I often state, and believe to be true, that there is no piece of music written in the past thirty years that has not felt the influence in some measure of John Cage. I know of few composers who do not pay full respect to you regarding their own work. How do you react to this?
I try to be totally ignorant of that. That’s the only way I know of to solve it. I don’t think it’s accurate, though. I think that when a person does something he does it originally, even if he’s thinking of something he calls an influence. I really think that each person does his own work.
I guess the kind of influence I am referring to is that of for example, [Witold] Lutoslawski, who, when I saw him a few years ago, claimed that his music was radically changed after he heard your Concert for Piano and Orchestra.
That’s a very good example. He does say that he made certain changes in his work after hearing mine. What he did, of course, was original to him and exactly what I’m saying, so I don’t feel any problem there at all and I enjoy his work when I hear it, and I enjoy it as his rather than as mine. I think that’s what is good about my influence, if there is one, that there are more possibilities open to people than there were when I was young.
When I was young, you had either to follow Stravinsky or Schoenberg. There was no alternative. There was nothing else to do. You could perhaps have felt that you could follow Bartók, or you could have translated that Bartok into Cowell or Ives, but we didn’t think that way then. We thought Schoenberg or Stravinsky, and the schools certainly felt that way. I think, for example, that folk music was thought of only in the way that Stravinsky thought of it. Now, of course, there are 1,001 things to do, and I think that that’s partly a result of a kind of step that not only I took, but others took.
It would seem to be a more healthy situation now…
Well, it s certainly more suitable for a larger population, which is the case, too.—David Cope (1980)
How close a contact do you maintain with composers on the Continent?
Well, I see them when I’m there, and they see me when they’re here.
Do you find ties between what you’re doing presently and what they’re doing?
Well, the Europeans are mostly involved in all sorts of things that I’m not involved in—control, center of interest, all such things. And I’m not involved in that and they tend to think, well, we can take these ideas of indeterminate things so far, and include it in a total picture which we will, of course, control. And I’m not even interested in whether they win and I lose.—Yale School of Architecture (1967)
When I first met Pierre Boulez in [Paris in the late forties], the smile, the energy, the brilliance of the eyes, all of it was electrifying to me; but in New York, I saw another side. Once, on our way back from Cape Cod, we ran out of gas. Pierre thought that was inelegant. I also remember a diner in Providence. Pierre was indignant over the service and the food, and I believe that he required us to leave. I was always frightened by his superior taste. He was always uncompromising. Things had to be exactly where they should be. I was still terribly poor. I wanted to make poverty elegant, but Pierre was not interested in that. What he wanted was an excellent richness. Everything had to be exactly right, aesthetically right. Once I dropped into his studio unannounced [where and when he was working] and he was wearing an elegant silk robe.
With Pierre, music has to do with ideas. His is a literary point of view. He even speaks of parentheses. All of it has nothing to do with sound. Pierre has the mind of an expert. With that kind of mind you can only deal with the past. You can’t be an expert in the unknown. His work is understandable only in relation to the past.
After having repeatedly claimed that one could not do what I set out to do, Boulez discovered the Mallarmé Livre. It was a chance operation down to the last detail. With me the principle had to be rejected outright by him
; with Mallarmé it suddenly became acceptable to him. Now Boulez was promoting chance; only it had to be his kind of chance.—Joan Peyser (1976)
I think he [Karlheinz Stockhausen] was gifted. He had a number of children and they’ve all become musicians, haven’t they? So there was some transmittable involvement with music. What is true of Stockhausen is that it seemed to us that the music was avant-garde, that it was making discoveries, but it wasn’t doing that. It was actually very conservative. Nothing was being revealed; the old places of emphasis were being reaffirmed.—Morton Feldman (Bunita Marcus and Francesco Pellizzi) (1983)
Just this last November, I was in Metz and went to a lecture that Karlheinz gave, and I was astonished to see that his whole insistence on musicality as relationships and oppositions was very, very conventional, and not in any sense a discovery. He gave a detailed lecture in which he said that listening was actually listening to relationships. In my opinion, listening is listening to each sound. If you listen to the relationship, you lose those sounds.
Can you escape that? Isn’t hearing simply recognizing the relationships of sounds?
In Karlheinz’s case, you have to know that something is a close interval or a distant interval, and that one is the inversion of the other, and so forth; whereas, as I listen to these sounds around us, I hear them all without making any attempt at such relationships. We’re quite different, so that when people think we’re the same, they’re quite mistaken.—David Stanton (1985)
You mention the relation of my activity to that of Merce Cunningham and David Tudor. And you ask if my activities would have been the same without those people. Certainly not. I have to work with other people and these two are two of the most mysterious and stimulating to me. I am not at all the kind of personality that either Cunningham or Tudor is. And it is for that reason that they fascinate me so much.
