Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away. Still, there is this sense of something imminent. And what is imminent, we find, is neither the past nor the future, but simply - the next ten minutes. (Pasternak)

Do you remember in Dr. Zhivago the way history sweeps everything out of his life, everything creating the slightest human feeling? How his identity is crushed by history, by the revolution? How everything personal, every fantasy, every human vulnerability, loses its meaning and is swept aside?

The same type of dynamic that swept away Pasternak's life can also take place in art. Here too, the fact that a thing happened, that it exists in history, gives it an authority over us that has nothing to do with its actual value or meaning. We see it life; why do we fail to see that in art too, the facts and successes of history are allowed to crush all that is subtle, all that is personal, in our work?

Yet the artist does not resist. He identifies with this force that can only destroy him. In fact, it has an irresistible attraction for him, in that it offers him known goals, the illusion of safety in his work, the tempting knowledge that nothing succeeds in art -like someone else's success. In a word, because it relieves the anxiety of art.

It is true a price must be paid for this protection, this comfort, this net spread beneath him if he falls. But think of what he gains when he identifies his art with a historical position. It is as though some Mephistopheles stood behind him, whispering, "Go ahead. Create now. We'll settle later."

Now let us make clear that to identify with history does not necessarily refer to the past. It can refer equally to the newest and most extreme developments in art. An artist can be as enamored of the new as of the old. He can even be committed to both, like Babel's dead young soldier who is found with a picture of Lenin in one pocket, and his twillim in the other. In fact, this is perhaps the most attractive position of all. When Schoenberg, for instance, formulated his principle of composition with the twelve tones, he predicted this would extend the Germanic tradition of music for another hundred years. His greatest satisfaction in having devised something new seems to be that he extended something old. And for many, Schoenberg holds the key to going backward culturally, yet appearing to move forward artistically.

Differences in historical position, however, have always seemed unimportant to me. Boulez, for instance, is intensely involved with how his music is constructed, while Duchamp selects a ready-made. Yet they both meet in that what you see or hear is not as important as the historical stance that brought it about.

For ten years of my life I worked in an environment committed to neither the past nor the future. We worked, that is to say, not knowing where what we did belonged, or whether it belonged anywhere at all. What we did was not in protest against the past. To rebel against history is still to be part of it. We were simply not concerned with historical processes. We were concerned with sound itself. And sound does not know its history.

The revolution we were making was not then or now appreciated. But the whole American Revolution was never appreciated either. Not really. It has never been given the importance of the French or Russian Revolutions. Why should it be? There was no blood bath, no built-in Terror.

We do not celebrate an act of violence - we have no Bastille Day. All it was, was, "Give me liberty, or give me death." Our work did not have the authoritarianism. I might almost say, the terror, inherent in the teachings of Boulez, Schoenberg, and now Stockhausen.

This authoritarianism, this pressure, is required of a work of art. That is why the real tradition of twentieth-century America, a tradition evolving from the empiricism of Ives, Varese and Cage, has been passed over as "iconoclastic" - another word for unprofessional. In music, when you do something new, something original youÕre an amateur. Your imitators - these are the professionals.

It is these imitators who are interested not in what the artist did, but the means he used to do it. This is where craft emerges as an absolute an authoritarian position that divorces itself from the creative impulse of the originator. The imitator is the greatest enemy of originality. The "freedom" of the artist is boring to him, because in freedom he cannot reenact the role of the artist. There is, however, another role he can and does play. It is this imitator, this "professional" that makes art into aurure.

This is the man who emphasizes the historical impact of the original work of art. Who takes from it and puts to use everything that can be utilized in a collective sense. Who brings the concepts of virtue, morality, and "the general good" into it. Who brings the world into it.

Proust tells us the great mistake lies in looking for the experience in the object rather than in ourselves. He calls this a "running away from one's own life." How many of these "professionals" would go along with this kind of thinking about art? They give us continual examples of looking for the experience in the object - in their case, the system, the craft that forms the basis of their world.

