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We’ve now played the Winter Music
quite a number of times. I
haven’t kept count. When we
first played it, the silences
seemed very long and the sounds seemed
really separated in space, not
obstructing one another. Up
in Stockholm, however, when we played
it at the opera as an interlude
in the dance program given by
Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown,
I noticed that it had become
melodic. Christian Wolff
prophesized this to me years ago.
He said — we were walking
along talking — he said:
“No matter what we do it ends
by being melodic.” As far as
I am concerned this happened to Webern
years ago. Karlheinz
Stockhausen told me the other day in
Copenhagen, “I demand two
things from a composer:
invention and that he astonish me.”
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