I was born in Los Angeles in 1912. My family’s roots are completely American. There was a John Cage who helped Washington in the surveying of Virginia. My grandfather was an itinerant Methodist Episcopal minister. After preaching ineffectively against Mormonism in Utah,
he ended up in Denver where he established the first Methodist Episcopal church. He was a man of extraordinary puritanical righteousness and would get very angry with people who didn’t agree with him. As a child my father used to run away from home whenever he got the chance. He was regarded as a black sheep.
My mother was married twice before she married my father, but she never told me this until after he died. She couldn’t remember her first husband’s name.
My father invented a submarine just before the First World War which had the world’s record for staying underwater, and he dramatized this by making an experimental trip on Friday the thirteenth, with a crew of thirteen, staying underwater for thirteen hours. But it never entered his mind that the value of staying underneath water lay in being invisible to people above. Because his engine ran on gasoline it left bubbles on the surface of the water. So his sub wasn’t used in the war, and Dad went bankrupt.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
My father was an inventor, and he had a very beautiful idea for space travel—going to the moon and such things. He had a theory of how the universe works; it was called “electrostatic field theory.” He was able in his laboratory to simulate the universe, and he had little pith-balls of different sizes, in an electrostatic field, that actually went through the revolutions and orbits and so forth that the planets do. The people at the Pasadena institute [Cal Tech] couldn’t explain why his thing worked, so they refused to believe it; but they also couldn’t explain it away.
He believed that everything in the world has an electrostatic charge. That, in effect, is what gravity is. We don’t fall off the earth because of our electrical connection with the earth; but if there were a sphere of an optimum size, we would have to hold it down to keep it here. Otherwise, because of its size, it would assume a charge opposite to that of the earth, and it would automatically move away. He had seen this happen in his laboratory.
Now with Buckminster Fuller’s domes and construction devices, it would be perfectly simple to make an enormous sphere. It would then move away from the earth, without force, but, so to speak, in accord with nature. Then my dad’s idea was that, since you would be able to do that, you would then be able to do the reverse, which would be to change the nature of the charge and so approach your destination.—Robert Cordier (1973)
My first experience with music was through neighborhood piano teachers, and particularly my Aunt Phoebe. She said of the work of Bach and Beethoven that it couldn’t possibly interest me, she herself being devoted to the music of the nineteenth century. She introduced me to Moszkowski and what you might call Piano Music the Whole World Loves to Play. In that volume, it seemed to me that the works of Grieg were more interesting than the others.—Roger Reynolds (1962)
I started taking piano lessons when I was in the fourth grade at school but I became more interested in sight-reading than in running up and down the scales. Being a virtuoso didn’t interest me at all.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
When I was twelve years old, I had a radio program. It was for the Boy Scouts of America. I rode on my bicycle from Moss Avenue near Eagle Rock,
where we lived, over to KFWB in Hollywood. I told them that I had the idea of having a Boy Scout program and that the performers on the program would be Boy Scouts and that ten minutes of each hour would be used by someone from either a synagogue or a church who would give some kind of an inspiring talk, you know. I was in the tenth grade, and so KFWB told me just to run along.
So I went to the next radio station—KNX. It was nearby, and they liked the idea, and they said, “Do you have permission from the Boy Scouts to do this?” I said, “No, but I can get that.” So I went to the Boy Scouts and said that I had the agreement of KNX to have an hour every week for the Boy Scouts and was it all right with them? They said yes, and I said, “Well, will you cooperate with me? For instance, can I have the Boy Scout Band?” And they said, certainly not. They said you can do anything you like, but we won’t cooperate; so I went back and told the people at the radio station. They agreed. Every Friday after school—I was still in high school—I would go over to the radio station and conduct the program which I think was at something like four to five in the afternoon or five to six. During the week I would prepare the program by getting as many scouts as I could to play, oh say, violin solos or trombone solos.
If this was in 1924-25, radio was still new to America.
Well, radio was very close to my experience, because my father was an inventor. He was never given the credit for it, but he had invented the first radio to be plugged into the electric light system.
What was your idea for the show?
Well, what I told you: Boy Scouts performing and some ten-minute inspirational talk from a member of the clergy. I no sooner began the program than there was a great deal of correspondence, people writing in; and those letters would be read on the air by me. I was the master of ceremonies. When there was no one else to perform I played piano solos.
Of?
Mostly Music the Whole World Loves to Play. There used to be these books with that title. They were on all the neighborhood pianos. It’s sad that we no longer have pianos in every house, with several members of the family able to play, instead of listening to radio or watching television.
How long did your juvenile radio career go?
That lasted for two years. Isn’t that amazing? And it was so popular that it became a two-hour program, and the Boy Scouts became jealous. They came to the radio station and said that I had no authority and no right to have the program. So, of necessity, the radio station asked me to leave, and they accepted the real Boy Scouts, because I was only second class. I was not even a first-class scout. They accepted the real ones, and the real ones used it in a quite different way. They were very ostentatious and pushy. The result was that after two programs they were asked to leave.
Was there a sponsor?
No, this was before the day of grants.
So, even into the late twenties, your experience of music came mostly from live music.
From piano lessons and so on. It was in church primarily. Aunt Marge had a beautiful contralto voice. I loved to hear her sing, always on Sundays in church and sometimes on weekdays at home. Then in college, at Pomona, I met a Japanese tennis player who had some kind of physical trouble as a result of playing tennis. So he was resting by taking a few classes at Pomona College. He was absolutely devoted to the string quartets of Beethoven, and he had as fine a collection of recordings of those as one could find. His name was Tamio Abe, and he played all those records for me.—Richard Kostelanetz (1984)
When I was a child I took for granted that I could sing, and so I applied to get in the glee club. And they said, “You cannot just get in the glee club. Your voice has to be tested.” So they tested my voice and they said, “You do not have a voice.” So I was not allowed to be in the glee club. And until I was thirty-five years old I lived without “bursting into song,” so that in group situations where other people were singing I remained silent, which is my tendency now, too.
But then I began to sing as a soloist and I found it was interesting to do, and I have done that a great deal both privately and publicly.—Mark Gresham (1991)
Since I was convinced I would be a writer when I was in college, I was also convinced that college was of no use to a writer because teachers required everyone to read the same books. So I persuaded my mother and father that going to Europe would be more useful for someone who was going to write than continuing college and they agreed.—Paul Cummings (1974)
I went to Paris instead of continuing my third year of college, and in Paris I was struck first of all by the Gothic architecture. I spent a number of months studying flamboyant Gothic architecture at the Bibliothéque Mazarin. A professor I had had in college José Pijoan
was furious with me for not being involved in modern architecture. He got me working with a modern architect
whose name was Goldfinger. Ironically, he got me to drawing Greek capitals for columns.
And then I heard that architect one day say that to be an architect you’d have to devote your entire life to architecture. And I realized I wasn’t willing to do that. I loved a number of other things—poetry was one, and also music.—Rob Tannenbaum (1985)
During the Depression in the early 19305, I found myself in Santa Monica, California, after having spent about a year and a half in Europe—in Paris, actually—where I rather quickly came in contact with a wide variety of both modern painting and modern music. The effect was to give me the feeling that if other people could do things like that I myself could. And I began, without benefit of a teacher, to write music and to paint pictures, so that when I came back from Europe I was in Santa Monica where I had no way to make a living—I was a dropout from college—and I showed my music to people whose opinion I respected and I showed my paintings to people whose opinion I respected. Among those for painting were Galka Scheyer, who had brought “The Blue Four” [Lyonel Feininger, Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee] from Europe, and Walter Arensberg, who had the great collection that was formed really by Marcel Duchamp. And I showed my music to Richard Buhlig, who was the first person to play Schoenberg’s Opus II. The sum total of all that was that the people who heard my music had better things to say about it than the people who looked at my paintings had to say about my paintings. And so I decided to devote myself to music. Meanwhile I had gone from house to house in Santa Monica selling lectures on modern music and modern painting. I sold ten lectures for $2.50 and I had an audience of something like thirty or forty housewives once a week. I assured them that I knew nothing about the subject but that I would find out as much as I could each week and that what I did have was enthusiasm for both modern painting and modern music. In this way I taught myself, so to speak, what was going on in those two fields. And I came to prefer the thought and work of Arnold Schoenberg to that of Stravinsky.—Alan Gillmor (1973)
Schoenberg was approaching sixty when I became one of his students in 1933. At the time what one did was to choose between Stravinsky and Schoenberg. So, after studying for two years with his first American student, Adolph Weiss, I went to see him in Los Angeles. He said, “You probably can’t afford my price,” and I said, “You don’t need to mention it because I don’t have any money.” So he said, “Will you devote your life to music?” and I said I would. And though people might feel, because I know my work is controversial, that I have not devoted myself to music utterly, that I have spent too much time with chess, or with mushrooms, or writing, I still think I’ve remained faithful. You can stay with music while you’re hunting mushrooms. It’s a curious idea perhaps, but a mushroom grows for such a short time and if you happen to come across it when it’s fresh it’s like coming upon a sound which also lives a short time.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
How did you, an experimentalist par excellence, come to study with such a formal structuralist twelve-tone composer?
In the ’30s we didn’t take Bartók seriously. We took Stravinsky and Schoenberg seriously as the two directions that one could legitimately take. I chose Schoenberg, and I think it was right, because toward the end of his life Stravinsky also turned to twelve-tone music.