The atmosphere of a work of art, what surrounds it, that "place" in which it exists - all this is thought of a lesser thing, charming but not essential. Professionals insist on essentials. They concentrate on the things that make art. These are the things they identify with it, think of, in fact, as it - not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it.

This is what every painter I know understands. And this is what almost no composer I know understands.

The problem of music, of course, is that it is, by its very nature, a public art. That is, it must be played before we can hear it. One beats the drum, then hears the sound. That's reasonable enough. One can't just imagine sound as an abstraction, as not being related to someone pounding the piano or beating a drum. To play is the thing. This is the reality of music.

Yet somehow there is something demeaning in the fact that there is no other dimension for music than this public one. The composer doesn't even have the privacy of the playwright, whose play can exist as a piece of literature. The composer has to be the actor too. And this is embarrassing when I don't like his act. The lines of a masterpiece may be great, perfect, there may be no argument with them; but I may not like the way not like the way the composer is saying his own lines.

What I want to make clear is that composers instinctively gear themselves to this rhetorical, almost theatrical element of projection in music. Their most delicate whisper is a stage whisper, a sotto voce. Though tonality has long been abandoned, and atonality, I understand, has also seen its day, the same gesture of the instrumental attack remains. The result is an aural plane that has hardly changed since Beethoven, and in many ways is primitive - as Cezanne makes us see Renaissance space as primitive.

Naturally, if the instrumental attack in music always creates the same aural plane, something must be done to activate, to vary it. It must be propped up to make it more interesting. That is why music is so involved with differentiation. A piece like "Socrate" by Satie, that goes on and on, with very little happening, very little changing, is practically forgotten. Of course, everyone knows it's a marvelous piece. Every year there's talk about it, every year someone says, "Yes, let's do Socrate" - but somehow it isn't ever done...

Now, as things become increasingly compressed and telescoped, as differentiation becomes, in fact, the subject of most composition, music has taken on the aspect of some extraordinary athletic feat. Think of a runner trained to run backward at great speeds, or, what is even more difficult, to run backward very slowly and steadily. Why backward? Since music is increasingly obsessed with this one idea - variation - one must always be looking back at one's material for implications to go on. Change is the only solution to an unchanging aural plane created by the constant element of projection, of attack.

This is perhaps why in my own music I am so involved with the decay of each sound, and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing - leaving us rather than coming toward us.

I was once told about a woman living in Paris - a descendant of Scriabin - who spent her entire life writing music not meant to be heard. What it is, and how she does it, is not very clear; but I have always envied this woman. I envy her insanity, her impracticality.

In reading over what I have just written, I see that in an implicit way I suggest the possibility of another type of aural dimension. Actually, that is not what concerns me. What concerns me is that condition in music where aural dimension is obliterated. What do I mean by this? The obliteration of the aural plane doesnÕt mean the music should be inaudible - though my own music may sometimes seem to suggest this. Offhand, I think of Schubert, "Fantasie" in F-Minor. The weight of the melody here is such that you can't place where it is, or what it's or what it's coming from. There are not many experiences of this kind in music, but a perfect example of what I mean can be found in Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Frick. Not only is it impossible for us to comprehend how this painting was made; we cannot even fix where it exists in relation to our vision.

Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

The painter achieves mastery by allowing what he is doing to be itself. In a way, he must step aside in order to be in control. The composer is just learning to do this. He is just beginning to learn that controls can be thought of as nothing more than accepted practice.

I, for one, listening to so much of the music of the past twenty years, must admit I still find the controls somewhat intimidating. But the intimidation is waning, because all the music seems to have are these controls. I believe it was Veblen who once said of the economic goals of America, "What good is all this planning when the ends are so indeterminate?" One could make the same observation about music today. We see the same abundance - but of what? As the old mythology dies away, as music no longer extols the same subject matter it once did, a new mystique arises. The mystique of its own making, of its own construction. What composers apparently seek today is an infallible technical position. Although they claim to be so selective, so responsible for their choices, what they really choose is a system or a method that, with the precision of a machine, chooses for them. In the past, if you didn't like something, you didn't use it; you let it alone. Now everything is used. I remember certain composers who worked all the time. Now they have big reputations, and work an hour a week. They do a lot, they have so much to work from.

