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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 #6, Earle
Brown’s 4 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,
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
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 were about to hear in the musical
program. That that was all right as far as I was concerned.
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