I worshipped Schoenberg—I saw in him an extraordinary musical mind, one that was greater and more perceptive than the others.—Paul Hertelendy (1982)
Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles. I studied counterpoint at his home and attended all his classes at USC and later at UCLA when he moved there. I also took his course in harmony, for which I had no gift. Several times I tried to explain to Schoenberg that I had no feeling for harmony. He told me that without a feeling for harmony I would always encounter an obstacle, a wall through which I wouldn’t be able to pass. My reply was that in that case I would devote my life to beating my head against that wall—and maybe that is what I’ve been doing ever since. In all the time I studied with Schoenberg he never once led me to believe that my work was distinguished in any way. He never praised my compositions, and when I commented on other students’ work in class he held my comments up to ridicule. And yet I worshipped him like a god.—Calvin Tomkins (1965)
Anyway, Schoenberg lived in a dark, quasi-Spanish house, and he had no grand piano, just an upright. He wasn’t tall, and he had very poor taste in clothes. He was almost bald and he looked as though he was haunted. As far as I was concerned, completely he was not an ordinary human being. I literally worshipped him. I tried to do my work as well as I could for him, and he invariably complained that none of his pupils, including me, did enough good work. If I followed the rules too strictly he would say, “Why don’t you take a little more liberty?” and then when I would break the rules, he’d say, “Why do you break the rules?” I was in a large class at USC when he said quite bluntly to all of us, “My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,” and when he said that, I revolted, not against him, but against
what he had said. I determined then and there, more than ever before, to write music.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
He refused to look at my compositions (in class). When I came up with a long fugue subject, he’d simply say, “Put it in your next symphony.”—Paul Hertelendy (1982)
Someone asked Schoenberg about his American pupils, whether he’d had any that were interesting, and Schoenberg’s first reply was to say there were no interesting pupils, but then he smiled and said, “There was one,” and he named me. Then he said, “Of course he’s not a composer, but he’s an inventor—of genius.”—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
You had the good fortune to study with two people who were extremely important for twentieth-century music: Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. With Schoenberg, there is the famous quote about your “beating your head against the wall” of harmony. You must have talked with Schoenberg a little more than that. Did you feel that it was important to study with him?
At the time that I felt the need to study music, the choice that was open to a student then was to study in the “school”—that is to say, of Schoenberg, or the “school” of Stravinsky. Both of them were in Los Angeles at the time, where I wanted to study. So it was a simple matter to make a choice. I don’t think that Stravinsky was teaching, but Schoenberg loved teaching, and I had decided, moveover, that I preferred his music to that of Stravinsky—though I had loved all modern music, not just Schoenberg. I preferred the work of Schoenberg to that of any other modern composer in the sense that if I were going to study, that I would study with him, and studying with him meant believing what he had to say. It didn’t mean having an opportunity to argue with him,
as so many college students do with their teachers, whom they may not have elected to study with. All they elected to do was to go to a building in which certain people happen to be, but they didn’t go to the people; they went to the building. I had already dropped out; I’m a college dropout. So that the only reason I went to study with Schoenberg was because I believed in what he had to say and to teach.
I stayed with him for two years, and when I left him, it was for the reason that your question included. Namely, that though we had gotten along beautifully for two years, it became more and more clear to me and to him
that he took harmony fundamentally seriously, and I didn’t. I had not yet studied Zen Buddhism, curiously enough. When I did, which was about ten or fifteen years later, I would have had even more reason for not studying harmony. But at that time, it was as though I was wrong, and what I was interested in was noise. The reason I couldn’t be interested in harmony was that harmony didn’t have anything to say about noise. Nothing.
Wasn’t it Cowell who recommended that you go to Schoenberg?
Yes.
I know that Cowell was the founder of the New Music Society and the New Music Edition, and he was responsible, I believe, for directing the attention of so many people toward the music of Varése, Ruggles, and Ives. I imagine you would have found working with him very congenial then.
I enjoyed him for the reasons that we’ve mentioned, together with his interest in music of other cultures. What is now called “world music” in the universities. He was, I would say, the instigator of interest in other cultures.
When I studied with Adolph Weiss here in New York, to prepare myself for studies with Schoenberg, I also studied with Henry Cowell at the New School and became his assistant for a while. In that way I didn’t have to pay for the classes. I had very little money. To eat and pay my rent and so forth, I was washing walls in a Brooklyn YWCA. I played bridge every evening with Mr. and Mrs. Weiss and Henry Cowell—or sometimes with the Weisses and Wallingford Riegger. About midnight, we would stop playing and I would sleep for four hours, then get up, and between four and eight I would do my exercises for the next day’s lesson with Weiss, and then I would get on the subway, at the last possible moment, to go to Brooklyn to wash the walls. The way I knew it was the last possible moment was because I saw the same people every morning, in the same car. Because they all went there at the last possible moment; they didn’t like their jobs any more than I liked mine. Then, when I got back to Manhattan, I would eat, and then take a lesson with Weiss, and then play bridge again until midnight.—Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (1975)
My mother had an arts and crafts shop which was nonprofit. Mother was the club editor of the Los Angeles Times. She started the crafts shop in order to give craftsmen an opportunity to sell their goods. I had no job. No one could get work. So I either did library research for my father, who was an inventor, or other people—people who were running for governor, who wanted this data or whatever; I would do library research for them. On occasion I also sat in my mother’s art and crafts shop and sold the goods and wrote music in the back of the shop. One day into the shop came Xenia, and the moment I saw her I was convinced that we were going to be married. It was love at first sight on my part, not on hers. I went up and asked her if I could help her and she said she needed no help whatsoever. And so I retired to my desk and my music, and she looked around and finally went out. But I was convinced that she would return. Of course, in a few weeks she did. This time I had carefully prepared what I was going to say to her. That evening we had dinner and the same evening I asked her to marry me.
What did she think of this, all of a sudden?
She was put off a little bit, but a year or so later she agreed. I think we were married in ’35. So at first we lived in the same apartment house as my mother and father did; and I was, at that moment, studying with Schoenberg.—Paul Cummings (1974)
I ran into Oscar Fischinger, who was a maker of abstract films that he made by following pieces of music; and he used, among other things, the Hungarian dances of Brahms.
It was an idea of a mutual friend that I would write some music that he would use to make an abstract film, and so I worked with him. While we were working together, I was moving bits of colored cardboard hung on wires. I had a long pole with a chicken feather, and I would move it and then have to still it. When I got it perfectly still—he was sitting in an armchair at the camera—he would click it and take one frame. And then I’d move them, following his direction, another inch and so, and then he’d take another frame. In the end it was a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles, and circles and other things moved and changed color. In the course of that tedious work, he made a remark which was very important to me. He said that everything in the world has a spirit which is released by its sound, and that set me on fire, so to speak.—Joel Eric Suben (1983)
When I was studying with Schoenberg in the thirties, Stravinsky came to live in Los Angeles, and an impresario who was our local Hurok advertised a concert of his music as “Music of the World’s Greatest Living Composer.” I was indignant and marched straight into the impresario’s office and told him that he should think twice before he made such advertisements in a city where Schoenberg was living. I was extremely partisan. I was like a tiger in defense of Schoenberg, and I was less and less interested in Stravinsky’s music as time went on. Then, circumstances were such that while Stravinsky was alive there was a celebration of his work at Lincoln Center and a performance with Lukas Foss conducting L’Histoire du soldat. Rather than present the whole thing with dancers and whatnot, they had decided to have three composers read the three different parts. Aaron Copland was the narrator, Elliot Carter was the soldier, and I was the devil. Everyone thought I was well cast. Anyway, Stravinsky was in the audience, and he was delighted with my performance, so I asked him whether I might come and see him. I visited him in a hotel on Fifth Avenue. We had a very pleasant conversation, and I found him an extremely interesting man, so I said something to this effect: “You know, the reason I never made an effort to see you before was because I was so partisan and so devoted to the work of Schoenberg.” He made this rather remarkable statement: “You know, the reason I’ve never liked Schoenberg’s music is because it isn’t modern.” This reminded me of things which I’d heard Schoenberg say when he was teaching us. He would take a particular group of four notes and he would say, “Bach did this with these four notes, Beethoven did this, Brahms did this, Schoenberg did this!” In other words, it was as Stravinsky was saying. Schoenberg didn’t think of himself in any sense as constituting a break with the past.—Jeff Goldberg (1974)
My connection with the WPA was entertaining. I went to San Francisco to the music department, and I’d already worked a good deal in the field of percussion music. I said I wanted a job on the WPA. And they said. “But you’re not a musician.” And I said, “I deal with sound. Where should I go?” And they said, “Try the recreation department.” (laughs) So I did. And I worked with children after school hours in Telegraph Hill. The Italians. The black kids in another part of town. And the Chinese in Chinatown. And I used to get a splitting headache from the Italian children. I’d bring them instruments to play, and things I had made, and they’d smash them. And I’d always left that session with a headache. But the Chinese people I got along with beautifully. The blacks were so gifted that they had no need of me. But I always remember how well I got along with the Chinese people. The only trouble was that the school was Catholic, and the sisters were not confident that my influence on the children was good, (laughs) So one day one of these tiny children came to me and said, “You’re not teaching us anything about counterpoint.” (laughs) And they couldn’t have even known the word. So then the next thing I knew they were gone.—John Held Jr. 1987
Xenia played in my percussion orchestra, but she was primarily an artist and learned how to draw very beautifully and painstakingly. She became interested in making mobiles using balsa wood and paper, which moved and cast very beautiful shadows. She now does curatorial work for a museum.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
Xenia was interested in crafts and in bookbinding, and she did later those valises for Marcel [Duchamp]. We went to live in a large house in Santa Monica run by Hazel Dreis, a very fine bookbinder. I mean a real bookbinder—not a casemaker, but a real binding. And we both bound books. Xenia did most of it. I enjoyed designing the covers and so forth. I also wrote music there. Then, in the evening all the bookbinders became musicians and played in my orchestra. So because it was percussion music, I think, it brought the interest of modern dancers. I wrote a few pieces for this dance group at UCLA, which was nearby, and also for the athletic department that had underwater swimmers who swam underwater ballet. That was how I discovered dipping a gong in a tub of water and making a sound that way. Because I found that the swimmers couldn’t hear the music when it was above water, but could if it was both in and out. So this connection with the dancers led me to the possibility of getting employment working with dancers. I went one day to San Francisco and got actually four jobs in one day and of the four I chose to work with Bonnie Bird, who had been in the Martha Graham group and was teaching at the Cornish School in Seattle. The Cornish School was extraordinary because of Nelly Cornish’s insistence that each person not specialize but study all of the things that were offered. I worked with Bonnie Bird and wrote music for her, and I organized the percussion orchestra and made tours around the Northwest and to Mills College every summer. And that’s where I met Moholy-Nagy and all those people from the School of Design in Chicago, and was invited to go to Chicago and join the faculty there.—Paul Cummings (1974)
The recording medium at that time was wire. Did you ever think of working creatively with wire?
