FIVE: His Performances

As far as I know, all my music has been performed. One of the things that impressed me when I worked with Adolph Weiss was that he had written a large amount of music and almost none of it was played. He was somewhat embittered because of this, and I determined then and there that if I did get to the point of writing music I would consider my responsibility only half-finished if I didn’t get it performed. I don’t think of music as finished when it’s simply written down.—Jeff Goldberg (1976)

My rule is that I won’t write something unless it is going to be performed, and I will make every effort to get it performed. So, when I travel, whether I was young, or now, it is generally in relation to that. Roughly I would say 1952, or perhaps 1954, is the turning point. Before that time, I had to make the effort to get it performed. Now other people make the effort and I have to respond by traveling.—Alcides Lanza (1971)

What’s your definition of theater?

I try to make definitions that won’t exclude. I would simply say that theater is something that engages both the eye and the ear. The two public senses are seeing and hearing; the senses of taste, touch, and odor are more proper to intimate, nonpublic situations. The reason I want to make my definition of theater that simple is so one could view everyday life as theater.

Is a concert a theatrical activity?

Yes, even a conventional piece played by a conventional symphony orchestra: the horn player, for example, from time to time empties the spit out of his horn. And this when I was as a child, taken to an orchestra concert frequently engaged my attention more than the melodies, harmonies, etc.

How about listening to recorded music?

I find that most interesting when one finds something in the environment to look at. If you’re in a room and a record is playing and the window is open and there’s some breeze and a curtain is blowing, that’s sufficient, it seems to me, to produce a theatrical experience. When you’re lying down and listening, you’re having an intimate, interiorly realized theater which I would—if I were going to exclude anything—exclude from my definition of theater as a public occasion. In other words you’re doing something by yourself that’s extremely difficult to describe or relate to anyone accurately. I think of theater as an occasion involving any number of people, but not just one.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

In the earlier indeterminant works, such as Variations II, which can be for any complement of performers, I’m curious about your feelings toward the results. Does it make a difference to you how it comes out? Are you concerned as to how one performance of Variations II will sound as opposed to another?

When it’s clear that the person who is realizing the work is doing his work not only in the spirit of the composition, but in such a way as to free him from his choices, then I think it makes no difference what the results are, because we’re not really interested in results. Results are like deaths. What we’re interested in is things going on, and changing, not in their being fixed. But when someone uses a piece like that, that they think is free, in order to do anything they want to do, when I say, for instance, “Make a disciplined action,” I’m not saying, “Do whatever you like,” and yet that’s precisely what some people now think I’m saying. That’s why recently in Buffalo there was a seminar in which I was obliged after what I thought was a very poor performance of the Song Books to speak as I am speaking now, and point out not uncertainly that the freedoms I’ve given have not been given to permit just anything that one wants to do, but have been invitations for people to free themselves from their likes and dislikes, and to discipline themselves.—Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (1975)

Performers: need they dress formally?

They’re just relating to the previous costume, aren’t they? It’s also a little bit of comic costume. That is a possibility. It could be comic, revolutionary. It could be an attempt to give stature to what the public might consider debatable as music. I did it originally. Well, the first concerts I gave, I gave in unconventional costume. The girls had blouses and skirts, the men had shirts and slacks. That was all. Then when I gave my first percussion concert in ’43 at the Museum of Modern Art, we all dressed up formally and I think it was an attempt to say that, too, was music. Then I dropped all that.

…or could they be heard and not seen?

Fortunately, I had an experience very early about this. I had organized four people to rehearse to play professionally, and we did all kinds of odd things to make sounds. I invited my mother to come hear it, and she said she thought the sounds were very interesting, but all the things we were doing to produce them were very distracting, and that she would like to hear it without seeing those distractions. So we pulled a curtain across. Then when people heard the music, they said, it’s very nice but we wonder how in heavens name you make the sounds.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

Even a bad performance may help to educate musicians and listeners to the possibilities of this new work, and stretch their capabilities to be interested in their experiences.—Calvin Tomkins (1965)

But if somebody performs your music in a way that is completely different from your initial concept, from your compositional idea, what would you then think of him?

Oh, I would think that was excellent. In Zen Buddhism, which has interested me for a long time, if the student asks the teacher a question and the teacher gives the answer and then the teacher asks the student the same question and he gives the same answer, he gets hit over the head.—Nikša Gligo (1973)

You said once, “I try to get it so that people realize that they themselves are doing their experience and that it’s not being done to them.” Isn’t all an done to you?

It has been, but I think we’re changing that. When you have the proscenium stage and the audience arranged in such a way that they all look in the same direction—even though those on the extreme right and left are said to be in “bad seats” and those in the center are in “good seats”—the assumption is that people will see it if they all look in one direction. But our experience nowadays is not so focused at one point. We live in, and are more and more aware of living in, the space around us. Current developments in theater are changing architecture from the Renaissance notion to something else which relates to our lives. That was the case with the theater in the round. But that never seemed to me to be any real change from the proscenium, because it again focused people’s attention and the only thing that changed was that some people were seeing one side of the thing and the other people the other side.

It could, of course, produce more interesting conversation afterward or during intermission, because people didn’t see the same side. It was like the story of the blind men with the elephant. More pertinent to our daily experience is a theater in which we ourselves are in the round, in which activity takes place around us. The seating arrangement [in the first “Happening”] I had at Black Mountain in 1952 was a square composed of four triangles merging toward the center, but not meeting. The center was a larger space that would take movement, and the aisles between those four triangles also admitted of movement. The audience could see itself, which is, of course, the advantage of any theater in the round. The larger part of the action took place outside of that square. In each one of the seats was a cup, and it wasn’t explained to the audience what to do with this cup—some used it as an ashtray—but the performance was concluded by a kind of ritual, pouring coffee into each cup.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

I think that the Happening business came about through circumstances of being at Black Mountain where there were a number of people present—Merce was there, David Tudor was there, there was an audience.

The Happening resulted from the fact that there were many people and many possibilities and we could do it quickly. In fact, I thought of it in the morning, and it was performed that afternoon—I was able to sketch it all out.—Deborah Campana (1985)

What were you trying to do?

Well, M.C. [Richards] had translated The Theater and Its Double of [Antonin] Artaud, and we got the idea from Artaud that theater could take place free of a text, that if a text were in it, that it needn’t determine the other actions, that sounds, that activities, and so forth, could all be free rather than tied together; so that rather than the dance expressing the music or the music expressing the dance, that the two could go together independently, neither one controlling the other. And this was extended on this occasion not only to music and dance, but to poetry and painting, and so forth, and to the audience. So that the audience was not focused in one particular direction.

So, actually, there was planning behind this event, and intent?

Of course. It was very quickly arranged, but the ideas were all there. And a score was made.

I made a score, which I don’t think I have any longer, that gave what I called “time brackets.” So that [Charles] Olson, instead of reading his poetry when he wished, had a particular “time bracket” within which he could do that. And the lecture that I gave included long silences.—Mary Emma Harris (1974)

Would you describe the whole performance?

At one end of a rectangular hall, the long end, was a movie and at the other end were slides. I was up on a ladder delivering a lecture which included silences and there was another ladder which M.C.Richards and Charles Olson went up at different times. During periods that I called time brackets, the performers were free within limitations—I think you would call them compartments—compartments they didn’t have to fill, like a green light in traffic. Until this compartment began, they were not free to act, but once it had begun they could act as long as they wanted to during it. Robert Rauschenberg was playing an old-fashioned phonograph that had a horn and a dog on the side listening, and David Tudor was playing a piano, and Merce Cunningham and other dancers were moving through the audience and around the audience. Rauschenberg’s pictures were suspended about the audience—

Those were the “white paintings”

Right. He was also painting black ones at the time, but I think we used only the white ones. They were suspended at various angles, a canopy of painting above the audience. I don’t recall anything else except the ritual with the coffee cup. I remember a lady coming in at the beginning, Mrs. Jalowetz, who was the widow of the man who had formerly headed the music department. She had made a point of coming very early in order to get the best seat. And she asked me where the best seat was and I said they were all equally good.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

[What drama have you truly liked?]

I think I can count on one hand the plays I have seen that have truly interested me or involved me.

However, this bleak state of affairs has produced not just a state of inactivity in the theater, but it has produced two things I would like to point out.

First of all in this country, the movement of the modern dance, which, I think, essentially, as it diverges from the classic ballet, is a new form of theater. We have many varieties of it.