I think that the relationship is unique, after so many years, that the three of you were at the same time each following his own path, but you are something all together.
Yes, yes, it is quite marvelous. I often felt even that David Tudor is—good heavens, he must be at least twenty years younger than I am—always seemed to me to be older. I think he was born older but I was born very young and always was surprised that he was not a composer. And now I am very happy that he has become a composer, and the fact that he is a composer now has somewhat separated us, because we no longer perform together, except with Merce Cunningham; but then we come as two different people, where formerly we came, so to speak, as one person. I am delighted that this has happened, and I do not regret what could appear to be the loss of David Tudor. For instance, no one to my knowledge now plays the Music of Changes the way he did. However, the piece had a life while he played it.—Alcides Lanza (1971)
If you knew David Tudor, and worked with him as I did over a long period of time, you would say he’s one of the great musical…I was going to say “minds.” I would say that of Schoenberg. But David Tudor is not so much a musical mind as he is a musical… At that time, he was, as Busotti said, “a musical instrument.” And when Busotti wrote a piece for him, he didn’t say “for piano”; he said “for David Tudor,” meaning him as an instrument. David still has that aspect in the society. I noticed him recently in California after a concert with the Cunningham Dance Company, and the young composers of the Bay Area flocking around him because of his technical knowledge and technical experience in the field of live electronics. And formerly, it was in the field of piano. And before that, it was in the field of the organ. But he was such an extraordinary musician that, if you were near him, and even now if you’re near him, you don’t need anything else. The world is immense through him, has no limits, has only inviting horizons.
Why do you suppose David never played any Ives?
I asked him why he didn’t play Ives because that’s the remarkable thing that is missing in his history. He said, “It’s too difficult.” And I don’t know what that meant. That is why he’s so fascinating. At first, I didn’t know what he meant, because it was not too difficult from the point of view of his hands. He played the Boulez Second Sonata, which is more difficult. Either he told me or I then realized that he would have had to change his mind over into that of a transcendentalist, which he didn’t wish to do. When he played the Boulez sonata, he read the poetry that Boulez was reading at the time—René Char. He learned the French language in order to read that poetry; he didn’t know it until then. He became, insofar as he could, the composer. And he said it would be too difficult to do that in the case of Ives. Had he done it, we would have had performances of Ives that we haven’t yet had.
This sounds very elitist, and I think I am actually an elitist. I always have been. I didn’t study [music] with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg. I didn’t study [Zen] with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I’ve always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.—William Duckworth (1985)
The other two people who have meant so much to me are not musicians but painters—Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
Can you, so to say, project yourself with your imagination, and think if these people would have been the same by themselves not having had this relationship with John Cage.
No. We have to take a Buddhist attitude toward this business. We are all related and it was simply fortunate that we came together. My relationship with Jasper Johns is similar to my relationship with Cunningham and Tudor. That is to say, I don’t understand him. My relation to Rauschenberg is quite different. I recognize Rauschenberg as myself, as if we were the same person. We do not even have to explain things to one another. I can have conversations with either Tudor or Cunningham, or Johns, in which I remain puzzled by what they say, even after many years. I never know what any one of those three is going to say, whereas I can predict, but still enjoy, what Rauschenberg could say, because he, like me, is interested in constant changing.—Alcides Lanza (1971)
My two closest friends among [visual] artists are [Robert] Rauschenberg and [Jasper] Johns. And I knew many of the other painters, but my kind of family attachment is to Rauschenberg and Johns. And then I always admired Duchamp so much that I couldn’t speak straight, and about four or five years ago, I asked him to teach me chess, so I often was with him in his last years, and I love his work very much. Originally, I had liked abstract painting, and particularly Mondrian. And then it was Rauschenberg who opened my eyes to the possibility of something that wasn’t abstract and then it’s been so interesting because it was then Johns. I see Johns now more than any of the others. I like, let’s see, of the ones since then, I think Claes Oldenburg.
Is there a connection?
Yes, I think so. One example with me is that my next project if I do do it —sometimes I have projects I don’t do—is to make as realistically as possible a thunderstorm. To take an actual thunderstorm and to measure it and then to use the ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake and have them actually sung. To have components, electronic components, made so that what the singers sing is transformed to fill up the envelopes of the actual thunderclaps is the idea. And to have the strings pizzicato, which will make raindrops and the rain falling on different materials because the thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake are a history of civilization’s technology. Well, that is, to my mind, a response to Jasper Johns’ beer cans. Because it sets out to make something which is as much as possible this other thing.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)
La Monte Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me as being very important. Through the few pieces of his I’ve heard, I’ve had, actually, utterly different experiences of listening than I’ve had with any other music. He is able either through the repetition of a single sound or through the continued performance of a single sound for a period like twenty minutes, to bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have all along been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of variety. I find his work remarkable almost in the same sense that the change in experience of seeing is when you look through a microscope. You see that there is something other than what you thought there was.