I did some library research work in connection with my father’s inventions. Because of that, when I became interested in recorded sound for musical purposes or even for radio plays, I then did library research for myself about the new technical possibilities; and they included, as you say, wire and film. Tape wasn’t yet, in the early forties, recognized as a suitable musical means; but wire and film were.
Did you work with them yourself?
No, I just wanted to. I wrote letters, I think it was in ’41 or ’42, to corporations and universities all over the country trying to establish a Center for Experimental Music, and I didn’t get anywhere. Well, actually, I got a little where. The University of Iowa’s psychology department was interested through the presence there of, wasn’t his name, Carl Seashore, who made many ways of finding out about intelligence and so on. He was interested in my project. Dr. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, isn’t that right, who was president of Mills, was interested. She was a very tall, big, imposing, and brilliant woman. She had a great collection of Gertrude Stein books. So was Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design in Chicago. But none of these people had any money. They said, if I could raise the money to establish it, they would be willing to have it as part of their activities. For two years I kept trying to do that, and that’s when I, so to speak, didn’t get anywhere.
What did you imagine this center having?
Well, I was working with percussion instruments. One characteristic of percussion is that it’s open to anything else than what it already has. The strings in the orchestra are not that way—they want to become more and more what they are; but the percussion wants to become other than what it is. And that’s the part of the orchestra that’s open, so to speak, to electronics or to… And so I thought of recording means as instrumental to percussion music.—Richard Kostelanetz (1984)
[Did you serve in World War II?]
Fortunately, I never had to go to war. My father was an inventor, and I did research work for him. I didn’t have to go to World War II, which otherwise I might have gotten involved with. He was doing work in seeing through fog for airplanes, and I did library research work in connection with that; and, of course, it was indirectly related to the war. It was pleasant for me not to have to get involved. Had I been drafted, I would have accepted and gone into it; I would not have refused. There are so many examples of people who were able to continue their work in the Army. The first I think of is the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote his Tractatus in the trenches in Italy. Christian Wolff, more recently, wrote more music in the Army than he did out of the Army, et cetera. In other words, I believe in the principle of Daniel in the lion’s den, so I would not want to keep myself out of it, if I were obliged to go into it. On the other hand, I am glad not to have gone into it, as I have never in my life shot a gun. As a child I was very much impressed by the notion of turning the other cheek. You know, if someone struck me on one cheek, I actually did turn the other cheek. I took that seriously.—Alcides Lanza (1971)
Xenia had inherited a small amount of money, and at the end of that year we decided that since the fan mail for the Kenneth Patchen play The City Wears a Slouch Hat had been very good [in Chicago], we would come to New York and make our fortune.
I would write music for radio and films and so forth, using sound effects, because I was still working principally with percussion. Well, it turned out that when I got here, all the fan mail that was received by CBS here was negative. So there was no possible employment. We were penniless, absolutely penniless.—Paul Cummings (1974)
[What persuaded you to stay in New York?]
It was a marvelous place to land because it was not only New York, which I think, when one first comes to it, is extremely stimulating, but it was the whole gamut of the world of painting. Through circumstances in Europe, many painters were living here in New York—Mondrian was here, for instance, and Breton was here; and so in one fell swoop or series of evenings at Peggy Guggenheim’s you met an entire world of both American and European artists. She was already involved with Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Cornell was a frequent visitor. Marcel Duchamp was there all the time, and I even met Gypsy Rose Lee. It was absolutely astonishing to be in that situation.
How did you first meet Duchamp?
I’d come from Chicago and was staying in the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst. Peggy had agreed to pay for the transport of my percussion instruments from Chicago to New York, and I was to give a concert to open her gallery, “The Art of This Century.” Meanwhile, being young and ambitious, I had also arranged to give a concert at the Museum of Modern Art. When Peggy discovered that, she cancelled not only the concert but also her willingness to pay for the transport of the instruments. When she gave me this information, I burst into tears. In the room next to mine at the back of the house Marcel Duchamp was sitting in a rocking chair smoking a cigar. He asked why I was crying and I told him. He said virtually nothing, but his presence was such that I felt calmer. Later on, when I was talking about Duchamp to people in Europe, I heard similar stories. He had calmness in the face of disaster.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
To continue with Duchamp a bit: Was he a good chess teacher?
I was using chess as a pretext to be with him. I didn’t learn, unfortunately, while he was alive to play well. I play better now, although I still don’t play very well. But I play well enough now that he would be pleased, if he knew that I was playing better. So that when he would instruct me in chess, rather than thinking about it in terms of chess, I thought about it in terms of Oriental thought. Also he said, for instance, don’t just play your side of the game, play both sides. That’s a brilliant remark and something people spend their lives trying to learn—not just in chess, but everything.—Paul Cummings (1974)
So when did you hook up with Jean Erdman?
Well, Merce Cunningham and Jean Erdman were working with Martha Graham at Bennington College and before they left, they asked me to write some music for a dance which they would make that summer. And so I wrote it [Credo in Us] and in return for writing the music Jean and Joe Campbell gave us their apartment which they still live in on Waverly Place. So we had a place to live, but no money for food, I mean literally. There was one of those days I felt relieved because I found that I had not even a cent—nothing. I think before I had nothing I had written some letters to people telling them of the situation and in that way I received something like fifty dollars through the mail. And at that time that was a good deal. And in the course of it, John Steinbeck, who was an old friend, came along and invited us to the 21 Club for lunch. I was so horrified because lunch cost over, well over, a hundred dollars. I never particularly like to have lunch anyway because it breaks into the day, and you can’t get anything done!—Gwen Deely (1976)
When I first came to New York, something had been written to me by Martha Graham that led me to believe she would give me a job as an accompanist for the dance classes in her school, and that she would consider my writing music for her. So when I first came to New York, I went to see her. I remember it was a late afternoon, it was quite dark, it must have been in the colder part of the year. She didn’t turn any lights on. She seemed very mysterious and very powerful, and I was already put off. Then it turned out that she hadn’t meant anything, that she didn’t want me to work for her at all, even as a dance accompanist. Then I felt somewhat liberated, I remember, when I left, from her kind of power.—David Shapiro (1985)
Can we talk about your [1943] concert at the Museum of Modern Art? Wasn’t that a very important event for you at that time?
I thought it was. It was not as important as I thought. It was highly publicized and highly reviewed, even in Life magazine, so I thought that my fortune would be made. I was very naive and quite ambitious, but I discovered very quickly that no matter how well known you are, it doesn’t mean anything in terms of employment or willingness to further your work or do anything.—Paul Cummings (1974)
I had heard one lecture given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School late in the thirties on Zen and Dada, which had impressed me very much, but which had not impressed me sufficiently to get me to reading Zen texts. It was only in the middle forties when, through personal circumstances that ended in my divorce from Xenia, that I required help as an individual who needed help, and that was going to come as usual from psychoanalysis, but it didn’t—and I recount the story in my book [Silence, 1961]. But instead I got involved with Oriental philosophy and that performed for me the function that psychoanalysis might have performed. But, in performing it, Zen is almost characterized by an insistence on an utterly realistic approach and one that ends in humor.
Then all of these things that have been talked about you and Dada really aren’t Dada at all, because their roots would be in Zen.
Well, except you have to go back to the beginnings of these remarks. I had been brought up on the twenties. I was very impressed by geometrical abstract art, and I was aware of Duchamp and so forth. I liked Dada very much. That interest in Dada became enforced by my interest in Satie, who himself was a Dadaist. I preferred Dada to its successor.
Surrealism.
I think so.—Irving Sandier (1966)
When I was growing up, church and Sunday School became devoid of anything one needed. The public schools avoided such “needs,” and what I was forced to do in school was what I no longer wished to do—including Shakespeare. I was almost forty years old before I discovered what I needed—in Oriental thought. It occupied all of my free time (aside from musical work) in the form of reading and attending classes of Suzuki for several years. I was starved—I was thirsty. These things had all been in the Protestant Church, but they had been there in a form in which I couldn’t use them. Jesus saying, “Leave thy Father and Mother,” meant “Leave whatever is closest to you.” In Zen, one speaks of “no-mindedness.” The idea of Nirvana is not a negative statement, but the “blowing out” of what is seen as an impediment to enlightenment. The ego is seen as the one barrier to experience. Our experience, whether it comes from the outside or from the inside, must be able to “flow through.” Irrationality, or “no-mindedness,” is seen as a positive goal, which is “in accord with” the environment.—C.H. Waddington (1972)
I remember meeting with de Kooning. It was at the time that I was first involved with chance operations, and I wrote those six or seven Haiku; and I made calligraphic copies of them on Oriental papers. I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but there’s one line of music at the bottom of the page and the rest of the page empty; and I dedicated these to people who had helped me or who were trying to help me with the problem of livelihood, which was serious then. Bill de Kooning must have been one of these because I dedicated one of the Haiku to him, and I went to his studio to give it to him. He had what has never appealed to me, and he explained to me that he had it, which was the desire to be a great artist. I remember that he didn’t turn the light on, and it was getting dark outside, and he said, “You and I are very different. I want to be a great artist.”—Gwen Deely (1976)
In the late forties, when we [Merce Cunningham and Cage] were making a tour, we wrote to Black Mountain, as to other colleges, asking for an engagement. And they wrote back and said that they would like to have us come but that they had no money to pay us, and we accepted that arrangement anyway. They agreed to put us up and to feed us. And so between two engagements—I think one was in Virginia and the next was in, oh, Chicago perhaps—we went to Black Mountain. I forget how long we stayed, but several days. And it was a great pleasure. There were many parties. And when we got in the car to drive away… We had parked it in front of that building where the studies were, and hadn’t used it while we were there. So that when we drove it back, we discovered this large pile of presents that all the students and faculty had put under the car in lieu of any payment. It included, for instance, oh, paintings and food and drawings, and so on.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)
I only took other employment if it was absolutely necessary, to eat; but I could go a long time without working, I mean without getting a job. It was when I began the Music of Changes in the early fifties that I decided to limit my work to my composition, not to look for another kind of work.—David Shapiro (1985)
From all I’ve read, it appears that those early meetings on Monroe Street with Feldman and Wolff and Tudor were very significant meetings. The image that comes out is one of daily activity and daily changes of attitude.