Then, after the development of the modern dance here, say in the thirties, in the forties many of us become aware of the thinking and action of Antonin Artaud. This indicated a theater…that would not use all of its means toward a literary end so that a form of theater other than the one he has spoken of would develop, and it has. We call it the Happening.

Now, I really believe and practice that a mediocre Happening will be more meaningful, more useful to us as a theatrical occasion, than even attendance at a literary theatrical masterpiece.—Stanley Kauffmann (1966)

I would say that the “art of performance” began with Fluxus—a theater without text but which could include text or other elements as well. There is a deep relation between Fluxus and Antonin Artaud. Isn’t there? Not enough has been said about this.—Serge Daney and Jean-Paul Fargier (1982, in Dachy 2000)

Would you regard yourself as antitheatrical the way Jasper Johns is sometimes called antitheatrical?

No. I love the theater. In fact, I used to think when we were so close together—Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, myself [in the early and mid-1950s]—I used to think that the thing that distinguished my work from theirs was that mine was theatrical. I didn’t think of Morty s work as being theatrical. It seemed to me to be more, oh, you might say, lyrical. Morty is a great poet, and he is often inspired. And Christian’s work seemed to me more musical, more really purely musical. That’s not true of his later music, which is politically idealistic. I’ve changed my mind. Wolff s music remains musical because he keeps the principles of repetition and variations. Earle’s seemed to me, oh, more conventional, more European. He was still involved, you might say, in musical discourse or soliloquy, whereas I seemed to be involved in theater. What could be more theatrical than the silent pieces—somebody comes on the stage and does absolutely nothing.—David Shapiro (1985)

So you advocate a return of the condition of art that perhaps it was in the Renaissance, when it existed, but people weren’t so aware of it. They banqueted in hall and they were surrounded by great paintings and they listened to music, but they talked while the music was on. Do you see this as a future position of art, perhaps?

I see it as the present one, actually. It began for me, I mean this experience began for me in Washington. David Tudor and I were performing my Variations VI. First those left who found the whole thing insupportable, then those who were interested stayed and began moving around the room and conversing and those who were most interested came close to see what we were doing, and shortly they began talking with us while we were performing, sometimes relevantly and sometimes irrelevantly. Now in Variations IV, in the case of the performance in Hollywood about two years ago, some people came up to me while I was performing (it was in an art gallery) and I was unwilling to talk to them because I thought I was performing, and when they talked to me, I didn’t reply, or if I did, I think I did to one person who was quite insistent, I simply said, “Don’t you see that I’m busy?” Whereas in the case of Variations VI, this whole need to be busy had dropped away. The work was being done, which reminds me of that haiku poem “Taking a Nap.” What is it? “Taking a nap, I pound the rice.” That is to say, by doing nothing, everything gets done.

That is true and false.

I think we have to say yes to what you just said. Yes, it is true and false, but it’s very true.

Do you see music at all related to ritual, as a ritualistic act?

Well, I imagine now a music in the future which would be quite ritualistic. It would be simply by means of technology a revelation of sound even where we don’t expect that it exists. For instance, in an area with an audience, the arrangement of such things so that this table, for instance, around which we’re sitting, is made experiential as sound, without striking it. It is, we know, in a state of vibration. It is therefore making a sound, but we don’t yet know what that sound is.—Roger Smalley and David Sylvester (1967)

You see, the old idea was that the composer was the genius, the conductor ordered everyone around, and the performers were slaves. In our music, no one is boss. We all work together.—Arlynn Nellhaus (1968)

What we are trying to do basically is to get three people to work together who [otherwise] make each other miserable. I’ve gotten more interested in the social aspect of making music. If people can work together well, it is an optimistic notion of society.—Robert Commanday (1968)

Old music was competitive. It divided people, just like the social system. New music brings people together to work and use technology for the common good. Its changing society.—Arlynn Nellhaus (1968)

How did you move into the theater thing?

Experience with the dance led me there. The reflection that a human being isn’t just ears but also has eyes, I think it was this. Around 1945, ’46, ’47, I became concerned about music, and I determined not to continue with this activity unless it was useful, and unless I found answers that struck me as being sufficient reason to devote one’s life to it. I found through Oriental philosophy, my work with Suzuki, that what we are doing is living, and that we are not moving toward a goal but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to do anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact. Before the Theater Piece [1960] I did two pieces for television. One was called Water Walk [1959] and one was called Sounds of Venice [1959]. I called it Water Walk because of the Music Walk [1958]; and the Music Walk, I think you would agree, is a theatrical work. Before the Music Walk was the Water Music [1952]. Those titles wish to show that all those works are connected. The Water Music comes from 1952,1 believe—the same year as the Black Mountain show—and was my immediate reaction to that event.

Could you describe it briefly?

The Water Music wishes to be a piece of music, but to introduce visual elements in such a way that it can be experienced as theater. That is, it moves toward theater from music. The first thing that could be theatrical is what the pianist is looking at—the score. Normally nobody sees it but him, and since we’re involved with seeing now, we make it large enough so that the audience can see it. I was working at the time on chance operations and a chart that enabled me to determine what sound pops up at what time and how loud, etc. So I simply put into the chart things that would produce not only sounds but that would produce actions that were interesting to see. I had somewhere gotten the notion that the world is made up of water, earth, fire, etc., and I thought that water was a useful thing to concentrate on. So the possibilities that I put into the chart involved, not exclusively, but largely, water.

What were some of these?

Well, pouring water from one cup into another, using a whistle that requires water to produce sound, making that whistle descend into the water and come out of it.

Do you remember any of the nonwater images?

There was a glissando on the keyboard, also a dominant seventh chord. I was already interested at that time in avoiding the exclusion of banal elements. In the development of twelve-tone music there was an emphasis on consonance, to the exclusion or very careful treatment of consonances. Octaves as well as firths and particularly dominant sevenths and cadences became things that one shouldn’t do. I’ve always been on the side of things one shouldn’t do and searching for ways of bringing the refused elements back into play. So I included sounds that were, just from a musical point of view, forbidden at that time. You could talk to any modern composer at the time and no matter how enlightened he was he would refuse to include banal musical sounds.

When you came to the Theater Piece in 1960—

Before that came a time-length piece, which is thirty-four minutes for a pianist approximately. I had been commissioned to write a piece for two prepared pianos, but I introduced an “X” concept of auxiliary noises. Thus I had other groups of noises: one was produced inside the piano, one was produced outside the piano but on it, and then there were noises separated from the piano—whistles. The parts are not in a scored relation, they are independent of one another. Then I wrote a lecture to go with them, involving combing the hair and kiss sounds and gestures that made the lecture theatrical. So I think you could find the theatrical continuing in my work.

In Milan, when I was invited to perform on a quiz show, the first performance was of Amores, an early piece for prepared piano, and the next two especially for television. I used the Fontana Mix. They are overlaying transparencies involving points and curved lines which don’t cross over themselves. A given line doesn’t cross over itself but it goes in curving, meandering ways from one side of the page to another. These curving lines are six in number and are differentiated by thickness (three are dotted) and you simply place them over the sheet with points—one sheet with points and one sheet with curved lines—and then a graph with one that is inside, and one measures the intersection of the curved lines with this straight line with reference to the graph vertically, to determine the kind of thing that would happen. The horizontal measurement gives the time. I used the Fontana Mix to make a tape piece and an Aria, and I used it to make television pieces. I don’t think I used all six of the lines. I used as many as I thought were necessary. And then I made lists of actions that I was willing to involve myself in. Then through the intersection of those curved lines and the straight line I could see within what amount of time I had, for instance, to put a rose in a bathtub, if that came up. If at the same time playing a particular note—or not a particular note—on the piano came up, those two things had to get done within the time allotted. I ended up with six parts which I then rehearsed very carefully, over and over and over again with people watching me and correcting me, because I had to do it within three minutes. It had many actions in it and it demanded what you might call virtuosity. I was unwilling to perform it until I was certain that I could do it well.

You say there were many things you had to do within the three-minute time; could you mention a few of them?

They’re all listed in the score. What is more interesting, I think, is that my chart included far more activity than what came up through the measurements, so that a lot of my preparatory planning and thinking was, from a normal point of view, wasted.

Have the charts been published?

