a feeling or idea or image or whatever, even the desire to be beautiful. This is not to say that such expressions might not appear or be felt by listeners to appear, but the point is that they would appear without specific intention: they would take you by surprise, innocently and without compulsion. Allowing each of us individually to be free in this way is the utopian element in such a view of experimental music. (It has also a kind of practical realism about it, insofar as there is almost inevitably—especially in times so culturally heterogeneous as ours—a gap between the expressive intention behind a work and how its listeners (variously) understand it. The absence of specific expressive intent would preclude misunderstanding about such an intent, or, to put it in another way, such an absence allows a work expressive flexibility.
When I began composing, I had the notion—I don’t really know where it came from, perhaps an adolescent impulse—that I should make a music unlike any other. I was encouraged too by hearing for the first time, after a long immersion in the older Western classical music (roughly from Bach to Brahms), the string quartet music of Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern. (This was in 1949, when opportunities for hearing this music even in New York were very rare and no recordings were available.) The music, especially in its sonorities, the kinds of noise it made, its continuities, its dissonances, felt extraordinarily bracing and like nothing I had encountered before and, by virtue of this, liberating. I wanted, in my way, to do the same. And for the next twenty or so years, this is what I tried to do, making a music that whatever else might be said about it, could be called experimental in the senses of that word suggested so far. But in the early ’70s, something caught up with me. Like many people at that time—and they included a number of musicians with whom I worked—I was (to make a longer story short and simple) politicized, and for the first time I thought about the connections between my emerging political concerns and my musical work (earlier involvement with pacifism and civil rights activity had had no such effect). My previous work now seemed to me too esoteric and, because of its performance requirements—involving the players in a kind of exclusive, intense concentration on each other’s sounds—too introverted: the gap between the performers’ involvement with a piece’s sound and the listeners’ seemed too large. What I was doing musically seemed mostly inaccessible to people (including good friends) who were, generally speaking, music lovers.
My first response was to attach to my music texts that were political in character or implication. As I said earlier, social arrangements find, in one form or another, representation in music (as in any kind of human activity), either implicitly or unconsciously or explicitly or consciously. It could be said that my work shifted from an implicit expression of the politics of a kind of democratic libertarianism akin to anarchism to an explicit politics of, roughly speaking, democratic socialism. And, in the music, I tried to make my work less introverted, less sparse, more of a response to what a larger number of people might recognize as music.
What, now, has happened to the notion of experiment?
The combinations of sounds (not quite the sounds themselves) may have something new about them, but the way they are put together also draws on more familiar procedures. In the earlier Pairs (1969), for instance, there is hardly a trace of usual musical techniques, at most a variant of hocketing (sharing out a melody line, mostly note by note, between two or more players) but without fixed rhythmic definition; perhaps something like counterpoint in the overlaying of paired players but without any specific motivic relationships—fragments of melody. No system is used in the note-to-note procedure of composing. Perhaps most important (though of course everything is important), the composing involved working out the conditions under which something I would regard as musical, a process, would be able to take place, conditions allowing a high degree of variability in timing and in density of sound.
John Cage used to remark that he found my work musical (this was not a value judgment); after a rehearsal of Bowery Preludes, Garrett List said to me, “Don’t get this wrong, I really like these pieces: they’re so unmusical.” Morton Feldman was heard to say that the writing was idiomatic and unidiomatic. The making of Pairs could be said to have spun itself out of itself (but I also think there is something of Webern in the background, though not in any of the technical procedures). Bowery Preludes from 1987 uses counterpoint—the piccolo and trombone duet, for instance, is a kind of two-part invention; there is identifiable melodic hocketing; there are longer patches of clear rhythmic articulation (as far as pitch is concerned, the earlier work starts with the assumption of complete chromaticism but has plenty of room for the appearance of diatonic moments, while the later starts with diatonic material, which easily shifts in and out of chromaticism; noise is always a possibility in both cases; I’m tempted to say that the nondecorative presence of noise is one of the clearest identifying features of experimental music—and I’d be willing to extend the notion of noise to the way sound appears in, say, Nancarrow or Lucier or even Feldman).
