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Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, David Tudor and I gave an
interesting program. We played five pieces three times each.
They were the Klavierstück XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Christian Wolff’s Duo for Pianists, Morton Feldman’s
Intermission No. 6, Earle Brown’s Four Systems and my
Variations. All of these pieces are composed in various ways that
have in common indeterminacy of performance. Each performance
is unique, as interesting to the composers and performers as
to the audience. Everyone in fact, that is, becomes a listener.
I explained all this to the audience before the musical program
began. I pointed out that one is accustomed to thinking of a
piece of music as an object suitable for understanding and
subsequent evaluation, but that here the situation was quite
other. These pieces, I said, are not objects but processes
essentially purposeless. Naturally then I had to explain the
purpose of having something be purposeless. I said that sounds
were just sounds and that if they weren’t just sounds that we
would (I was of course using the editorial we) — we would do
something about it in the next composition. I said that since
the sounds were sounds this gave people hearing them the chance
to be people, centered within themselves where they actually
are, not off artificially in the distance as they are accustomed
to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by
means of sounds. Finally I said that the purpose of this
purposeless music would be achieved if people learned to listen;
that when they listened they might discover that they preferred
the sounds of everyday life to the ones they would presently hear
in the musical program; that that was alright as far as I was
concerned. |