You can buy them, you can buy the Fontana Mix, and you can also buy the Theater Piece. The Theater Piece carries this kind of activity up to an abstract point, because none of the things to be done are verbalized. But what an actor will do in a given time space is up to him. He follows my directions—and I think many people perform that piece without following my directions—and puts verbs and nouns on cards. He conceals the order from himself by shuffling the cards. Then he lays them out so he can tell which is one and which is two, up to twenty. Reading the numbers, which are the only things which are in my score, he will be able to make a program of action just as I made one for the Water Walk. And if he did it as I did it he would, I know, arrive at a complex situation. But what people tend to do is to get ideas of what they will think will be interesting and these, of course, are a limited number of things, because their imaginations are lazy, and they do fewer things rather than more and they are satisfied to do one thing over an inordinately long duration.

When I was writing the Theater Piece I started out in terms of process, just overlaying these things and taking measurements, and I went far enough with that concept to put it on paper, but not to specify verbally. I left that up to the performer. I stopped the process before it was realized, leaving the realization up to the individual.

This is why…I had a conversation earlier that year with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and he asked, “If you were writing a song would you write for the singer, or would you write music?” I said I would write for the singer. He said, “That’s the difference between us. I would write music.” He was at the time thinking about writing a song for Cathy Berberian, and he wanted to make use of as many ways of vocal production as he could think of. He was interested in African clicking, and she was able to do that, so he put it in. He was also interested in whistling. It didn’t occur to him that she couldn’t whistle. She’s absolutely incapable of whistling. So he gave her things to do that she was unable to do. That was why I left the Theater Piece unspecified. I didn’t want anyone to do something he couldn’t do.

The words could be taken by chance from a dictionary.

Right.

Yet they’re supposed to be the basis of the action.

Right. I wanted to leave the performer free. I didn’t want him to get involved in a situation that he wasn’t willing to carry through.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

How would you react if somebody, during the performance of your music, falls asleep or shouts or protests. Would you be hurt, offended, discouraged?

No, each person is doing his own life. And even when someone is listening, he is listening in an original way. So there is no point in being offended because we are, so to speak, a multiplicity of centers.

Your first remark about that man at the concert who goes to sleep reminds me of this haiku poem: “By going to sleep, I pound the rice.” Which means that someone is sleeping and someone is pounding the rice.

You mean, everybody has his own rights and nothing more?

Yes, and we are, so to speak, working together so that there is no need for the person who is pounding the rice to sleep and there is no reason for the sleeper to be singing, you see.—Nikša Gligo (1973)

What happened after the Theater Piece?

At about that time my music was published, and it took a long time to make up a catalogue for it. In 1958 I began some pieces called Variations. The first one was involved with the parameters of sound, the transparencies overlaid, and each performer making measurements that would locate sounds in space. Then, while I was at Wesleyan [University], in this first piece I had had five lines on a single transparent sheet, though I had had no intention of putting them the way I did, I just drew them quickly. At Wesleyan while talking to some students it suddenly occurred to me that there would be much more freedom if I put only a single line or a single notation on a single sheet. So I did that with Variations II, but it still involved measurement. Then Variations III came along. I had been working very early with structure, with this process that could be seen as structure; it always involved space, which struck me as distinguishing what we now call neo-Dada from earlier Dada. I admired modern architecture with all its open space. I admired those Japanese gardens with just a few stones. I had been committed to the notion of activity and nonactivity, just as earlier I had been committed to sound and silence.

Just as I came to see that there was no such thing as silence, and so wrote the silent piece, I was now coming to the realization that there was no such thing as nonactivity. In other words the sand in which the stones in a Japanese garden lie is also something. Why this had not been evident to me before, I don’t know. There isn’t any nonactivity. Or, as Jasper Johns says, looking at the world, “It appears to be very busy.” And so I made Variations III, which leaves no space between one thing and the next and posits that we are constantly active, that these actions can be of any kind, and all I ask the performer to do is to be aware as much as he can of how many actions he is performing. I ask him, in other words, to count. That’s all I ask him to do. I ask him even to count passive actions, such as noticing that there is a noise in the environment. We move through our activity without any space between one action and the next, and with many overlapping actions. The thing I don’t like about Variations III is that it requires counting, and I’m now trying to get rid of that. But I thought that performance was simply getting up and then doing it.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

The two kinds of music now that interest me are on the one hand a music that is performed by everyone—music by many, many people. And therefore, more and more in my performances, I try to bring about a situation in which there is no difference between the audience and the performers. And I’m not speaking of audience participation in something designed by the composer, but rather I am speaking of the music that arises through the activity of both performers and the so-called audience. This is a difficult thing to bring about, and I’ve made only a few attempts so far and with mixed results, you might say. I think the most enjoyable from my point of view was last fall at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee when I was asked to give a demonstration of sounds of the environment. And about three hundred people came into a concert hall, and I spoke to them much as I am speaking to you now about the enjoyment of sounds of the environment. And then, through I Ching chance operations we subjected a map of the university campus to those operations and made an itinerary for the entire audience which would take about forty-five minutes to an hour. And then all of us, as quietly as possible, and listening as attentively as possible, moved through the university community. It was a social experience.

Rather than a musical one?

It was also musical and was discussed as such and as society when we returned to the hall.

The other kind of music that interests me is one that has been traditionally interesting and enjoyable down through the ages, and that’s music that one makes oneself without constraining others. If you can do it by yourself, you’re not in a situation of telling someone else what to do.

But I find the conventional musical situation of a composer telling others what to do—I find that something which I now don’t myself instigate. If someone plays my earlier music in which that situation takes place, then I don’t make any objections; but I myself would not have organized that concert.—Hans G.Helms (1972)

Do you like to speak with performers before they perform one of your pieces?

I like to make suggestions and then see what happens, rather than setting down laws and forcing people to follow them. Since I don’t hear music in my head to begin with, I don’t lose anything at all by leaving a little more freedom. The use of chance operations leads to certain freedom, and the providing of suggestions, rather than law, adds to it.—Terry Gross (1982)

In Allan Kaprow’s Happening with the mountain [Courtyard, 1962], he says that there is this symbol business about the girl and the Earth Mother. That strikes me as drawing relationships between things, in accord with an intention. If we do that, I think then we have to do it better than people in history did it. Happenings don’t do it better because they have this thing we’ve spoken of as carelessness in them. Carelessness comes about through —to use your words—“nonmatrixed activity.” The only way you’re going to get a good performance of an intentional piece, that furthermore involves symbols and other relationships which the artist has drawn in his mind, is to have lots of rehearsals, and you’re going to have to do it as well as you can; rather than using one symbol, you might find another, more effective symbol. You’re involved in a whole thing that we have been familiar with since the Renaissance and before.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

If you read [Ferruccio] Busoni’s curious essay written a long time ago—it’s called “Sketch of an Esthetic of New Music” [ca. 1911], and it really should be read—he says, for instance, in speaking of the new music in which notation is too rigid, that music must be freer than that, the thing that has made it rigid is the tendency toward architecture, and that this tendency toward architecture, the division of the whole into parts, has been very pleasing to the academic, because it is very easy to teach; but it has nothing to do with the proper spirit of music. It has only to do with the spirit of the academy. That it is, in fact, opposed to the spirit of music, because music is free of all such constraints, since it exists in the air. It’s a marvelous essay.

If someone makes a Happening, very often it is an individual expressing an idea or a feeling, and he makes a kind of scenario or plan for the Happening, which will express this idea which he has. He does not engage the people in any discipline, but leaves them completely free. What he is doing actually is something like a Renaissance work—namely, the expression of an idea or a feeling that an individual has, and he is doing it in what amounts to a careless way, because it is undisciplined. If one is going to let anything happen, which is the basis of how the Happenings developed —namely, that anything can happen—it must be because one does not have an idea nor a feeling to express, but is willing to give all that up and to move into a situation in which anything may happen, because one is interested not in expressing ideas or feelings but in increasing one’s awareness and curiosity. Now if one has the feelings of open awareness and of utter curiosity, and if he wants to make a Happening, then he will make a situation that is extremely complex, in order that something may happen—not that what happens will be something that he had in his mind, but that it will precisely be something that he did not have in mind. Most of the Happenings that we have had in New York have been things that people had in mind and then produced. And that is what the Renaissance did, and we’re not interested in that; and if we are, we know the discipline we must follow to produce a Renaissance work of art. But the Happening comes about in a situation where we have renounced the Renaissance; and where we wish to have happen something that we have not had in our minds, and that will increase our awareness and goad our curiosity. A Happening should be like a net to catch fish the nature of which one does not know.