On the other hand, La Monte Young’s music can be heard by Europeans as being European. For example, take the repetition of a tone cluster or a single sound at a seemingly constant amplitude over, say, a ten-minute period. The European listener is able to think, “Well, that is what we’ve always had, minus all the elements of variation.” So they imagine, you see, that something is being done to them, namely, a simplification of what they’re familiar with. My response is not that he is doing something to me, but that I am able to hear differently than I ever heard because of what he has done
—Roger Reynolds (1961)
I was very impressed the other day when I heard Herbert Brun’s Infraaudibles, which is also sound output from computer, a sound that was different from the sound of tape music or other forms of electronic music with which we are now familiar. It was an experience with which I was unfamiliar, not only with sound qualities and juxtapositions of them and the delicate changes within a sound with respect to its timbre, but also the pitch relations which were microtonal and which were not arranged, as I understand it, according to any scale. The pitches were chosen within fields set up by Brun, chosen by the machine according to random operations, ending up having microtonal pitch relations which are still extremely fresh and interesting to our ears. This will all lead to perceiving things with which we are unfamiliar, and, even if we don’t perceive it in all of its details, we would have an experience which we have not yet had. I had this kind of feeling years ago with La Monte Young’s music, for instance, and then again the other day with the sounds from Herbert Brun’s piece. This would lead us to believe that this experience of being surprised by what it is that we experience will continue. The changes I’m speaking of are not slight ones but are almost as if it were another country, another continent, or another planet that had been discovered.—Larry Austin (1968)
Do you see any set of developments in the arts that you are especially interested in?
I don’t know what you mean by set. I am not interested in organized art, for example, the New Romanticism, New Wave, etc.—Jay Murphy (1985)
That interest in place in relation to music is a contemporary concern. For instance, I was in a hallway in the basement of Wesleyan University, Middletown, and there was a concert of students of Alvin Lucier there in which you could walk through a corridor and only at nodal points in the hallway did the sound become audible. In other words, you could pass through the sound physically, you could walk through it. It was electronics and the nature of the architecture—that close relation of sound and architecture also found in some pieces by Pauline Oliveros, just as that same concern for place arises in artists who deal with earthworks.—Bill Womack (1979)
[Dove Bradshaw] works with our changing conceptions of time and space which we have assumed for a long time are two different things. She’s involved, as we are in our lives, because of art, with an almost scientific procedure, so that she can experiment in such a way as to prove something. And she can subject us to the results of her experiments, which can open us to the life we are living.
For instance, the works on which she applies silver then liver of sulfur so that what she’s putting on the canvas is not necessarily what you’re going to see there in a few days or in a month.
The fact that the piece changes requires a change, for me; it requires a change of attitude. If I so to speak change with it, then I can change with the world that I am living in, which is doing the same thing.
Do you mean one of the chessboard pieces with sulfur added that causes it to change in response to the air?
When I acquired it there was no indication of the chessboard.
You’ve got it and then it slips through your fingers; it’s something else.
Which you may not have wanted.
Which you may not even like.
But if you change your mind you may enjoy.
So its very challenging and demanding, isn’t it?
Oh, very.
It cracks the whip over you a little bit.
Exactly. Like the Zen monks with the stick: “I slit the cat’s throat.”—Thomas McEvilley (1992)
In the forties I would pick up new books and see nothing interesting. It was in the fifties I became aware of Jackson Mac Low. I admit that his work was difficult for me at first, but Jackson faithfully sent me things as they appeared; he had been in my class at the New School.
In 1956.
And gradually I became devoted to his work and enthusiastic about it.
Jackson is a friend, whom I admire almost as much as you do, but it seems to me that Jackson, interesting as his methods are, missed the trick. He doesn’t know that you have to cut it somewhere. That’s why his pieces invariably go on too long. Even if you’re involved with chance operations, the trick is that somewhere you must impose taste—you must decide that one procedure is not going to work any longer or that another device is a more inventive way of doing things.
That may occur in Jackson’s work because, if he’s using chance operations, he works with a rather limited reservoir of material, like a page from a particular book or something.
And then one not as interesting as Thoreau’s Journal or Finnegans Wake.
And you immediately get the notion of repetition. Or if he’s using the words that appear from a single person’s name, as he often does, words naturally get repeated: repetition becomes the dominant characteristic of his work. I thought for a while that, since he was involved, as I am, with chance operations, I ought not to bother using chance operations with language; but then when I saw that I was interested in nonrepetition, it was as though I could enter the same field Jackson was in without stepping on his toes. And that’s why I continued to do it.