Yes.
How long did that last?
It lasted a year, maybe two years. Then I went to Colorado and met Earle Brown and Carolyn Brown, and they became so interested in the work that they decided to leave Colorado and come to New York and live here. I, meanwhile, had started a tape music project with Louis and Bebe Barren and David Tudor. And Earle went into this. Well, the appearance of Earle Brown on the scene infuriated Morton Feldman, so that the closeness that I had had with Morty and David and Christian was disrupted by the advent of Earle Brown. Later, that whole problem was resolved by our raising the money to present a concert of the music of Brown and Feldman at Town Hall. Then both Earle and Morty became friends, and had a truce.
Did the intensity of that group of people extend outside of the group?
Oh yes. There were other people who wanted to enter the group and enjoy the exchange of ideas and so forth, but Morty refused to let that happen. He insisted upon its being a closed group. It was through my acceptance of Earle Brown that Morty then left. The group then dissolved. Morty was literally furious that anyone else was allowed into the group. Another one who might have been in it, but wasn’t, was Philip Corner. And I don’t know, but I imagine Malcolm Goldstein and James Tenney. However, the fact that they weren’t brought into it made it come about that they formed their own group, which was called Tone Roads. And they did beautiful work.—William Duckworth (1985)
What attracted you to mycology?
Well, the building that I lived in in Manhattan [in the late forties and early fifties] had a marvelous situation. It was at Grand Street and Monroe, and I had half of a top floor of the tenement. I could look up to 59th Street and I could look down to the Statue of Liberty, and I was spoiled by this involvement with the sky and air and water and so forth. When they tore this building down, I went to the people in charge and I said, could I have an apartment that would have the same view when you put up the new building? And they said, we can’t take such things into consideration. And so at that moment, it was a coincidence, as it generally is, some friends of mine, who had come together through one association or another with Black Mountain College, had the notion of starting a cooperative community in Stony Point, New York, up the Hudson, and asked me to join in and I did. And it was August. I had lived in the privacy of New York, and I was suddenly introduced to a farmhouse in Stony Point before the buildings that we now live in were built, and I found myself living in small quarters with four other people, and I was not used to such lack of privacy, so I took to walking in the woods. And since it was August, the fungi are the flora of the forest at that time. The brightest colors (we are all children), they took my eye. I remember that during the Depression I had sustained myself for a week on nothing but mushrooms and I decided to spend enough time to learn something about them. Furthermore, I was involved with chance operations in music, and I thought it would just be a very good thing if I get involved in something where I could not take chances. However, I’ve learned to experiment, and the way you do that is, if you don’t know whether a mushroom is edible or not, you cook it all up, and you take a little bit and then you leave it until the next day and watch to see if there are any bad effects. If there aren’t any, you eat a little more, and presently you know something.—Yale School of Architecture (1965)
[How did your involvement proceed?]
I decided to learn [about mushrooms] and other wild edible plants. First I got books and found the books confusing. And then I met Guy Hearing, and I finally began to learn a good deal about mushrooms. Then four years later [in Italy], I was on a TV quiz show, which I won by answering questions about mushrooms; and that was the first consequential amount of money I’d ever earned. (It was two years later, in 1960, that I began to make some money with my music.) So I began giving classes at the New School for Social Research in mushroom identification, and then that class developed into the New York Mycological Society, of which I’m a founding member. Now I have one of those honorary things from the People to People Committee on Fungi, which is centered in Ohio, for having done a great deal for amateur mycology. And I’m a member also of a Czechoslovakian mushroom society. But I’ve now given away all my mushroom books—there were over three hundred of them I’d collected—since I figure I have enough in my head. And I’ve published with Lois Long a portfolio of twenty lithographs—ten are by her which illustrate fungi, and ten are by me which write about fungi in relation to all my other interests.
I think that when I focus my attention on something, it goes dead; but when I place it in a space that includes things that are not it, then it comes alive.—Robert Cordier (1973)
There’s pleasure in eating, don’t you agree?
But you couldn’t live on mushrooms?
No, they’re not nourishing.
Do you have favorites?
I like the ones I have. If you like the ones you don’t have, then you’re not happy.—Lisa Low (1985)
Did you notice the mushrooms at Black Mountain?
No. I had always lived in the cities, and when I went to Black Mountain, I had, even then, the feeling that the insects and whatnot in the country were far more irritating than the cockroaches in the cities. And it was only in Stony Point that I discovered that I was starved for nature and took to walking in the woods. And my whole attitude toward insects changed.
You prefer insects to cockroaches now?
I prefer being bitten by mosquitoes to cockroaches. Yes.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)
What led you to study with [D.T.Suzuki]?
I was very fortunate. I had read The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. I became interested, in other words, in Oriental thought. And I read also a short book by Aldous Huxley, called The Perennial Philosophy, and from that I got the idea that all the various religions were saying the same thing but had different flavors. For instance, Ramakrishna spoke of God as a lake of people coming to the shores because they were thirsty. So I browsed, as it were, and found a flavor I liked and it was that of Zen Buddhism.—Laurie Anderson (1992)
At what point in your composing did you become interested in Zen and in Buddhism?
It happened between ’46 and ’47, and the involvement didn’t take place immediately. It began with Oriental philosophy and then Suzuki came from Japan and was teaching at Columbia, and I attended his classes for some three years. So that, that takes us up to about ’51 or something like that. Now the effect it had was first to change what it was that I was trying to say in my work. And, second, to change how it was I was making my work. And what it was that I was saying was very much influenced by such Oriental notions as creation, preservation, destruction, and quiescence; and I was most involved in this understanding of the seasons. And then the Indian notion of the emotions that are necessary to make a work of art, the four white ones and the four black ones and the central one, without color, of tranquility, this being the one that must be expressed no matter what others are expressed. All that I tried to express in certain works. Then I began composing in that way, first with charts, in which I made moves on the charts, regardless of my intentions. In other words, a spirit of acceptance, rather than a spirit of control. And then testing my life by my art, et cetera.—Yale School of Architecture (1965)
Most people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I use chance as a discipline. They think I use it—I don’t know—as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask.
And also choosing how to follow the answers you get.
Well, my use of the I Ching in my work is just a mechanism of the chance operation. But I think if you use the I Ching as a book of wisdom, there, too, it’s difficult to know how to ask the questions.
Very often you can ask a question and then find out that it gives you an answer that makes you aware of another dimension you haven’t thought of.
If I ask the I Ching a question as though it were a book of wisdom, which it is, I generally say, “What do you have to say about this?” and then I just listen to what it says and see if some bells ring or not.
So do you use it for…
On occasion when I’m troubled. But I haven’t been troubled for quite some time—that is to say, I haven’t been so troubled that I felt the need to ask it.—Robin White (1978)
Another thing that I think I learned from Zen and from the teaching of Suzuki is that the whole of creation is Mind with a big M, and each person is mind with a little m. The little m often thinks that it has purposes and senses of direction, but if it changes its direction, if it turns round or is converted, then it looks out of itself toward the big Mind, either at night through dreams or in the day through the senses. And what Zen wants is that it flows with the Big Mind, and what Chinese medicine wants is a relation of conduct to nature.—Thomas McEvilley (1992)
The number 64, which is the number that the I Ching works with—I found a way of relating it to numbers which are larger or smaller than 64 so that any question regarding a collection of possibilities can be answered by means of the I Ching which I now have computerized, so that I can very quickly do something using the I Ching actually as a computer. I found when I made HPSCHD with Lejaren Hiller that if you have a question for which you want a great number of answers, then it is economical to use the computer. But if you have a question which you only want one answer to, then it’s better to do it yourself. And when I do it myself I use the printout of the I Ching which is now computerized. Mostly I want only one answer to a question, and therefore I can work at home without going to a computer laboratory. And this box over here that has ropes around it is full of I Ching printouts. So I have a great supply of answers to questions which I have not yet asked.—Hans G.Helms (1972)
Why do you have such a strong interest in chess, which is a rigid, closed system?
In order to let it act as a balance to my interest in chance. I think the same thing is true of Marcel Duchamp. Because when he gave me his book on chess, I asked him to write something in it, and he wrote in French
: “Dear John, Look out, still one more poisonous mushroom.” Because both mushrooms and chess, you see, are the opposite of chance operations.—Art Lange (1977)
[Chess] is pretty directed then?