And at this point the word “discipline” means what it originally meant—namely, giving up oneself in order, one could even say, to know oneself.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson (1965)

I think what we’re doing is something else and not that. So when I go to a Happening that seems to me to have intention in it I go away, saying that I’m not interested. I also did not like to be told, in [Allan Kaprow’s] Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts [1958], to move from one room to another. Though I don’t actively engage in politics, I do as an artist have some awareness of art’s political content, and it doesn’t include policemen.

I think we all realize that anarchy is not practical; the movement of philosophical anarchism in the United States that did quite a lot in the nineteenth century finally busted up because in the large population centers its ideas were not practical. We look at our lives, at the anarchist moments, or spaces, or times, or whatever you want to call them, and there these things that I’m so interested in—awareness, curiosity, et cetera—have play. It is not during organized or policed moments that these things happen. I admit that in a policed circumstance I can take an aesthetic attitude and enjoy it on my terms.

But why do you think that so many Happenings have become intentional?

I think that those people for one reason or another are interested in themselves. I came to be interested in anything but myself. This is the difference. When I say that anything can happen I don’t mean anything that I want to have happen.

But don’t you in some way structure your work?

You’re aiming now at a purity we are never going to achieve. When we say “purposelessness” we add “purposeful purposelessness.” You’ll find this more and more being recognized not as double talk, but as truth. That’s why I don’t like definition; when you succeed in defining and cutting things off from something, you thereby take the life out of them. It isn’t any longer as true as it was when it was incapable of being defined.

But some people cant do things unless you define them for them.

That kind of sight is not going to enable them to see. The whole desire for definitions has to do with the Renaissance in which we demanded clarity and got it. Now we are not in such a period and such definitions are no longer of use to us.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

I’m glad to report that I haven’t had the feeling that anyone in the [Boston] orchestra was angry with me, whereas formerly they were.

Just fifteen or sixteen years ago in New York—and now I wish to correct a misstatement of fact on the part of a rather sensationalist critic in this town who reported that I asked the Philharmonic to smash their instruments, and that they complied. That is simply not the case. What happened was that, at great expense, I managed to amplify by means of contact microphones the entire New York Philharmonic and to send it out by means of twelve channels, in Atlas Eclipticalis, when Leonard Bernstein gave a kind of avant-garde festival.

What happened at the first performance was that many in the orchestra were furious at the music and tore the microphones off their instruments and stamped on them and smashed them. And the next day, which was Friday, I repaired or brought new microphones for all the ones that had been broken, and they again smashed them. And on Saturday they again smashed the new ones. On Sunday, Mr. Bernstein gave them a sermon, and they played rather nicely, but then they were not ashamed of their behavior. And one of them came offstage smiling, and he shook my hand, “Come back in twenty years and we’ll treat you better.”—New England Conservatory (1976)

In A Year from Monday, you state, “In New York, when I started writing the orchestral parts of my Concert for Piano and Orchestra, which was performed September 19,1958 in Cologne, I visited each player, and found out what he could do with his instrument, discovered with him other possibilities, and subjected all these findings to chance operations, ending up with apart that was quite indeterminate of its performance. After a general rehearsal, during which the musicians heard the results of their several actions, some of them— not all— introduced in the actual performance sounds of a nature not found in notations, characterized for the most pan by their intentions which had become foolish and unprofessional. In Cologne, hoping to avoid this unfortunate state of affairs, I worked with each musician individually and the general rehearsal was silent…. Well, anyway, the result in a number of cases was just as unprofessional in Cologne as in New York. I must find a way to let people be free without their becoming foolish. So that their freedom will make them noble. How will I do this? That is the question.”

Have you experimented with new methods to free musicians without incurring the risks you have described?

That remains a problem. Nonetheless, the musicians are getting better. In the United States, many of them have met in universities, stayed together, and this has entailed group activity. We have had so many who have devoted themselves exclusively to a “career.” It is fortunate that musicians at last devote themselves to music.

And what are your research methods to realize this freedom?

I try a great variety without being sure of what direction to follow; for example, today I’m especially interested in music that does not require repetition.—Jean-Yves Bosseur (1973)

In the sixties, people were very irritated by your works, and today…

Oh, you mean today you don’t think they’re so irritated.

People are not accustomed to it.

I just performed Muoyce, which is a whispered version of my Writing for the Fifth Time through Finnegans Wake, and it was done in Frankfurt. It lasts for two and a half hours. Klaus Schöning of Hörspiel WDR told the audience, which was large, about four or five hundred Joyce scholars, that the doors were open; that once the performance began, they could leave as they wished, and that they could also come back if they wanted. After twenty minutes, they began to leave, and he told me later that only about half of the audience was there at the end. So I think that the work is still irritating. People think, perhaps, that they are no longer irritated, but they still have great difficulty paying attention to something they don’t understand. I think that the division is between understanding and experiencing, and many people think that art has to do with understanding, but it doesn’t. It has to do with experience; and if you understand something, then you walk out once you get the point because you don’t want the experience. You don’t want to be irritated. So they leave, and they say the avant-garde doesn’t exist. But the avant-garde continues, and it is experience.—Thomas Wulffen (1985)

Obviously there seem to be some differences between the European and the American audiences concerning the reception of your work.

I suppose there are differences. I think the European audiences are mostly mature people. The audiences in the United States are more generally in the universities and are people who are not yet economically members of the society.

But hasn’t that changed within the last ten years? Or in the United States, are there still mostly young people as audience for your music?

My impression is that the universities are the places where American society as a whole enjoys art. When they graduate from the universities, only some of them enjoy it.—Birger Ollrogge (1985)

Does the computer alter the concept of “audience”?

I think that not the computer itself, but the ideas that I and others have, in the field of music, have done this already, so that we think of the concert more and more not as something that begins and ends but as a process that continues and sometimes [is] very long so that people could come and go — again, flexibility. And one of the things that’s so annoying about concerts to people who are themselves, let us say, not music lovers, is this business of sitting in rows in a theater situation, and our tendency now is to remove that by having a space in which people can move or sit, go out, come in… in the course of the performance of music.

Will there be any future need for concert halls and museums?

No, but this notion of only having what we need—it seems to me can be laid at the door of the Germans; I think it’s a false idea that they’ve buffaloed us into—I think we can perfectly well do things that are not necessary, and that it will seem pleasurable to us to get together and have an unnecessary concert…

On whether concerts are more pleasurable experienced by groups of people:

Well, I think there is a great difference between an original painting and a reproduction, and between a live performance of music and a recording, and the general experience as numbers increase will be of recordings as things develop in technology, and people may even learn to prefer them to the original, but others will want to see the original and will realize that there is a difference.—Don Finegan et al. (1969)

I believe in practicality, that’s why I’m so devoted to the piano, because it’s available everywhere; but I’m not so devoted, for instance, to the bassoon, because the bassoon is becoming rapidly an instrument of the past. It can’t compete with the brass instruments, and in Hollywood, for instance, they no longer employ bassoonists—

In their orchestras—

Because they don’t make enough noise, so that fewer and fewer people are learning to play the bassoon, which I think is a good thing, because the bassoon vibrates in such a way as to turn the man who plays it insane. Almost everyone who learns to play it loses his mind. And now we don’t have so many bassoonists, so it’s all very good.

[But the piano and other things?]

But the piano is very useful, because there is one everywhere. If I wrote only for the bassoon, I also would be disappearing as a useful individual. More and more it’s practical to write for electronics, because wherever you go there are electrical circuits—amplifiers, loudspeakers, and microphones. We carry with us our contact microphones now, but I think ultimately they’ll be available too.

What I want to do now, and what David Tudor wants to do also, is to have a period of laboratory research in which we work with amplifiers, microphones, and loudspeakers to discover other possibilities than the ones with which we are familiar. And I think the fact that we’re not working in laboratories is one of the things that makes the problem of composition difficult. In other words, at the present moment, my ideas tend to be removed from physicality, and what is needed, so that we will have our feet on the ground, is physical contact with sound, with new possibilities, in a laboratory. At this time, and here [in Sweden] too, electronic laboratories for music are developing everywhere; but they are all related to fixing music on tape. And this is related to the Renaissance, and not to electronic technology.

So it’s a question of distribution. You do not believe in tapes and records.

This is an enormous problem now. The electronic distribution of our activities is becoming more and more magical with Telstar, for instance. McLuhan says that anything that happens at any point happens everywhere because of the electronic media. It’s in the nature of our understanding of electronic technology, and so we speak of the global village.