At least in the music of the past, when we find controls taking over, there is still a dichotomy; we can still distinguish between the man and his machine. This is true even when controls take over most completely. Take the "Grose Fuge", possibly the most revealing of all Beethoven's compositions. An aura of danger, of something gone amiss, hovers above this music; a suggestion of a final judgment turned against itself. One suspects that Beethoven in this work was pushed aside by the music's onslaught.

Do I dare to suggest here that whatever transcendental quality this work possesses might be just because of this fact? Just because what we have here, in its most volcanic and pathetic way, is a control in control of its master? What will happen to my thesis, to my years of thinking and working in the opposite direction?

The answer to the paradox may be in something I have written elsewhere: "For art to succeed, its creator must fail." How many times have I felt, while listening to a work of Cage, a sense of regret, or loss for its creator? And when we meet face to face at these concerts, I would really like to say to him, "Let me extend my condolences to you personally, but tell, "Atlas Eclipticalis" it was most thrilling experience of my life."

If there is no such thing as a moral, or an honest, or a "true" position in art, what does approximate it is an art with just a little less control.

Of course, the history of music has always been involved in controls, rarely with any new sensitivity to sound. Whatever breakthroughs have occurred, took place only when new systems were devised. The systems extended music's vocabulary, but in essence they were nothing more than complex ways of saying the same things. Music is still based on just a few technical models. As soon as you leave them you are in an area of music not recognizable as such.

Agreed, we might begin every age with the same handful of Assumptions, but not with the same closely related technical procedures throughout all of history! This obsessive emphasis on a ritual which has become identical with the belief it symbolizes, leads us to only one conclusion - that music must be some kind of religion. The mission of music is evidently to propagate the tenets of this religion. Schšnberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Boulez - their fame is because they did exactly this.

Interestingly enough, it is not to these men that so many of the younger generation have turned as to an almost religious force, but to a man totally removed from them - John Cage. Not since Tolstoi has there been an artistic figure who has made such an impression on the youth. The clue to this phenomenon may perhaps be found in a conversation between Cage and a visitor at his home in Stony Point. The visitor was speaking of Cage's many remarkable achievements and innovations, praising the enormous progress he had brought to music. Cage walked over to the window, looked out into the woods, and finally said, "I just can't believe I am better than anything out there."

This is not really an artistic, or even a philosophic, position. It is a religious position. Isn't this what Cage implies when he says he created a camera for others to take the picture? if art is self-effacement to begin with, what Cage achieves is self abolishment. We said earlier that the painter's mastery consists in stepping aside and letting things be themselves. Cage stepped aside to such a degree that we really see the end of the world, the end of art. That is the paradox. That this very self-abolishment mirrors its opposite - an omniscient dogma of final things. It does suggest, it does have an aura, of art's final revelation.

What does Cage give us besides this camera? It would be hard to say. Yet why do we know, in the most ambiguous musical circumstances, when it is the ear what is not Cage? We know at once if the performer is involved with his own glamour, or if he is insensitive, or if he misunderstands. Like a certain Personage we will not name, Cage is hidden, but we know what's good and bad in his eyes. If you're asked what is Cage, that's hard. But even Stockhausen knows when it's not Cage.

He does not give the young people of this generation an ideal. He does not cry, like Mayakovsky, "Down with your art, down with your love, down with your society, down with your God." The revolution is over. Mayakovsky's, and ours. What Cage has to offer is almost a type of resignation. What he has to teach is that just as there is no way to arrive at art, there is also no way not to.

A close and valued friend once became annoyed at my persistent admiration of Cage. "How can you feel this", he said, "when it's apparent that everything he stands for negates your own music?"