Yes. On the other hand, I like games anyway. I even like poker. I don’t play it very often. Sometimes if you get in residence at a university you have to play games with the teachers. Poker is very popular at universities.—Mark Bloch (1987)
I work a great deal and enjoy working, but life is so complicated—circumstances arise and we’re not always able to do the work we think is the proper work for us to do. It is precisely being able to accept those interruptions, to be able, temporarily, to let the work go and do the thing that comes and asks to be done.
I spend most of the day working. Sometimes I interrupt my work to go mushroom hunting or to play chess, which I don’t have a gift for. Marcel Duchamp once watched me playing and became indignant when I didn’t win. He accused me of not wanting to win. You must have an extraordinary aggressiveness to play well.
I was twenty-three when I married, but the marriage only lasted ten years. Now I share my apartment with Merce Cunningham.
I met Merce Cunningham in the thirties, before he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company. I began to write music for him, and we toured the country together. Then I became musical director for his own company. I still tour with them and give lectures, which is one reason why I don’t teach. I move around too much. Continuity is extremely important in a teaching situation.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
The first time I left Stony Point must have been ’60 or ’61, when I was made a fellow at Wesleyan University, and then in ’67, when I was made a composer-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati. And then the two following years, ’67 through ’69, 1 was at the University of Illinois, and then at the University of California, Davis. And I needed the large income that all of these fellowships and residencies gave me, because I became in their late life the sole support of my mother and father. So that I was obliged to make a great deal of money, whereas up until 1958, 1 never knew where the next dollar was coming from. And it was in ’58 that I won the TV quiz in Italy. That was the first sizeable income that I had, and I spent most of it to buy a Volkswagen bus for the dance company so we could tour.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)
If I notice that I’m disturbed if the phone rings and not giving my full attention to whomever it is, then I think I am not doing my work properly. I should be able to be interrupted. I mean, it’s being done well if being interrupted is not upsetting it. I’ve noticed many people who protect themselves from those interruptions make that separation between work and their lives. I enjoy being at the telephone when I am there and I enjoy my work when I am there.
Some people consider me a poor musician whereas they think some of my ideas are interesting. So they say, he’s not a musician, but he’s a philosopher, whereas most philosophers say he’s not a very good philosopher but he’s a good musician. And they ask me sometimes which I think are more important—my compositions or music or my texts, and the answers are the ones we’ve been giving all through this conversation—when we’re writing music, that’s what’s important, and when we’re writing ideas, that’s what’s interesting. And I would like to extend it to as many other things in my life as I can—to cooking, to answering the telephone. And life actually is excellent at interrupting us.—Rose Slivka (1978)
Well, I began to make money not from actually writing music but from lecturing, concerts, and all such things, what you might call the paraphernalia of music, when I was fifty. Now I could get along without giving any concerts if I chose to live in a poor corner of the world. My income from past work is sufficient to live on in a very modest situation. I used to suggest to Merce Cunningham that it was time to retire, and he said, “Where would you go?” And I said, “To Bolivia.” He said, “Why?” So I said, “Because surely no one there is interested in modern music.” I’d like to be somewhere where the phone doesn’t ring. You see I refuse to have an answering service. I consider it a form of twentieth-century immorality.
In what way?
Well, it means that you disconnect yourself from the society. And at will. It’s a form of selfishness.
Do you have your name in the telephone book?
No, I don’t, but that’s not my wish. That’s Merce’s wish because he’s involved with a large company of dancers and a school, so if his name were in the telephone book, it would be awful. Anyway, people find out what your number is whether it’s in the book or not.—Stephen Montague (1982)
I think that one of our most accessible disciplines now is paying attention to more than one thing at a time. If we can do that with equanimity, then I propose paying attention to three things at the same time. You can practice it as a discipline; I think it is more effective than sitting cross-legged.
In meditation?
I think the meaning of meditation is to open the doors of the ego from a concentration on itself to a flow with all of creation. Wouldn’t you say? If we can do this through the sense perceptions, through multiplying the things to which we’re able at one and the same time to pay attention, I think we can accomplish much the same thing. That’s my faith.—Terry Gross (1982)
When you taught at the New School, around 1956, you worked with performance material as well as with music. What kind of assignments did you give?
The course in the Composition of Experimental Music
generally began with my trying to bring the students to the point of knowing who I was, that is, what my concerns and activities were, and I wanted them to find out who they were and what they were doing. I wasn’t concerned with a teaching situation that involved a body of material to be transmitted by me to them. I would, when it was necessary, give them a survey of earlier works, by me and by others, in terms of composition, but mostly I emphasized what I was doing at that time and would show them what I was doing and why I was interested in it. Then I warned them that if they didn’t want to change their ways of doing things, they ought to leave the class, that it would be my function, if I had any, to stimulate them to change.
Did many leave?
Well, there never were many, and they mostly stayed. Eight or ten at the most. Some people did quite conventional musical work; they knew that I would try to get them to budge a bit. And some of them did. After this basic introduction, the classes consisted simply in their showing what they had done. And if I had anything to say I would say it. I also got them to say things about their work,…but this is a common progressive education practice, isn’t it? We had very little to work with: a closet full of percussion instruments, a broken-down piano, and things that people brought with them. The room was very small, so we simply did what we could do in that room.
I reminded them that because we had so little they had to do things that would nevertheless work. I didn’t want them making things that couldn’t be done. Practicality has always seemed to me to be of the essence. I hate the image of an artist who makes things that can’t be done.
Wasn’t it surprising to have painters in a music class like that?
It wasn’t surprising to me because I had, before that, in the late ’40s and the early ’50s, been part and parcel of the Artists Club. I had early seen that musicians were the people who didn’t like me. But the painters did. The people who came to the concerts which I organized were very rarely musicians—either performing or composing. The audience was made up of people interested in painting and sculpture.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)
Your music wasn’t published until Peters gave you an exclusive contract late in the 1950s. How did your signing with them come about?
I was living in the country then, and I had quite a problem supplying copies of my music to people who wanted to have it. I first took all of my music to Schirmers, and Mr. Heinsheimer said my music would only be a headache for them. The only piece he liked was the Suite for Toy Piano, but he said, “Of course we’ll have to change the title.” So I said, “There’s no need for you to do that; I’ll just take my music away.” And I took it back to the country.
People kept writing to me asking for copies, and I kept on writing music. Finally, one day—it was while I was writing the incidental music for Jackson MacLow’s play called The Marrying Maiden—I put my pen down, and I determined not to write another note until I found a publisher. So I picked up the Yellow Pages and I ran down the list of music publishers, and I stopped at Peters. The reason I stopped there was because someone—I think someone in some string quartet—had said that Mr. Hinrichsen was interested in American music. So I simply called and asked to speak with him. He said, very cheerfully over the phone, “I’m so glad that you called. My wife has always wanted me to publish your music.” That day we had lunch and signed the contract.
One of his great virtues was that he made no effort to censor, or to like or dislike the music. He felt that his function was not that, but was to publish it. If he decided to publish something, he didn’t question it. I think it’s for that reason I have an exclusive contract with them. He accepted everything I had done, and gave me carte blanche. I can do anything I want. That was not my privilege until I was nearly fifty years old, and that’s true in both writing music and in writing texts. Now it’s true that anything I do do is used in this society. Formerly it wasn’t true. Walter Hinrichsen was the first to open that door.—Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (1980)
In the fifties, when I gave a concert, I would advertise it, and at the most 125 people would come. When I gave HPSCHD in Illinois last year, somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000 people came, and they came from all over the country—and even from Europe! I gave a music circus in Illinois the year before and 5,000 people came, and the concert was free. I gave one in Minneapolis this year; another 3,000 people came, and it was free. Things are changing.
There are people saying that you as an “avant-garde artist” are the jester of the bourgeois society. What do you answer to this reproach?
The situation is different and has been different for many years in the U.S. from what it is in Europe. The people in Europe who concern themselves with art are for the most part not students, who are busy studying in Europe, but are rather the people who have the leisure to pay attention to art. Therefore, Europe considers itself more cultivated than the U.S., which is considered by Europe to be a little far away from tradition and from culture, and to be a little bit barbarian.
Well, what is happening in the U.S. is this: When you get a job in society and enter in the economic-political structure of capitalism, you no longer have any time for art. You’re not interested in art any longer; only a few people are. The people who are interested in the arts are the students. Therefore, if I make a tour in the U.S., I go from university to university. If I make a tour in Europe, where do I go? I go from festival to festival, or from radio station to radio station, and from one concert hall to another. The public is changing now, but formerly it was entirely a grown-up group without children. That means that the idea of being a court jester is a European idea.—Max Nyffeller (1970)
Morton Feldman claims that, just as they killed Socrates, they may kill you through acceptance. Not only have you been accepted but you’ve been glorified and even established. Doesn’t your tolerance of this resemble a certain complicity?
Those are romantic ideas. Feldman’s thinking is extremely sentimental. In fact, I would prefer something with a little more bite. What does it mean? A dinner consisting only of desserts would be bland.—Jean-Yves Bosseur (1973, in Dachy 2000)
After many years of doing what you do, how do you handle criticism? Do you think people are more aware, and more kindly disposed?
They certainly are. We performed in a museum in Columbus, Ohio. It was winter—I think it was ’49, when food had to be flown in to Indians in Arizona, because the snow simply covered the United States—and we were on a tour. We left Chicago and the next place we were to get to was Portland. The only way we could get there was down through Arizona; we had to park the car in Sacramento and take a train. And then we flew from there to Denver and then back to Sacramento to get the car, and then across to Columbus. When we got to Columbus, there was no time to rest before the performance because of the problems with travel. At that time Merce did a series of solos and I played the prepared piano. The stage was very poor—every time Merce jumped, his head disappeared from view. Afterward, there was a party for us, and all the people did at the party was tell us that our work was terrible and that we shouldn’t do what we were doing—that we had no notion of what music was or dance or anything. We thought that that performance in Columbus was a complete failure and that it ought never have taken place. Well, ten years later, I received a letter from a young man who said he had been in the audience and that it had changed his life.—Middlebury College Magazine (1981)
Do you feel it doesn’t matter what people say about you?