The notion of the physical distribution of ten thousand books is another problem, not so much electronic, as it is mechnical. The machine [of the book] belongs to the Renaissance. The things of intangible distribution belong to electronic technology. When Bengt Emil Johnson speaks of the poetry that will not so much be consigned to books as to recording, the moment they become recordings they will be able to be distributed with great ease, with no difficulty whatsoever, throughout the world. But once they’ve been experienced, the tendency of technology will be not to keep them but to ask you for another one, something new—this is the spirit, I think, of the new culture: not to keep but to constantly give.

So this question of distribution is related to museums, and to monuments, and so on. Of course, we will have that problem, but it will be a disease rather than something simple.

Do you have some ideas to solve this?

We can’t be satisified with distribution now because it won’t be very good. For instance, my book [Silence], published in the United States, is very difficult to get outside the United States, and that won’t be solved, because all of the publishing problems of books, and objects, and things in quantity are still those of the previous culture. Yet with the number of people who work now—the number of composers, the number of authors, and so on—has vastly increased over the nineteenth century; but the number of [music] publishers has not increased. The result is that you have traffic problems, so you have the kind of problems that all large cities encounter with automobile traffic. And I hear, where I go now, that in the future we may expect that private traffic in large cities will be forbidden. It may then equally be forbidden to produce a book that would require people to distribute it, but it will not be forbidden, certainly, to send information by electronic media throughout the world.—Lars Gunnar Bodin and Bengt Emil Johnson (1965)

[What about live theater?]

The difficulty with the theater, as I see it, is that it has—because of the complexity involved and probably because of the economics—tended to close the circle around it rather than to open it out. This is true also of the symphony orchestra. Whether or not people inside the circle are going to enter into the dialogue is very much an open question. Occasions will arise when dialogues will occur, but in the case of theater it’s extremely difficult. I was up at Wesleyan University for discussions about the performing arts. There was a man who had performed Hamlet at the Tyrone Guthrie—

George Grizzard?

Yes, and the director associated with him.

Alan Schneider?

Alan Schneider. I certainly wouldn’t have gone had I known what was going to take place. It was a warm evening and they began by taking their coats off, and trying to give the feeling of informality; they even went so far as not to use the chairs but to sit on the table that had been placed in front of them. They proceeded to say that they had nothing to tell the audience, that what they wanted were ideas from the audience, in other words they wanted to have a discussion. Of course there were no questions. So they had to chat and supplement one another’s loss of knowledge of what to do next. The whole thing was absolutely disgusting: the kind of ideas and the kinds of objectives, the vulgarity of it, was almost incomprehensible. The chairman of the meeting was also disgusted and at one point he interrupted Schneider and Grizzard and knowing that I was in the audience, asked me to speak my piece. I asked them what they thought of Happenings and learned that they had no knowledge of them whatsoever. They don’t go. They weren’t interested. They were concerned with the Hamlet situation.

This is the difficulty. When a painter comes to a Happening, he brings a painting tradition; when a musician comes he brings with him a music tradition. But no one in the theater brings anything—

Except a quality of mind, namely, a tremendous ego. You could see that in Grizzard. He kept being humble in order to show that he wasn’t so stuck up. But it was clear that he was as stuck on himself as he could be, and that he wanted the best thing to happen to him that would happen. He thought it was nice and ethical of him to have preferred to do Hamlet instead of something on Broadway. That kind of shoddy ethic is just intolerable.

I said this sort of thing. I was quite heated. I normally don’t like to talk against things, but I had been asked to. When we couldn’t discuss Happenings because they had no knowledge nor interest, and didn’t think it was as serious as Hamlet and thought they were being virtuous, then I said, “Well, what do you think about TV?” They weren’t interested in TV. And yet they’re living in an electronic world where TV is of far more relevance than the legitimate theater.

Why don’t we think of those theater people as what they are? They’re a form of museum. And we are going to have museums and we should just be grateful to them for doing what they’re doing and not bother them.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

Your music has always been elusive when people try to record it. Do you agree?

I like live music. I don’t stop my music from being recorded because other people like it. But I’ve always been opposed to records.

You often work with electronic equipment. It seems to me that the spontaneity and good humor of your approach helps to humanize such devices.

The piece we’re setting up now [Cartridge Music] uses electronics, but it also uses junk things that are part and parcel of everyday life. We have a complex situation with three performers, and objects with cartridges and contact microphones. We enter a situation that resembles people trying to get through the tunnel into New Jersey.

In terms of sound?

No, in terms of what we have to do to produce the sounds. One person may be turning down the amplitude while someone else is playing something. Causes and effects get disconnected. The personal element seems to make the machinery not quite work properly.

Is a concert hall a good place for such an experience?

Yes. If we have a concert such as this, people can then listen when they go outside, and the noises won’t seem as disagreeable as they’d thought.

Would it be good if all the sounds of life eventually replaced the concert hall altogether?

Not altogether. In the future, it seems to me, we should want all the things we’ve had in the past, plus a lot of things we haven’t had yet.

It seems to take a lot of work and trouble to achieve the randomness and spontaneity you seek. Is this a contradiction?

It’s an attempt to open our minds to possibilities other than the ones we remember, and the ones we already know we like. Something has to be done to get us free of our memories and choices.—David Sterritt (1982)

I think the only real difference between theater and music is that more and more things happen that aren’t, superficially, making sounds. The moment that you have singers, such as you have in Renga and Apartment House, you’ve already left the situation of music, at least in the view of the musicians’ union. Singers, you know, belong to AGMA, which is the theater union. That became extremely clear both in the performance of [Mr.] Swift Eagle and in the reaction of the audience. The audience acted as though it were not at a musical concert; it didn’t occur to them to stop making noise themselves, but they moved into a theatrical reaction.

For us, as spectators who didn’t participate in this disruption, Swift Eagle’s performance seemed to belong to “theater,” as such, rather than music. That is, the people sitting beside me might protest against the music, but, when he would start doing his things, then some of them became so fascinated, in spite of themselves, that they would simply pay attention again. However, he was a very appropriate performer for one of your pieces, I think, because, while he could relate to the audience and deal with that, still he was intent on doing what he was also doing. He was able to exist on many levels of his reality, and this was very good.

I disagree first of all with the idea of a performance as separate from a rehearsal. So that rather than a performance being a special occasion, it simply becomes the general nature of the performer. At that point, I think, one could decide whether or not he was interested in the performance.—Dick Higgins (1976)

A few years ago, several orchestras across the country played your Renga with Apartment House 1776. It usually provided a rather vicious reaction from at least a good portion of the audience. Did you anticipate such a response?

No. I thought it would be a cheerful piece, and that it would be celebrative of the bicentennial—which I think it is. I’m always surprised that more people didn’t recognize it as having that character. But many people faced with sad music laugh, and faced with witty music start crying, and so forth. It seems to me that music doesn’t really communicate to people. Or if it does, it does it in very, very different ways from one person to the next.

Many people become annoyed, I think, simply because I superimposed the spiritual songs of four different peoples. Yet if you engaged them in a discussion on ecumenical thought, you’d probably find that they agree with the idea that there are different ways of approaching God.

It was not bad in Cleveland or in Boston. It was bad in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. That’s largely because of the orchestras, which are not good orchestras. There are good people in each of the orchestras, but there are in them a large number of people who aren’t good, who don’t play faithfully what they are given to play. Faced with a music such as I had given them, they simply sabotaged it.

It sounds like the same things that happened with the New York Philharmonic and Atlas Eclipticalis.

Yes, of course it is. The New York Philharmonic is a bad orchestra. They’re like a group of gangsters. They have no shame—when I came off the stage after one of those performances, one of them who had played badly shook my hand, smiled, and said, “Come back in ten years; we’ll treat you better.” They turn things away from music, and from any professional attitude toward music, to some kind of a social situation that is not very beautiful.

In the case of Atlas, they destroyed my property. They acted criminally. They tore the microphones off the instruments and stamped on them, and the next day I had to buy new ones to replace them for the next performance. It was very costly. And they weren’t ashamed.

In light of your musical differences with Pierre Boulez, do you feel he performed properly?

Well, Boulez and I have had a difficult friendship, one might say, but a long one. I met him over thirty years ago. He gave me the manuscript of the Second Piano Sonata. So although we don’t see eye to eye, we nevertheless have a window or a door open on the other one, with a kind of sympathy.