Behind these differences in the more recent work (actually, the work of about the last seventeen years) is the technical—and more-than-technical—fact that the music in many cases draws its material from songs, most of them not my own but a variety of political songs or folk songs or black spirituals, which have had or have acquired association with political or social issues: for instance, in Bowery Preludes use is made of the spirituals “Mary, Don’t You Weep,” “Oh, Freedom,” and “Set Down, Servant,” all songs originally expressing, under religious guise, the Southern slaves’ aspirations to freedom and then taken up again during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (I first heard “Mary, Don’t You Weep” on a highly political Staple Singers album in the early ’70s). Also used are a black prison song, “Ain’t No Mo’ Cane on Dis Brazos,” first sung by slaves in the cane fields on the Brazos River in Texas and apparently still sung by the mostly black prison population hired out to this day to work in those same fields, and a contemporary British women’s “Picket Line Song,” written during an equal-pay strike in London in 1976. I should mention that one part of Bowery Preludes uses no such song material and is notated in such a way as to focus the players entirely on dynamics and sonority.
The way the song material may be used varies, but mostly the pitch intervals and the rhythms are variously represented, transformed, augmented, diminished, extended by additive processes, and so forth. The song is rarely quoted directly. (There are affinities here with Ives, for instance, and the English keyboard music of the turn of the seventeenth century.) The songs—which I choose not just for their political content but also because I really like them as songs—also provide a kind of guiding spirit to the composing. It’s not that I set out to express in the music the content of the song (the words would then, in any case, be necessary). Rather, as, for example, in the trombone and piccolo duet in Bowery Preludes, the partly humorous militancy of the “Picket Line Song” is both in the musical material in my hands, so to speak, being variously modified, and in my head as I work, as a kind of wider-structure or scaffolding of feeling, which is not really the same thing as setting out to make a piece intended to express humorous militancy (about, incidentally, a quite serious issue).
Now, what has happened to the notion of experimental as a way of working that is free of specific or directed expressive intentions? Perhaps not so much. Generally speaking, of course, I believe my earlier and later music sound different (though there is still sometimes that thread of noise running between them). But in each—earlier underlying, later perhaps more on the surface, earlier in the way the sounds are made, later more in what the sounds refer to—there is a concern about freedom. I don’t want to make any easy metaphorical jump from musical to political or even personal freedom; but if we believe that our music is part of our larger social existence, then some such connection, however flickering, may be there. It is also the case that every work, no matter how indeterminate or experimental, has its particular expressive horizons, even when what is expressed is the freedom of sounds to be just sounds: that freedom is a signified meaning made by us, not by the sounds. The expressive possibilities of, say, Pairs are delimited—only a certain range of expression or meaning could imaginably be found in them, experienced because of them, a range that can be identified, though you may not be able to put it into words. (These remarks are, of course, in no way value judgments.) Every piece, I think, has—in addition to the abstract arrangement of its sounds or simply the existence of its sounds and their possible relation to whatever other sounds are going on around them—what I would call a content, something that it suggests, which is not the same as its sounds, though such a content may deeply affect those sounds, how they are arranged and how they appear to us. For example, in Cage, that content has often to do with nature, stars, the seasons, plants, or the words of Thoreau. All this affects how we hear the sounds in his music, how their horizon of expressiveness is indicated. In Pairs, the content could be said to have something to do with working together, two by two. In my more recent work that content often relates to a political mood: assertive, resistant, commemorative, celebrative, for instance. The connection may be fairly tenuous or subterranean; it is often discontinuous. As for indeterminacy, it will always exist in some form; it’s our destiny, because we’re mortal. The trick is not to forget it. In the recent music I’ve been speaking about, one could say that that indeterminacy is most interestingly active in the ways the sound of a piece and its content interconnect or interfere with one another, which will happen, in the always-changing conditions of performance and listening—unpredictably.
Before concluding, I would like to mention two more ideas, which I think are important but not exclusively so.
Both these ideas have to do with renunciation or restriction, a kind of ascetic minimalism (it’s a nice paradox that much of the music labeled minimalist, say, the earlier Philip Glass and Steve Reich, was basically good time music). One is the notion of musical poverty, of an avoidance of rhetoric, of the presence of silence or spaciousness, of sparseness of the irreducibility of material. One might think of music of Satie, Webern, Feldman, Lucier, Cage, for examples. The other notion is of what Adorno refers to as “the ideal of darkness,” which does not simply match what he feels to be the darkness of the times, of social reality, but “does no more and no less than postulate that art properly understood finds happiness in nothing except its ability to stand its ground. This happiness,” he continues, “illuminates the sensuous phenomenon from the inside.… blackness [darkness]—the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture’s façade—has a sensual appeal.” These notions, of poverty and darkness, would function, so to speak, to keep us honest; and Adorno adds the point that in that very function their music achieves its particular beauty. As I said, I find these ideas of critical importance but not exclusively so: necessary but not sufficient conditions for our work.
So what is our work? It is, I still believe, experimental music.