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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. In Stockholm,
however, when we played it at the Opera
as an interlude in the dance program
given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn
Brown early last October, I noticed
that it had become melodic.
Christian Wolff prophesied this to me
years ago. He said — we were
walking along Seventeenth Street 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
once told me — we were in Copenhagen
— “I demand one of two
things from a composer:
invention or that he astonish me.”
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