So he did well with your work, but the orchestra was just intractable?

He did as well as he could. He couldn’t do very well, and the orchestra certainly could do badly. He worked with the Apartment House aspect of the piece and did that very beautifully. I’ve since followed all his directions for the instrumentation of the quartets. The assistant conductor prepared the orchestra, and he had done it very well. But when Pierre heard the sliding tones—he hates sliding tones—he insisted that they be removed from the piece. He said that without consulting me. The sliding tones are essential to the orchestra part because they make it sound like nature. (Seiji Ozawa had done that so beautifully.) But Boulez insisted that instead of sliding, they make it like an arpeggio. It was perfectly awful. I couldn’t countermand what he had said at the last minute; there would have been complete chaos in the orchestra.—Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (1980)

You see music, from the point of view of its being written and performed and then heard, becomes, in contrast to painting, a social situation. A social situation, when it involves a group of people, is very different from a social situation which has reference to individuals, because, when a group of individuals becomes a group, they in a certain sense are no longer individuals. So that most of the music I’ve written has been for individuals who have developed a virtuosity, who’ve devoted themselves to this work in a way that involved them in discovery and such things as stamina. The perfect example, of course, is David Tudor. But when you come to a group of musicians who are not individuals, but have become a group exceeding four…

[So it has to do essentially with how many people?]

This question of numbers is exceedingly interesting to me. I have a friend in India who owns a textile factory in Ahmedabad. His name is Gautham Sarabhai. He has calico mills you may have heard about. That beautiful exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of Indian textiles was all provided by the Sarabhais. Just as Paris has suffered from the glacierlike effect of technology, so this textile factory in India realized the need to give up the ancient procedure of a man making a piece of cloth from beginning to end by himself. It had to adopt certain factory conventions that are of an assembly line, really, so that one person would do something to a piece of cloth, and another person would do something else. And in the end no one [person] had produced it. It has been produced by a group that was not a group of individuals even. And the effect in India was striking, because all the people became extremely unhappy. Before that, they had been happy. He’s a good man—Gautham Sarabhai. He wanted to solve this problem of accomplishing more work, which is the desire of the twentieth century, in order to make more money and so forth, and yet not to make his workmen miserable. At first they introduced some Japanese specialists, who had been studying this problem of factory work, but they got nowhere. Finally, someone came from the United States, someone who made systematic experiments; and he discovered that two people have difficulty working together, because they tend to divide into one against one. This accounts for all the divorces. Three people divide into two against one, so that two people become happy and make the third one miserable. Four people divide into two against two, and they can’t work well together. Five people can work well together, they discovered. The same is true of six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and even twelve. They can develop an esprit de corps, a spirit of the group, which does not deny the individuality. Thirteen is impossible, in their experience. This thirteen may be the trouble with the Christian religion, because besides Jesus there were the twelve disciples.

Right. For it to work, they had to get rid of one of them.

It’s very amusing, for offhand from the musical point of view, we would say that the number four works very well. For we have so many examples of string quartets. But then the Indian experience may prove that wind quintets are superior to string quartets. I noticed in the forties we had in the United States an excellent string quartet called the New Music String Quartet. And very shortly they split up.—Robert Cordier (1973)

In the course of writing Renga and Apartment House, a long work to write (it took me thirteen months and well over a thousand pages, contacting all those singers, organizing everything), anyway, I was taking my laundry one day to the laundromat, and crossing Eighth Avenue I suddenly got an idea for another piece for orchestra, because the problem is how to deal with those one hundred people. And I was already aware that, after all the work and trouble and everything, I was perhaps making something that would not function, could not be performed, could not be quickly done in this union money-making situation. Anyway, I suddenly got an idea that I thought might work. And then when I ran into this musician on Fifty-first Street and he said, “What did you think of the rehearsal?” I said, “I think it was awful.” And then I described to him the new piece that I had thought of. I’ve already composed it; it is now being copied; it’s eight quartets, in three different versions, for twenty-four, forty-one, and ninety-three people. But only four play at a time, so you see you suddenly have a quartet of the fifteenth first violinist, the third second violinist, the fifth horn, and the fifth cellist.

And these people will be obliged to be real people.

I said, “What do you think will happen?” He thought for a moment and then said, “I don’t think they’ll fool around.” They’ll realize that if they fool around, they’ll be fooling around themselves. And the orchestra, as it stands now, gives them no room for feeling that they’ve done anything, so they can be bad children because it won’t make any difference.—Dick Higgins (1976)

Do you always use transparencies for scoring?

Yes, when I use scores, this can go directly to the publisher. In the piece I’m currently making for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello, there won’t be a score that connects all of the parts. There won’t be a fixed relation between those instruments, but rather a flexible relation between them. It resembles, perhaps, that aspect of architecture in, say, San Francisco where, because of the fault in the earth, the architecture has to be flexible and be able to move, so when there is an earthquake, the building will simply shake instead of falling down.

I’m thinking now, and have been for several years, of kinds of music which will survive, so to speak, any relationship of the parts. In a piece called Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras, and in another one, Thirty Pieces for String Quartet, I literally made thirty pieces for each group of instruments in the orchestra and each instrument in the string quartet. Those pieces could begin anywhere at any point of time between zero and forty-five seconds, and end at any point of time between thirty seconds and one minute, fifteen seconds. The whole composition, which is a series of thirty of these, would last approximately thirty minutes. Any one segment of a piece, or any one of the pieces of those thirty, could be played in one tempo or another, because of this latitude or flexibility in the beginning and ending. What’s happening in the present piece Music for…,with the title completed by the number of players to that didn’t happen in the earlier pieces is that the lengths of time and the positions of those flexible beginnings and endings are changing, so that rather than all of the instruments having the same degree of flexibility, they have different degrees of flexibility. Another thing I’m going to do is change the range in which the instrument plays at any given time, so that it may move from a very narrow range, as in the piece I’ve just showed you, to a wider range, according to chance operations. You’ll have a togetherness of differences—not only differences in ranges, but differences in structure.—Bill Shoemaker (1984)

After the experience that I had in Kalamazoo with the rehearsal and performance of Mureau, I went to Montreal and did the same work with the entire audience without a rehearsal, as I suggested in the foreword to M. Afterward, when I left Montreal, I took a plane to New York. It happened that I arrived at Kennedy at the same time that Margaret Mead the anthropologist arrived. She was coming from another place, but we were both in the same baggage pickup area. We drove to town together, and I told her what I had done in Montreal. She is involved more and more now with the notion of ritual, which is a way of involving all of the people present in an activity. She asserted again, as I had heard it before, the importance of food and eating where there is a large number of people together. What is desired, as Ivan Illich would say, is a feeling of conviviality.

The work that I have been doing during the past year is a four-part text called Empty Words, a continuation of Mureau. Empty Words gradually does without parts of speech. The first part is without sentences; the second part is without phrases; the third part is without words; and the last part is without syllables. I thought of it as something that could be read through the whole night, with intermissions of, say, half an hour between the two-and-one-half-hour sections, with the presence of food, following the suggestion of Margaret Mead, and timing the last part, which is nothing but silences and letters, so that it would end at dawn along with the opening of the windows and doors of the world outside. You might say that my concern is social, but what has impressed me about Oriental and Buddhist practice and thought is not just thinking of individuals or society, but thinking also of the environment. It’s only necessary to recall that in Buddhism all beings are Buddhas whether they are sentient as we are, or whether they are not sentient as stones and cigarette butts are not. I remember the meaningfulness in the Buddhist service in Kyoto, early one morning when I was there, of the opening of the doors. All those things get mixed up, so that why I have the recording of the dawn as the second part of my present piece for orchestra is that I have become through Empty Words aware of the dawn, and even awake at that time in order to hear it, you know, morning after morning.