Jackson’s also very eclectic in his esthetics, as you know. He has expressionistic poems as well as those we’ve spoken about.
I first encountered this among artists, the people who painted oil paintings and who refresh themselves by painting watercolors. And I think that’s what it is with Jackson. In order to refresh himself from the one, he does the other. I went to a reading the other night, and he read a more recent poem—in fact, he said it was a poem written that very day. It was another Light Poem. And it was more or less off the top of his head. It was that sort of thing. But, oh, Richard, his head has a lovely top, and the least thought that enters his head is a very good thought.
Really?
No, I think so, because it was really rather his least thoughts that were in the poem. And then there was another poet that evening whose considered thoughts were less entertaining than Jackson’s offhand ones.
Are there any other writers that you…
And I think, in general, that we can say that the act of picking up a magazine or something to do with literature now is a less pat matter than it would have been in the thirties or even the fifties, because there’s far more experimentation going on, so to speak, generally, than there was in those decades.
And “reading” has also become more problematic, in a fundamental sense.
And I’ve noticed too that an audience—for instance, the audience listening to Jackson read the other night at St. Mark’s—was really attentive throughout and delighted with things that would have completely confused an audience of twenty years ago. Or at least twenty-eight years ago, twenty-five years ago.
You’re calculating, I can tell, for a time in the early fifties, which you regard as the extreme nadir of experiment in art in this country. Is 1953 your calculation?
No, 1952—Richard Kostelanetz (1979)
Is it possible to say that the “Cagean” influence is also present in conceptual art?
I don’t agree with that notion. I think that we are all together and that ideas are also equally available to us. For instance, two inventors invent the same thing at the same time. This must be that they didn’t influence each other, but that they were influenced by the possibility of having that idea. So I think that what appears to be my influence is merely that I fell into a situation that other people are also falling into. And what is so nice about the situation is that it admits a great deal of variety. I would say that it admits more variety than if you fell into the twelve-tone system.
I have thought, for instance, that 4′33″, which could be thought to be the source of my influence on conceptual art, was a very physical work, not conceptual. I thought of it as a quick way of hearing what there was to hear. —Alcides Lanza (1971).
[How else is the world of composition different now?]
Now young composers coming along tend not to think of entering that old structure of finding a publisher to publish their music—they’d rather distribute it themselves. They move about the world more or less as performers. The whole thing of the distribution of information in the form of correspondence is now worldwide. What does that bring about? It brings about a community of individuals who have no one ruling what they may not do. They are free in their musical actions from anything resembling economic or political structures. They are, so to speak, in an anarchic situation with a very few exceptions, and those exceptions are when, as with Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, they step on prejudices which the society still maintains by means of its beliefs. Where else do they fail, in terms of the old structures? They fail when, through their actions to which they are dedicated, they are somehow not able to make a living and starve, or have to change their directions because of their desire for food and so forth. I think that all of these things go together in such a way that we don’t have to solve just education or just art, but we have to change the entire society.—Robert Filliou (1969)
[Bill] Anastasi?
We play chess every day. We’re going to play today, and he’ll either drive down or he’ll take the subway. If he comes down the subway, he’ll bring headphones without music, and papers and a board to draw on, and pencils and so forth; and he’ll make a drawing with his eyes closed, and his arms responding to the movement of the subway car.
How big are they?
They’re convenient for drawing on his lap.
Has he done other work reflective of non-intention?
Oh yes. Some of it is close to Tobey in that his face is close to the wall, or the surface on which he’s drawing, so that he can’t really see what he’s doing.
Doesn’t this relate to what Jackson Pollock did? Doesn’t the physical aspect of what he’s doing echo painting in general?
Pollock is a curious case, because he doesn’t have an interest in what he sees in the way that Tobey has an interest in what he sees. I think of Pollock as being involved in gesture.
And Anastasi is not making gestures as much as extending, or representing, the subways gestures.
Yes.
His arm responding to extrinsic forces, which Pollock would never allow.
No. And Pollock controlled the color in a way that Tobey would never dream of controlling the color, simply by putting it in a pitcher and pouring it out, you see, so that the white never changes, whereas with Tobey every brushstroke would be with different white.
Is that controlling color, or not controlling color?
It’s giving great complexity to the surface, the kind of complexity we see when we look at anything we see that it’s not all flat.
Or uniform.
Whereas with Pollock it’s uniform. And with Tobey and with Anastasi it’s not uniform.—Richard Kostelanetz (1991)
This is an example of Anastasi’s work. It’s a cloth put over a pot while brown rice is being cooked. He was able to make that which is like the highest Zen work of Enzo without doing anything, as in Zen. In fact they would say, “By taking a nap, I pound the rice.”—Thomas McEvilley (1992)