This was my answer: "If anyone negates my music, it is, say, Boulez. With Boulez you have all the aura of a right or righteous gesture. It looks like art, smells and feels like nothing but art, yet there is about it no creative pressure that makes a demand on me. It lulls me to sleep with its own easily acquired virtues."

My only argument with Cage, and there is only one argument, is with his dictum that, "Process should imitate nature in its manner of operation." Or, as he put it on another occasion, "Everything is music."

Just as there is an implied decision in a precise and selective art, there is an equally implied decision in allowing everything to be art. There is a Zen riddle that replies to its own question. "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" the riddle asks. "Answer either way and you lose your own Buddha nature."

Faced with a mystery about divinity, according to the riddle, we must always hover, uncertain, between the two possible answers. Never, on pain of losing our own divinity, are we allowed to decide. My quarrel with Cage is that he decided. A brilliant student of Zen, he has somehow missed this subtle point.

Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room. My concern at times is nothing more than establishing a series of practical conditions that will enable me to work. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

The question continually on my mind all these years is: to what degree does one give up control, and still keep that last vestige where one can call the work one's own? Everyone must find his own answer here, but there is a story about Mondrian that may clarify what I mean.

Someone suggested that since Mondrian used areas of all one color, why not use a spray instead of painting these areas? Mondrian was very interested, and immediately tried it. Not only did the picture not have the feel of a Mondrian, it didn't even have the look of a Mondrian. No one who has not experienced something of this will understand it.

The word that comes closest is perhaps touch. For me, at least, this seems to be the answer, even if it is nothing more than the ephemeral feel of the pencil in my hand when I work. IÕm sure if I dictated my music, even if I dictated it exactly, it would never be the same.

But this whole question of being an artist comes only after so much work and reminiscence begins to saturate your life. Proust did not know what his "subject" was until his life was almost over. What you are, or are about to become, is clear perhaps to others, but never to yourself. The fact that Flaubert could say to George Sand (after writing "Bovary") that he is not sure whether he wants to become a writer, is close to what I mean. One never has an identity as an artist, but in a vague way remembers oneself in that role.

The trouble is we use a theological dialectic to understand the whole mechanism of art. But theological speculation has all too often been very much of this world; the search for God merely a mask for the search for knowledge. ThatÕs why Spinoza was rejected. All he had to offer was God; nobody wanted that.

The search for art, all too often, has been another mask for the search for knowledge. Another attempt to reach heaven with facts. Since the Tower of Babel, this attempt has failed. You canÕt reach heaven with knowledge, you canÕt reach it with ideas, you canÕt even reach it with belief - remember our Zen riddle!

Years back someone said to me, "If you love something, why change it?"

Though this observation was not made about the art of the past, it very well might be. To answer it, one must understand that the love of the past in art is something very different to the artist than it is to the audience. The artist's life, remember, is a short one, the ordinary span of, say, seventy-odd. The audience, on the other hand, goes on for centuries, and is, in fact, immortal.

The audience feels the loss in change more crucially than the artist, because it loves art with the passionate love one gives a thing one can never really possess. What it incessantly demands of the artist is for him to make up for this loss. But it is very hard for the artist. He feels the audience is suffocating art with its love and concern. He doesnÕt understand the nature of their love, or the nature of their loss.

But this is perhaps a digression. What I am trying to lead up to is that there is a difference between the many anxieties of an artist trying to make something, trying to find safeguards against failure, and the anxiety of art. The anxiety of art is a special condition, and actually is not an anxiety at all, though it has all the aspects of one. It comes about when art becomes separate from what we know, when it speaks with its own emotion.

Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away. Still, there is this sense of something imminent. And what is imminent, we find, is neither the past nor the future, but simply - the next ten minutes. The next ten minutes... We can go no further than that, and we need go no further.

If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it. If there is a connection made with history, it is after the fact, and can be perfectly summed up in the words of de Kooning, "History doesn't influence me. I influence it."