I had an astonishing experience recently with the Empty Words. It was in Boulder, Colorado. I had been invited to do whatever I wished for the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist Institute headed by Rinpoche, or most precious jewel. The school is very well organized; it had not just studies of Buddhism, but also the arts, music, poetry, and dance. There were also teachers of science and so on, brought together through their common interest in Buddhism. I had just finished the fourth part of Empty Words, and had in some performances read the first part with electronics, changing the timbre of my voice, and changing its position in space; in other words, varying a number of, as we say, parameters of sound; and also using in the two-and-a-half-hour period a chance-determined program of slide projections of Thoreau drawings. There would be a hundred and fifty in two and one half hours, which means a slide changing somewhere between one second and four minutes. At any rate, when I finished the fourth part, with its long silences up to eleven and twelve minutes, and just a few letters otherwise, I felt there was no need to change the timbre of the voice, and also no need to speed it up and slow it down as I had in the first and second parts, but to establish a tempo for a line whether it had letters in it, or whether it was part of a silence, so that there would be a movement toward a center, or a coming to quietness, or you might even say, a coming from the loss of the aspects of language, to a having of the simplest elements of music. I thought that this would be appreciated in a Buddhist situation. I also thought that instead of one hundred and fifty slides, that there would be just five slides in the two and one half hours, and those not always shown, so that they would suggest a meditative experience. Then I recalled that the Bodhidharma (when he came from India to bring Buddhism into China) sat facing a wall in China for ten years. At one point, one of the people cut off his right ear, but he didn’t budge. So thinking along these lines, I sat in Boulder with my back to the audience. It was a large audience, about fifteen hundred people. There had been a program printed, saying that this was simply a mix of letters and silences from the Journal of Thoreau. Well, after twenty minutes, an uproar began in the audience, and it was so intense, and violent, that the thought entered my mind that the whole activity was not only useless, but that it was destructive. I was destroying something for them, and they were destroying something for me. The social situation was really miserable; however, it divided the audience, and at one point a group of people came to protect me. Things were thrown, people came up on stage to perform, and it was generally an upsetting situation. Afterwards, instead of just leaving, there was a discussion between those who remained and myself. I said that I thought that we were due for a period of self-re-examination. Later, I was with friends, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, George Quasha, and other poets, and they said that I had succeeded in bringing the monsters in among the Buddhas. This, of course, had not been my intention.—Anthony Brown (1975)

Did you enjoy the noises?

I was doing something I had never done before. And the reason that I decided to do it here was that it occurred to me that it would be very beautiful and very appropriate for this circumstance. But then due to my becoming so foolishly famous, many people come to such a performance who have no reason for coming except foolish curiosity. And when they discover that I’m not nearly as interesting to them as they thought I might be, I don’t understand why they don’t go away.

Isn’t that the chance response you deal with?

I know it, I know what limb I’m out on. I’ve known it all my life, you don’t have to tell me that.

It’s just like those slides you showed, the response was just a different thing.

Nonsense. Those slides are by Thoreau and in my opinion they are extremely beautiful. The catcalls and imitations were stupid criticisms. The thing that is beautiful about the Thoreau drawings is that they’re completely lacking in self-expression. And the thing that made a large part of the public’s interruption this evening so ugly was that it was full of self-expression.

Did you end the piece the way you wanted to end it, or did you end it because people were making noise.

I didn’t end it the way I wanted to end it. I ended it the way it was to end.

Why is it that when I go to hear someone and I don’t like what is going on, instead of interrupting it, I say to myself, why don’t you like it? Can’t you find something about it that you enjoy? People insist upon self-expression. I really am opposed to it. I don’t think people should express themselves in that kind of way.

But isn’t that what you’re doing right now?

I don’t think so. I’m discussing this situation, which, although you say you enjoyed it, I think could have been a lot more successful.

Haven’t you said that you want to incorporate outside noises into your work?

I haven’t said that. I’ve said that contemporary music should be open to the sounds outside it. I just said that the sounds of the traffic entered very beautifully, but the self-expressive sounds of people making foolishness and stupidity and catcalls were not beautiful, and they aren’t beautiful in other circumstances either.

What were your expectations of your performance tonight?

I don’t have expectations.

If you’re disappointed, then you have expectations.

That goes back to what I said at the beginning, that I felt that it would be beautiful to do this piece in this situation.

Aren’t you glad you got an honest response?

If we are talking about the interruptions, that’s not to be classified under honest, that’s to be classified under the complete absence of self-control and openness to boredom—and boredom comes not from without but from within.—Anne Waldman et al. (1974)

I had a wild time there [in Milan] because I read the third part of Empty Words, and I’d no sooner begun than the audience began an uproar. They didn’t leave the hall—there was a large audience of three thousand people —they didn’t leave the hall, but they joined me, so to speak, in performing. Some of them were opposed to what I was doing and some of them were in favor of what I was doing, and many of them wanted to do whatever they wanted to do. And so this continued for two hours and a half. Nobody left. Some people were rather wild and destructive, and they tried to destroy the slide-projecting machine, and to remove the drawings of Thoreau, which I thought was very sad because they’re so beautiful. On the other hand, the fellow who was controlling the slide projector was very energetic, and he fought and kept it going. And one person came up and took my glasses off to keep me from reading, and also the light that I was reading by was smashed; but another person put in a new bulb immediately, and I looked at the fellow who took my glasses off, and something about the expression on my face made him put them right back on. So I continued for two hours and a half. At the end I went to the front of the stage and showed no anger, but I made a kind of embracing gesture with the arms out, and up. And then there was a kind of wild applause, and I was told later that it had all been very successful. I didn’t see how it could be termed successful in terms of my work, since it was impossible for anyone to hear what I was doing; but it was a kind of social occasion.—Geoffrey Barnard (1980)

[What do you think of performances past?]

Our situation as artists is that we have all this work that was done before we came along. We have the opportunity to do work now. I would not present things from the past, but I would approach them as materials available to something else which we were going to do now. They could enter, in terms of collage, into any play. One extremely interesting theatrical thing that hasn’t been done is a collage made from various plays.

Let me explain to you why I think of past literature as material rather than as art. There are oodles of people who are going to think of the past as a museum and be faithful to it, but that’s not my attitude. Now as material it can be put together with other things. They could be things that don’t connect with art as we conventionally understand it. Ordinary occurrences in a city, or ordinary occurrences in the country, or technological occurrences—things that are now practical simply because techniques have changed. This is altering the nature of music and I’m sure it’s altering your theater, say, through employment of color television, or multiple movie projectors, photoelectronic devices that will set off relays when an actor moves through a certain area. I would have to analyze theater to see what are the things that make it up in order, when we later make a synthesis, to let those things come in. Now in terms of music I thought of something manually produced, and then of something vocally produced, wind, et cetera. This includes all the literature. And then I thought of sounds we cannot hear because they’re too small, but through new techniques we can enlarge them, sounds like ants walking in the grass. Other sounds are city sounds, country sounds, and synthetic sounds. I haven’t analyzed all the things that go into theater, but I think I could.

What are some of them?

It’s extremely complex because it involves, as I said earlier, seeing and hearing, We know, or think we know, what the aspects of sound are, what we can hear and how to produce sounds. But when you’re involved with sight the situation becomes more complex. It involves color, light, shapes that are not moving, shapes that are moving; it involves what in Buddhism is called “nonsentient” being and then goes again in relation to what is called “sentient being”—animals, et cetera. I would refer back to Artaud’s thinking about theater. He made lists that could give ideas about what goes into theater. And one should search constantly to see if something that could take place in theater has escaped one’s notice.—Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner (1965)

How did you come to do what you did last night?

I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I was in this house doing my work, hearing those [filing] cards I was using while writing through The Cantos of Ezra Pound —I thought how beautiful. My first thought was I’ll continue doing my work onstage, shuffling the cards, turning pages, and so on—and that I’ll do it without amplification. Then when I saw the hall, I thought, well, we’ll have to have it. I generally make sound in the Dialogue in relation to circumstances of the place. Merce Cunningham is onstage doing his work at the same time.

You’ve written that music should not do anything to the audience; that the audience should do something to the music—to make its own performance, as it were. How did this happen last night?

Well, music is not just composition, but it is performance, and it is listening. The amplification of those cards, though it was high, almost at the level of feedback—which we heard now and then—produced sounds that were still so quiet that one could hear the audience as performers too. And I’m sure that they noticed that themselves. You noticed, for instance, the man in the back who was having trouble with his digestion. And I would hear many different kinds of coughing and I’m sure that people heard those themselves as sounds, rather than as interruptions. I hope, and I’ve hoped this now for thirty years, when I make music that it won’t interrupt the silence which already exists. And that silence includes coughs. I thought the audience behaved/performed beautifully, because they didn’t intend to cough—they were obliged to cough; the cough had its own sound—and they didn’t make any opposing sound. All the sounds, I thought, interpenetrated —nothing obstructed anything else.

It’s called a “Dialogue,” which implies some intention in interaction between you [and Cunningham]. What kind of form does that take? When you design a piece, how do you think of the dialogue?