Of course it doesn’t matter. Because it is their action at that point. I learned very early to pay no attention to criticism. A review of a concert I gave in Seattle was to the effect that the whole thing was ridiculous. I knew perfectly well it wasn’t. Therefore, the criticism was of no interest. In fact, it taught me that if people like what I am doing, I should look out. It’s important that I live as I did before society became involved in what I am doing.
Do you resent society?
I think society is one of the greatest impediments an artist can possibly have. I rather think that Duchamp concurred with this view. When I was young and needed help, society wouldn’t give it, because it had no confidence in what I was doing. But when, through my perseverance, society took an interest, then it wanted me not to do the next thing, but to repeat what I had done before. At every point society acts to keep you from doing what you have to do.
When you say society, you don’t mean an audience?
I’m objecting to society as an audience, but I like society as what you might call an ecological fact.—Moira and William Roth (1973)
An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience.—Bill Womack (1979)
So you are concerned with people and unconcerned with the audience. You want the audience to turn into people.
I’m out to blur the distinctions between art and life, as I think Duchamp was. And between teacher and student. And between performer and audience, etcetera.—Moira and William Roth (1973)
Bob [Rauschenberg] knocked on the door to my studio one day, and brought in a painting he had just finished. It was a new one in the black series. I think he felt my reaction to it was not sufficiently enthusiastic. I had been very enthusiastic about his work, and he may have felt I was disappointed. In any case, I suddenly realized that he was terribly upset, close to tears. He asked me if there were something wrong with the painting. Well, I gave him a good talking-to about that. I told him he simply could not be dependent on anyone’s opinion, that he could never, never look to another person for that sort of support.—Calvin Tomkins (1980)
I think our questions are stupid and corny.
Well, my answers are too, so it makes no difference. We’re just a group of stupid people talking nonsense. I feel very stupid now. I feel myself, in the present moment, of just not knowing what to do at all; and I hate to do what I have done. And yet I don’t know what to do now.
In the last few years, I’ve done a great deal of traveling, and lecturing, and performing; and I am not a good performer. David Tudor is a much better performer. It would be better if I would stay home and work, or even just pick mushrooms, in order that I might find what to do. But as I travel around like this, I’m like a traveling salesmen, or a minister traveling from one town to another preaching the gospel. Formerly, when I had the occasion to give a lecture, I would write a new lecture; but now I have so many engagements. I have no time to write a new one. So I simply read one of the old ones. And none of this is conducive to life, but rather to death, because it is the same kind of repetition that you get with printing, like the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the fact that I move around is related to McLuhans description of the world as just one village. He says we live in “a global village.”
Now the fact that I work by moving from one town to another is something that I’m not used to. I’m still used to the idea that I need time and some space in order to function as a composer. I think, for instance, that I need to be at home for, oh, at least three weeks with an empty head before any idea will come into it. This is an old romantic Renaissance idea, but I still have not found a way to travel around the world and to have ideas come into my head.
And you like to travel very much.
No, I would prefer, I think, to stay at home. On the other hand, I begin to realize that my home is all around the world. So we have changed from one culture to another with respect to traveling; but in this sense, as in many others, we tend to have one foot in a previous culture and the other in a new one. And we have not learned the way to act with ease in this new situation. This is one of our problems nowadays.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson (1965)
If, for instance, you go to Paris and spend your time as a tourist going to the famous places, I’ve always had a feeling you would learn nothing about Paris. The best way to learn about Paris would be to have no intention of learning anything and simply to live there as though you were a Frenchman. And no Frenchman would dream of going, say, to Notre Dame.
So you managed to do that with Duchamp, live in Paris and not sightsee?
That was my intention: to be with him as often as circumstances permitted and to let things happen rather than to make them happen. This is also an Oriental notion. Meister Eckhardt says we are made perfect not by what we do, but by what happens to us. So we get to know Marcel not by asking him questions, but by being with him.—Moira and William Roth (1973)
When did you start working with words?
Well, back in the thirties people found my music unusual and had questions about it, so my writings actually began as responses to people’s questions in an attempt to let people know what it was that I was doing. More and more I began doing in writing what I was doing in music, so that I wouldn’t answer questions literally but would give instances of how I was working. The “mesostics” on the name of Joyce are something else. They are a form of poetry which I devised that enables me to read all the way through a book that otherwise I would not read through. I find that if I involve myself in some kind of discovery, then I can get through a situation in which I otherwise have difficulty. If I had set out to try to understand Finnegans Wake, I wouldn’t have been so attracted to read it. But if through reading it I made something, which is a discovery, then I’m excited.—Robin White (1978)
Is there a human being who has influenced you more than anyone else?
As time goes on I feel more influenced by more people.
Is there any area in which you prize your achievements more than any other area?
No.
What would you say is your most important legacy to future generations?
Having shown the practicality of making works of art nonintentionally.
What is your favorite piece of wisdom?
The Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind. This is a text, not a phrase. Why?
I have no idea.—Jay Murphy (1985)
And what are your favorite objects?
I’m very careless about objects. That’s why I give everything away. That’s why I’ve given my mushroom books away to this university UC-Santa Cruz; materials re music to Northwestern and re the humanities to Wesleyan
: I keep boxes and put things in them, and give them away almost immediately or send them to places, because I am searching, you see, for this emptiness all the time. I’m a magnet in this society for material. Things are sent to me continually. I have no way to survive unless I get rid of them. It seems ruthless, but it is necessary.—David Cope (1980)
The photographer Mark Haven has commented that in your loft there is more a suggestion of contemporary graphics, with the Jasper Johns prints and so forth, than music. There does seem to be very little suggestion of your work as one walks around.
Well maybe, except there was an Italian article recently with photos about this loft that said it was musical. Everything here is as visible as sound is audible. The pictures unevenly placed are like notes on a staff. But the thing about this place that is musical is the street noise from Sixth Avenue.
Do you like all the noise?
I love it!—Stephen Montague (1982)
I love living on Sixth Avenue. It has more sounds, and totally unpredictable sounds, than any place I’ve ever lived.—Michael Zwerin (1982)
I wouldn’t dream of getting double glass because I love all the sounds. The traffic never stops, night and day. Every now and then a horn, siren, screeching brakes—extremely interesting and always unpredictable. At first I thought I couldn’t sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered into my dreams without waking me up.—Stephen Montague (1982)
Now I don’t need a piano. I have Sixth Avenue, the sounds. I translate the sounds into images, and so my dreams aren’t disturbed. It just fuses. There was a burglar alarm one night and I was amazed because the pitch went on for two hours, was quite loud. It seemed to me to be going slightly up and slightly down. So what it became in my dreams was a Brancusi-like shape, you know, a subtle curve. And I wasn’t annoyed at all.—David Sears (1981)
I was thinking about things to ask you and they all seemed kind of stupid or insignificant. But then in doing this piece [recording the noisy plumbing in your house] I had some sort of reference point. Was that a piece that I did or a piece that you did?
It’s just the recording of some things that happened. Right? The water was turned off today, so some air got into the pipes. I’m afraid I exercised the pipes too much before you came. If I hadn’t, you would have gotten more of the spitting sound. Or that explosive, forceful sound. But I think sounds are interesting whether they’re forceful or not. It’s something that wouldn’t have been made if you hadn’t made it, so in that sense you made it. But you have no control over what’s happening, so you haven’t made it in the sense of giving it its shape. It’s what you might call “a music of contingency,” which means that you’re necessary but not in control.
I guess you were necessary, also, because they happen to be your pipes.
I don’t know. I was less necessary. I was playing chess.
Was that sound of me running the water bothering you at all?
No, no. I like sounds. Sometimes there are marvelous percussive sounds from those pipes up in the skylight—really very forceful. They can wake you up if you’re sleeping.
Why do some of us like the shocking sounds more than the nonshocking sounds?
I guess they oblige us to listen—no alternative.—Mark Bloch (1987)
A new development in my life that interests me very much is gardening. I’ve never thought of myself as a gardener, but as a hunter. And now in New York, I have a loft situation with a twenty-by-twenty-foot skylight. It’s the old B.Altman department store. There are seven large windows, so the place has plenty of light. I have between eighty and ninety plants now.
What appeals to me is the fact that everything, even though you’re growing certain species, varieties for certain characteristics, each one is an individual. You get to recognize the individuality of each tree.
I have two mangoes and one is doing very well and the other is not. The other, when it gets new leaves, they just dwindle and fall. Whereas the strong one gets bigger and bigger. Grete Sultan says one has good genes and the other doesn’t.—Andrew Timar et al. (1981)
[Has this new interest in growing changed your diet?]
We are also eating, the ones who have money and so forth, wrong food. The vegetables are not good for us through the agribusiness. The meat is not only not good as animal fat but the chickens have all been ruined with those hormones. So that the diseases we have, and the amounts of disease we have, are astonishing. These are the problems that should be addressed rather than the protection of one country against another. We should approach immediately, as soon as possible, the question of air, the question of water, the question of food, the question of shelter, et cetera. All those things.
A quick change in food intake will affect the health of the whole society. Drastically. My arthritis, all the pain from my arthritis, disappeared in one week from changed diet. It stands to reason that if you keep putting things into you and it keeps going out that it’s like flushing—a system that changes quickly. Same is true of the rivers, and the same is true of the air. If we change the way we treat it, it will change.
If you go now to Iceland you go into a land situation where the air is good, and the water is good. I mean really good. There’s no industry. Englishmen going there for a vacation are frequently so astonished at the pleasures of having good air and good water that they don’t go back; they stay there. I was amazed. You just can’t believe what a pleasure it is to breathe good air and drink good water.