I think it is probably a misnomer. The only way you can rationalize the tide, it seems to me, is in terms of each member of the audience; he’s the one who has to make the dialogue.

It’s the dialogue with the audience, then?

Not with the audience, but the audience creating the dialogue, or looking at two things at once.—Middlebury College Magazine (1981)

Some of your critics have mentioned to me that one major factor in being alienated from your thoughts and music is that of a sense of avoiding skills, or avoiding a practiced or virtuoso approach. Their notion of “skill” and “virtuoso” is based on deciding something is good and working to intensify that narrowly as a goal until it is spectacular. Do you agree with the criticism (or even believe it to be a criticism), or are such critics simply missing the point of your ideas?

That’s a mistake on their part. Most of my music is written for virtuosos. The orchestra music is not written for virtuosos because orchestral musicians are not virtuosos. But the Music of Changes was written for David Tudor, and he is a virtuoso pianist. The Etudes Australes were written for Grete Sultan, and are probably the most difficult piano pieces ever written, demanding skills that include even how to sit at the piano. I receive over and over again letters from virtuoso pianists who find these pieces fascinating, most recently from Roger Woodward. He says he’s fascinated by them. I’ve heard different pianists play them, and I’m delighted to see that the pieces will have a long life; again, in opposition to the general critical thought that my music will evaporate into thin air the day I die—which I don’t think is true. If it did, I think there is enough of it around that it would germinate again, that it would come back. But I’m not concerned, really.

The pieces that I’m writing now for Paul Zukofsky he says are the most difficult violin pieces that have ever been written. He objects to that difficulty, and he can’t work at them for more than about five minutes at a time. He has to stop and rest. Too difficult. On the other hand, he has explained to me, since I don’t play the violin, that the history of violin literature has been one of increased difficulty as time goes on, so that it’s only reasonable that these pieces should be more difficult than previous pieces for the violin.—David Cope (1980)

Do you have any ideas yet about the orchestral piece for Japan?

It will be called Etcetera No. 2. Etcetera No. 1 was written for the ballet of Merce Cunningham, which he made for the Paris Opera and which is being revived in January. The music begins with the musicians unconducted, acting freely as individuals; and when they choose, they move to one of four conductors in front of them. Pardon me, I think it is three conductors. And the conductor cannot conduct until he has a full complement of the musicians for whom there are empty chairs in front of him. And four is the maximum actually—four, three, I think of two even—I don’t know. I forget. Anyway, that is the character of Etcetera 1, and Etcetera 2 is going to begin with the musicians all conducted, and there are going to be four conductors. And each pair of musicians will have one stand with the music on it. It is very curious. That took me a long time to figure out. It’s important that there be two, because when one of them leaves the conducted situation to go to an unconducted melodic situation, he needs to know, when he returns, where everybody is. And the one who is sitting there can tell him.

What I thought was fascinating was that they said to you that you could choose what other works would be on the program with your new work.

Not only that I could, but would I build the programs by choosing a piece that had seemed very important to me in connection with my own work, and then to choose music among our contemporaries (which I took to be younger people), music which was not yet well known, but that I thought was important. So I’ve chosen for Hiroyuki Iwaki for the Suntory International Music Program in Tokyo in 1986 to play either the Socrate of Erik Satie or the Symphony, Opus 21, of Anton Webern, or both, because the Webern is only ten minutes. In addition, Christian Wolff is writing Exercises 24 and 25, two short pieces. Satie’s Socrate will be welcome because it’s thirty to thirty-five minutes. It’s very rarely played beautifully.

Have you ever heard it played with an orchestra beautifully?

Never.

Have you ever heard it played with an orchestra?

Yes.

And what do you think was wrong with it?

Well, what I thought was wrong was that the transparency and the subtlety didn’t seem to appear.

Didn’t seem to come through?

Well, I heard that recently in Bonn, Germany, at the Satie festival where I was asked to talk, and I looked forward so much to hearing it with a good orchestra and sopranos.

That by the way seems to be another one of the problems.

It certainly is.

The singers there had vibratos which were so wide that you couldn’t tell what the pitches were. And in my reply to Takemitsu, I said, “If you choose to include the sopranos in the program, make sure to have singers who don’t vibrate but who sing as folksingers do and use microphones, and the microphones shouldn’t be amplified too much either. We want to hear the melodies in relation to the orchestra.” I thought hearing it with the vibrating voice business was terrible. When I was asked to write the opera, I said, “Can I get the singers not to vibrate?” And the conductor said, “No, that’s what they do.”—Ellsworth Snyder (1985)

[Given your taste for theater, why haven’t you worked in opera?]

I was asked to write an opera, and I have never written one. It means a lot of work. It means a theater piece with all those singers. And you see, I’ve come to the desire to free each person in the performance from anyone like a conductor. Instead, what I want the opera to be is a collage of sorts, of a pulverized sort, of European opera; and my title, I think, is excellent. It’s Europera, which is the words “Europe” and “opera” put together. Originally I thought to have the music be the music in the repertoire of operas of that particular opera house. So that both the sets and the costumes would already exist. They would simply be collaged in a different way than conventionally. So instead of having one opera, you’d have them all in one evening. And it’s a very nice idea and relatively practical, but it turns out that operas—I was told, as I never go to the opera, of course. I was told that the opera had become quite modern, the sets were not what I imagined, and the costumes too were often not what I would think they had been in the past. Furthermore, the conductor who had asked me to accept the commission is going to be a new conductor, and he didn’t want my work to reflect on the previous conductor, which it would, if you took the costumes and sets you see that they had. So he wants it to refer to opera in general, rather than his predecessor. In that way, my first idea had changed a great deal, and I find as I travel about, for instance, yesterday evening, I got another idea from going to a dance concert, about what I would like to do with the lighting. Rather than have the lighting focused on the activity, I would like to have the lighting done by means of chance operations. I’ll probably find out what is the minimum lights, so that the singers won’t fall down or something. And what would be the maximum lighting. Then to play between those, with what must be very good technology now. And that won’t be too difficult. I’m disconnecting not only the lighting from the singers but the costumes from the roles and the background from the activity, and I’m going to introduce a number of what I think of as stage effects, things happening, so that the whole performance will be like not a choreography involving a dance, but still a kind of movement in this space without benefit of a plot.

I was on my way to Frankfurt to tell them I wouldn’t do it, and I went to sleep on the plane. When I woke up, it was just dawn, and seeing the dawn was so marvelous, and that struck me as being the right backdrop for the opera. So that instead of being a single day, or act or one performance, I thought there will be two performances, two Europeras, 1 and 2. There will be a series of days, days of different lengths, that is they go from dark to lightest to dark. And there will be through chance operations a determination of different effects of weather. Then I’m going to have many of the dancers dressed in black, helping the singers around—suggesting that, even though the subject is European, the conventions are Oriental.—Ellsworth Snyder (1985)

I had a very good performance of an orchestral work, 30 Pieces for Five Orchestras, done on the 1981 Metz Festival in France. And it was because I had written into the contract that there were to be ten rehearsals devoted entirely to this work. That is to say, thirty hours of rehearsal. About three quarters of the way through rehearsals, the musicians obviously became interested in what they were doing, so interested that they wanted to hear it. Every time they had a chance they would leave the group to go out and listen, then go back. The performance was excellent! Do not write for orchestra unless you have in the contract some way that will hurt them—plenty of rehearsals.

Your music suffers from the problem that it looks easy—

And we don’t have to practice it.—Stephen Montague, (1982)

There is something about performance that tends to make it seem “special” rather than “everyday-like” so that people get what they call “butterflies” before a performance—nervousness and so forth. I think one should move away from those “butterflies” and to a way of life where not-performing is equal to performing, or is emotionally the same; or where the special moments are the same as non-special moments.

We give equal attention and dedication to each, then?

In other words, not reserving our attention for what we think are important things, but maintaining our interest and attention to life. It is hard to talk about because the subject is so limitless.—Mark Gresham (1991)

I now not only don’t object to my music being recorded but I even help people record it. However, I never listen to the records.

Not even if you would play them all at once?

That would have to be a specially arranged Happening, which may happen actually in California. When I’m seventy-five years old, they’re planning a week of my music, and it will begin with the Musicircus of the different kinds of music that are already in Los Angeles. And it will end with a kind of Musicircus of my own work. And in that way we might very well play as many records at once that we could find. I think I’ll do that.—Birger Ollrogge (1985)