I now distill water with a machine, and then having taken everything out of it, I then put essence of seawater back into it—not to taste it, but in order to have proper minerals in the water.—Scan Bronzell and Ann Suchomski (1983)
The foods are all poisoned, systematically poisoned. It all accumulates. And now, I won’t even buy vegetables in the regular stores. But whether I succeed in getting vegetables that are free of pollution, I doubt, because I think that pollution is global. I don’t think there is any escape from it.—Monique Fong and Françoise Marie (1982)
How did you become interested in macrobiotics?
Some years ago I had a case of blood poisoning in my foot which ended with numbness in the toes of the left foot and then seemed to be going to the right foot. The doctors did what they called sophisticated tests, and there was no indication of what was wrong. The blood circulation seemed to be all right, everything was all right. Everything was fine, but my toes wouldn’t move! That continued for several years, and also since 1960 I had had arthritis. It was in my wrist, and my fingers were enlarged. That lasted for all those years—over fifteen years. I was taking twelve aspirin a day, which was the only thing they advised me to do. I could see that things were getting worse, and I happened to be in Paris for a number of months and thought that acupuncture might help. A Chinese man came and he said, “Acupuncture will only help you palliatively.” He said, “What you need is to have your blood tested and then to make
a change of diet. Someone will have to do that for you.” I asked him how much I owed him for this advice. He said, “I haven’t done anything for you,” and he wouldn’t accept anything. He wouldn’t give me any acupuncture either.
Well then, finally, not on that trip to Paris but during a later one, a little over two years ago, a book of mine was being published, and I had many interviews. It was very strenuous. One was for TV, and it was in a basement without any heat. That night I couldn’t sleep because there was a pain behind my left eye—just unendurable. I knew that the orthodox
doctors wouldn’t help me, so I began complaining to my friends.
I complained to Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among others. They’ve followed the macrobiotic diet for eight years. Yoko said to me, “What you need to do is go to Shizuko Yamamoto, in New York, and she will change your diet.” Well, immediately bells rang. I didn’t hesitate; I went immediately.
Shizuko Yamamoto means, in Japanese, Tranquillity at the Base of the Mountain.
The first thing Shizuko said was extremely impressive to me, because I also had the good fortune in the late forties to attend the classes of Daisetz Suzuki in Zen Buddhism for two years, and that had a determining influence upon my music and my thinking. When she said, “Eat when you’re hungry and drink when you’re thirsty,” it sounded exactly like Zen Buddhism. I was delighted. She went on to explain the importance of whole grains as the staple. I found it extremely convincing. At that time, however, I had been cooking following the books of Julia Childs—plenty of butter and cream and so forth. The idea of cooking without butter and cream was extremely difficult for me. I didn’t know what to do. Finally, John Lennon, through one of his assistants, sent me a whole stack of macrobiotic cookbooks. Then I felt encouraged so I began to explore the whole thing and immediately saw that it would be a pleasant experience.
When did you meet Shizuko?
Just about two years ago. I began following the diet immediately. Since then I haven’t taken any medication, and I have no pain anywhere. Within a week after the changed diet, the pain behind the left eye went away. My wrists are still not as flexible as they should be, but there’s a great deal of improvement. Also I lost a good dealthirty pounds of
excess weight.
Before I changed my diet I had always had problems with constipation, but now there’s nothing like that. The other thing I find remarkable—you can see this so easily in relation to other people—is the way that your energy asserts itself the moment you wake up at the beginning of the day, and it remains constant. It doesn’t go up and down, it stays level, and I can work much more extensively. I always had a great deal of energy, but now it is extraordinary.
I remember recently in California I was invited to make etchings, and at one point we were working until three o’clock in the morning. Every two hours or so, the other people I was working with would say, “Oh, let’s stop and rest.” Resting didn’t seem necessary to me. I just continued working. They were not only resting but they were taking coffee too to keep themselves going, then they would get that much more exhausted afterward. They were constantly going up and down whereas I was not doing that.
Since this change I think I’ve been more active than I’ve been since 1952, over twenty-five years ago. I’ll be sixty-seven this year. Let’s see, I was around forty, and I was very, very active; my mind went in many directions. But three books are being published this year, five editions of etchings, and many, many new pieces of music. I think it is largely due to this change. At the same time, I’m much more equable in feeling; I’m less easily agitated.
Do you find that macrobiotics restricts you?
When people invite me to dinner, I say, “You know I follow this diet, and I prefer to bring my food with me.” They either let me bring my food or they actually change their menu. I find it happening more and more that people are willing to change their food entirely.
This evening I’m going for dinner to the house of a friend who was actually opposed to the macrobiotic diet, and this evening she will cook a macrobiotic meal—and she’ll enjoy it herself too!
I find it easy to eat macrobiotically when traveling. I take along a Panasonic rice steamer and an electric wok. They turn a motel room into a kitchen.—Maureen Furman (1979)
Would you like to share one of your favorite recipes with us?
I have one I like very much now; I call it Lentil Pâté. You slow-boil two cups of lentils in eight cups of water in a heavy, uncovered pot for fifteen minutes, after which you add a cup of bulghur—which you must stir frequently because it absorbs the liquid. Let that cook for fifteen minutes, then turn it off. You then sauté a large, chopped onion in sesame oil, and add it to the mixture with a teaspoon or so of salt. I have a pepper-grinder and I count to fifty while grinding it, then add two heaping tablespoons of Dijon mustard or that delicious mustard made of green peppercorns. You can eat this hot or cold, or you can spread it on bread—taking the place of butter.—Paul Hersh (1982)
I used to smoke at least three packs a day. Everything that happened was a signal to light a cigarette. Finally I divided myself into two people: one who knew he’d stopped, the other who didn’t. Every time the one who didn’t know picked up a cigarette to light it, the other one laughed until he put it down.
Do you always drink Guinness stout, or Irish whiskey?
Well, now I don’t drink alcohol because of my macrobiotic diet. It’s a funny thing. I don’t have any desire for it either. But when I was drinking, it was a very fine single malt whiskey. Let’s see, what do I like to drink now? I guess I like water. It quenches the thirst.
Do you ever go to the cinema?
No.—Stephen Montague (1982)
Do you read the papers?
No. I read them over peoples shoulders, or across the aisles. I figure that if something is happening that I ought to know, someone’ll tell me about it.—Paul Hersh (1982)
Do you pay much attention to current events?
I think more and more people, like Thoreau, just don’t read the newspapers. I don’t even bother looking at the television anymore. I don’t even listen to the radio. You could say, perhaps, that I’m not a proper member of the twentieth-century society. On the other hand, I’m aware that we are very close to destroying ourselves. And I think when that news arrives, one way or the other, I’ll be aware of it.
Most people seem only to read the headlines.
Recently, I found myself, because of airplane travel and so forth, reading more than usual. And I must say the best newspaper I picked up in the course of the last month was the Christian Science Monitor. It was so amusing to see that even they were not able to make sense out of current events. They actually had an article that said that it was important for there to be a balance between the United States and Russia, and that we had to keep up the defense. I mean they actually said that. Whereas if one of the countries would be willing to approach zero and open itself to attack, the other would immediately…we know from Thoreau, from Martin Luther King, from Gandhi, and everything, that defenselessness is the best protection against attack. Daniel in the lion’s den. Throw us in there where the Russians can really get us! The other thing that the newspapers have headlines about is unemployment, because it’s going up very high. Instead of being seen as the nature of the future, unemployment is seen as some horror. None of the jobs that anyone is offered are of any interest. No one wants a job. What everyone needs in order to do his best work is, as you know very well now, self-employment.—William Duckworth (1985)
What do you do for leisure?
I don’t have any leisure. It’s not that I have my nose to the grindstone. I enjoy my work. Nothing entertains me more than to do it. That’s why I do it. So I have no need for entertainment. And my work is not really fatiguing, so that I don’t need to relax. Merce’s work is physically tiring, so he likes to look at television. But I don’t so much enjoy that. Or put me down in a situation where I have plenty of energy and I’m not permitted to do my work, then I’ll look at television.—Stephen Montague (1982)
I come home after a tour with a lot of mail to pay attention to. I’m here now for two days before I go off on another tour. I’m perhaps going too much, but I’m committed to do it, and I think that that’s the excuse that everyone gives, that through circumstances they’re overcommitted, whereas they didn’t think when they became committed, that they would be in the end
overcommitted.
I take my work with me wherever I go, so that if I, for instance, have a doctor’s appointment I take it with me and use the time in the doctor’s office. I also work at home, of course, so I’m prepared to work at the drop of a hat. I learned to do that because of my long association with dancers, who in the course of rehearsals frequently leave gaps of time that can be filled up with one’s own work. I’ve made that a habit through the years; otherwise, I wouldn’t have gotten all the things done that I have done. Even people who are not very familiar with my work generally comment on the volume of it.—Tom Darter (1982)
So you don’t have any real secrets about how you manage all this?
Well, you begin by watering the plants, and you end the day by playing chess. And I have to do my exercises. And I shop, generally, though I didn’t do that today.
So by having a game of chess at the end of the day…
I’m making a balance with my use of chance operations. Because if I make a wrong move with my knight, I lose. Games are very serious success-and-failure situations, whereas the use of chance operations is very free of concern. It’s like being enlightened.—Kathleen Burch et al. (1986)
My most recent interest is in stones.
Stones?
Yes, I collect them for my garden from all over the world. Some of them are quite big. I ride along the road and I stop and I look at stones. I have a very large stone waiting for me now in a van in North Carolina.
There are so many faces to this particular rock that it’s like an exhibition of several works of art.—Lisa Low (1985)
What do you think about the fact that you’re now an establishment figure?
I’m not sure that’s the case, although it is partly the case. But it’s very curious that the critics go on saying how bad my work is.—Geneviere Marcus (1970)
My name has become well known, but the experience of my music is as unknown, I would say, as ever. That’s partly due to the fact that I’ve written a great deal of music and it’s not all the same, and I’m always making new music, so no one knows what they’re going to hear when they hear some of it. Through my being, you might say, notorious, certain things are expected by some people and certain things by other people. They get preconceptions about what the experience is going to be like, and very often they’re disappointed. And if the program has an intermission, there’s a decidedly smaller audience after the intermission than at the beginning of the concert. Sometimes there’s such a large crowd waiting to hear it that thehall fills up again with new people when some of the first group walk out.—Tom Darter (1982)
It is quite a different thing, as I have already said, to perform vocally as a soloist. The fascinating thing about the voice for a soloist is the flexibility. I do not think it can really be approached by a chorus in the same sense that it can be utilized by an individual. When the individual is alone, the voice is extraordinarily capable of change from one point to another in any of the aspects of sound. It must be the most flexible instrument there is, even exceeding the stringed instruments. I think that is modified greatly by the addition of voices singing the same thing. My tendency until recently, and only because of the request from the madrigal society in Oregon, has been to write for a group of soloists rather than a group singing the same musical part. Now, however, I am getting ideas that are relevant to groups, but they have to do with the breaking down of government.
So if you bring up the question of performance disciplines, then I am at a loss how to answer largely because I have no experience. But I know where I want group activity to go. I want it to go away from leadership in all its various aspects.
I think it would bring me back to something like this: If for an individual the duration of the sound is flexible to the extent that it could be a short sound or a long sound, then because the beginnings and endings would overlap, a sound could begin at any point in the overlapping area. And if that was overlapping that ending point it could be very short. If it was exterior to the ending point then it would have to last at least to this other point.
If that could be done by an individual, it seems to me it could be done by the chorus, in the sense that the chorus would be a group of individuals, not necessarily doing the same thing, so that some individuals are making short sounds while others are making long sounds. And this could apply also, as we said earlier, to the pronunciation or vocalization of an “E,” or to dynamics. That would make a choral situation in which I would be willing to live. It would give me “breath” rather than forcing me to behave the way others are behaving.—Mark Gresham (1991)
Do you believe your self-creation came about as a result of your relation to your work? If so, how did you avoid the separation between life and work? Would you agree that the artist is a person who believes in work for the sake of work, in art for making the artist, to make life into works and works into life?
It reminds me of what Thoreau said, and I feel so too. “It’s not important what form the sculptor gives the stone. It’s important what sculpting does to the sculptor.” I don’t think being an artist is essential. People can be plumbers or street cleaners or be like artists if they do their work as their lives; what and how they do makes how they live, and gives them the love and pleasure of living. The situation of being constantly on the brink of change, exterior and interior, is what makes the question that has been asked difficult to answer. One never reaches a point of shapedness or finishedness. The situation is in constant unpredictable change. It makes me think again of Thoreau and Walden because Walden sets out from the question: Is life worth living? The whole book is a detailed and affirmative reply. He found that out by simply keeping his ears and eyes open and in his daily work being present at each moment.
In the last two years I’ve been doing a great deal of work reading and writing out of James Joyce. Then I thought to simplify my life by leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for one year. I had to do it for one year because of the symphony commitments during the bicentennial. During my leave, I felt such a gap, such a loss of something that was a large part of my life. So I’m back with it and I find I can write more music as I tour around the country with the dance company than I can staying home, simply because people don’t know where I am. I’m like that Chinese animal who climbs into the tree during a snowstorm and no one can see where it is because the snow has covered its tracks.—Rose Slivka (1978)
My attitude toward old age is one of gratitude for each day. Poor Henry David Thoreau died at age forty-four. You know he had the habit of walking through the streets of Concord in the dead of winter without any clothes on, which must have certainly disturbed the local citizens no end. Later there was a lady who each year would put flowers on Emerson’s grave and mutter as she would pass Thoreau’s: “And none for you, you dirty little atheist!” Anyway, as I get older and begin to be almost twice as old as Thoreau, I am naturally grateful for all this time. It strikes me that since there’s obviously a shorter length of time left than I’ve already had, I’d better hurry up and be interested in whatever I can. There’s no fooling around possible. No silliness. So where I used to spend so much of my time hunting mushrooms, I’ve recently become interested in indoor gardening. I now tend to spread myself thinner and thinner. I’m always looking for new ways of using my energy but meanwhile continuing other activities.—Stephen Montague (1982)
I was interviewed recently and asked how it felt to be so old, to have grown so old, and one of the things I found myself talking about is the constant opening up or opening out to other possibilities. I remember that it seemed to be essential when I was in my twenties to focus my attention on one thing and I made a choice between music and painting. I chose music, but now it seems perfectly natural to open out to every single thing I possibly can do because I’m not going to be here much longer. The best thing to enjoy is to do as much as possible while I am here.—Rose Slivka (1978)
About five or six years ago, I was invited to make etchings at the Crown Point Press in California. I accepted immediately, even though I didn’t know how to make them, because about twenty years before, I was invited to trek in the Himalayas, and didn’t. I later discovered that the walk was going to be on elephants with servants, and I’ve always regretted that missed opportunity. I thought I was too busy. I am now multiplying my interests because it is my last chance. I don’t know what will turn up next. The doctor told me at my age anything can happen. He was right. I got rid of arthritis by following a macrobiotic diet; work is now taking on the aspect of play; and the older I get the more things I find myself interested in doing. If you don’t have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it’s begun. It then resembles the Venus de Milo, which manages quite well without her arms.—Stephen Montague (1982)
Are you concerned that the things you’ve done will exist after you don’t exist anymore?
I’m afraid they will, I’ve now done so much work in so many different directions that it would be very hard to…I mean writings, graphic work, and the music. All of that would be hard to get rid of now. Even for me, say I decided I wanted to get rid of it, that would be impossible—there’s too much, and now too many copies of it. I’m afraid it’s here for a long time. It could go into a decline as a person does who gets ill, but then it might recover.
The I Ching was in decline for several hundred years and it came back.
Generally, if something does go into a decline a kind of sympathetic action takes place in some part of the population, and they take care of it and bring it back.
Does that please you?
I don’t think it is a concern that I have. My own concern now is to live as long as I can, to do as much more work as I can, and to let my work that is already finished live, so to speak, its own life.—Robin White (1978)
I don’t think of success any more than I think of good or bad. I do think sometimes my work is superficial, but then when I notice that it’s superficial I try to make it more radical. That’s what happened in the Apartment House. My first attempts to change harmony were superficial. But my later attempts, I think, were quite radical.—Art Lange (1977)
How has the response to your work changed over the years?
Well, I don’t have to persuade people to be interested. So many people are interested now that it keeps me from continuing really. I asked a former assistant a few days ago how I should behave about my mail that is so extensive and takes so much time to answer? If I don’t answer it honorably, I mean to say, paying attention to it, then I’m not being very Buddhist. It seems to me I have to give as much honor to one letter as to another. Or at least I should pay attention to all the things that happen.
What did you decide to do about it?
To consider that one function in life is to answer the mail.
But it could take the whole day.
But you see, in the meanwhile, I’ve found a way of writing music which is very fast. So that if we take all things as though they were Buddha, they’re not to be sneezed at but they’re to be enjoyed and honored.
But this is a huge challenge.
It’s a great challenge. The telephone, for instance, is not just a telephone. It’s as if it were Creation calling or Buddha calling. You don’t know who’s on the other end of the line.—Laurie Anderson (1992)
With the breakthroughs in computer technology we can program, or “superimpose,” the collected works of any composer. Would you enjoy hearing your music organized this way?
Yes.
Who else’s?
Anyone, or any number of them together. I really would. I’ve learned to amuse myself when signing things for people by asking them if they want a “single” or a “double,” and a double is the signature over a signature, which turns it into a drawing.—Paul Hersh (1982)
Have you ever thought that you were going crazy?
The feeling is not familiar to me. I used to have a feeling, which was that I had, so to speak, a guardian angel. I have the feeling now that I might die in an accident or something, whereas formerly I thought that I wouldn’t, because I had work that needed to be done. Now I have the feeling which may be presumptuous—I hope it is—that I’ve done more or less what I was obliged to do. Therefore I could just as well die. Nothing much would be lost if I did.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)
Have you ever had any big disappointment? What has been your biggest disappointment?
I don’t think it’s an interesting question, forgive me.
I’ve learned so much in the book Conversations with Marcel Duchamp, and on the very first page he is asked that question; and he says I have nothing to complain about. I’ve enjoyed it all, the whole thing. And the same remark comes from Thoreau, when on his deathbed a relative asks him if he’d made his peace with God and he said I wasn’t aware that we’d ever quarreled.—Rose Slivka (1978)
As I get older, every birthday that ends in a 5 or a o is cause for a celebration of some sort. And when you have celebration going on all over the world, it usually takes a year before and a year after those birthdays to get them all in. That leaves me with a year or two every five years to do my work.—Harry Sumrall (1986)
This is your seventieth year—the beginning of a new decade for you. Your lifestyle and the macrobiotic diet seem to agree with you. You’re in good health and seem very fit.
I’m gradually learning how to take care of myself. It has taken a long time. It seems to me that when I die, I’ll be in perfect condition.—Stephen Montague (1982)
Right now I am reading The Yellow Emperor, an ancient Chinese text on health. What they do anciently in terms of health, as far as I understand it, is to take nature as the model for human behavior—which is the cyclic succession of spring, summer, fall, and winter, together with heaven and earth—and to see all that as something which if it works rightly (if it is in the Tao, the Way), the normal succession of events will be for each person to live for a hundred years. And if you do it incorrectly, if you don’t act as nature does, you will die much sooner. So long life consists in acting as nature does.—Thomas McEvilley (1992)