(An Informal talk in New York between Morton Feldman and a friend)

Since I've come back from England it's been as much as I can do to catch up with things. Right now I'm finishing up an orchestral piece. When that doesn't go too well I turn to an article I started this summer. That doesn't always go too well either. The problem is to establish a certain continuity, but if you put too much emphasis on continuity, you can be left with nothing else.

- Is your article about England? -

Yes. Cardew and his circle interested me very much. In fact, the whole atmosphere there, the whole situation, was interesting to me. There's agenuine involvement, a genuine excitement about the new ideas coming from New York. I found the same talk, the same climate I remember here in the early fifties. It's just the groundwork, but one feels a change, a break with the rhetoric of France and Germany. "Renaissance" is the wrong word; it always implies a reference to the past. What's going on in England these days is not a return to the past or a rebellion against it. It's what I've described elsewhere as a getting out of history. The young intellectuals I met . . . they're not looking to New York for a "Guernica" or a "Gruppen". What they identify with is the whole spirit coming out of the New York scene, the fantastic paradox of down with the masterpiece; up with art.

France was so involved with the new that it passed them by. Germany is too eclectic, America too taken over by the academic avantgarde . . but in England you really feel it. Even the students I spoke to were willing to suspend their own values, willing to listen.

- You speak of intellectuals. Did many composers share this excitement you talk about? -

Aside from Bedford, Cardew and a few others of that group, I didn't meet composers in England. I met people who wrote music, but when they weren't in the pay of the B.B.C. they referred to themselves only as students or teachers. There's an incredible modesty about being in the arts. It's something that's not mentioned, like one's bravery in battle. Only one man reluct~ntly confessed to me that he had "dabbled" in music. I found out later that he had written an orchestral work that had been performed with some success by a major orchestra in London. No one admits he's a composer. I think the composers are shut up somewhere in Dickens-like orphanages and allowed out only to write operas for children.

- What about someone like Cardew? -

Cardew is talked about, but he's not played very often. It's not that he's up against any special condition, it's simply that there's less money. Here we're performed, but it's hard to get published; there it's just the reverse. Concerts of that kind are a luxury, you see . . . a luxury they can't afford. In the States the young composer usually enters the professional world through the University. In England it's apparently the B.B.C. that serves this function. Since Cardew is rarely performed by the B.B.C., I had to go to Paris before I heard an evening of his music.

I know Cardew chiefly as the man who "realized" the performance material for Carre' -

Yes, he was part of Stockhausen's atelier in Cologne for several years. Like Dunstable a few centuries before, he's had to spend a good part of his life just getting to "where the action is". At one point he taught himself to play the guitar simply in order to take part in the performance of a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kierkegaard. He still has copies of the piano music David Tudor brought from America in the early fifties, copies he himself made at that time. The public knows very little about all that, about the way the artistic community acts and interacts. By the time the public gets there, all it hears is the funeral oration. They have the impression that a certain artistic faction is representing them to the world, but more often than not they've picked the wrong men. Cardew and his friends have much more prestige in the rest of Europe than they do at home, but that just thickens the plot. They're making their own scene in England, very much as Cage and the rest of us made ours here in America back in the fifties. If anything, they're more "out-of-a-movie" than we were. I always think of Cardew, Tilbury and Bedford making that night train across the Channel to Warsaw. Cardew in his Victorian ulster, Tilbury in that black raincoat he wears, Bedford in a leather jacket . . . three conspirators right out of Eric Ambler, on their way to represent England at one of the most important avant-garde music festivals in Europe!

- I get the feeling that Cardew is quite important -

Any direction modern music will take in England will come about only through Cardew, because of him, by way of him. If the new ideas in music are felt today as a movement in England, it's because he acts as a moral force, a moral center. Without him, the young "far-out" composer would be lost. With him, he's still young, but not really lost.

- Did you find any reflection of all this in the universities? -

The emphasis is really more on a certain type of musicology in the universites . . . the ones I saw. You find a good deal of this passionate appreciation of some piece because it was written in the 17th century, or the 18th century, or before the first World War - especially before the first World War. Once I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. "That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific." That's not specifically English, of course. We all marvel at Purcell's daring harmonies as though they were written by a monkey.

- That's quite true. In fact, it all doesn't sound too different from the average American university. -

The research here is better; but again, that's just a question of money. The real difference to me was in the gossip media. American music departments are hotbeds of intrigue. I once had a talk with Leon Kirchner in the labyrinthine darkness of a New York concert hall. I'm told that the following morning at Harvard all Kirchner's students knew of our te'te-a'-te'te. Now, that's what I call ''musicology''. If it exists over there, it's all beneath the surface. Nobody seems impatient, nobody asked me for letters of introduction. When students out of graduate school come to visit me here, they want something. As one of our less esteemed presidents has said, "the business of America is business Well, in England it isn't, or doesn't seem to be. What you feel is something else . . . an unmistakable atmosphere of waiting.

The word "Establishment" is, of course, just a music-hall joke. No country is free of it, and it's constantly changing; so much so here in America that William Schuman once introduced me to his wife as a composer who was "both in and out". But seriously, this thing you feel in England, this waiting for the Establishment, waiting to be taken in, taken up, it's stronger there than any place I know. Maybe that's what creates that odd immature atmosphere, as though everyone were looking at the handwriting not on the wall, but on the blackboard.

You see, it's not obvious, the way it is in Paris, where the art is bourgeois, the food is bourgeois, the artist himself is bourgeois. Or America, for that matter, where the middle class owns, literally owns the Ballet and the Philharmonic. In England it's different; you still feel an association with Kings, still feel a sort of mustiness of that patronage of days of old. It's almost as if they've let it slip, any possibility of an upsurge artistically . . . let it slip with this current of the Empire going, everything going. All they have, and all they need, is tradition. In New York all one has and needs is art. Nothing else can survive in such a soil-less waste.

Philip Guston once told me about visiting an Italian painter in Venice. After finding his way to a darkened alley and climbing to the top floor of an ageless palazzo, he knocked, entered, and on the easel was a gigantic painting of a futuristic city. The New York landscape doesn't make for dreams of other worlds, but in return we have something else - we are not deceived by progress. We are the arch-modernists with no feeling whatsoever for modernity.

And yet, sitting in that train, looking out of that window, I thought of Rimbaud coming back to France to die. How thankful he must have been that so little had changed. Even as a stranger, I felt a need that England should be the same, if and when I might return. Then I understood the ambivalence, understood how difficult, how problematical it would be for them to enter a 20th century sound. England is so beautiful, so very beautiful that everything brought forth there becomes, of itself, inviolable.

- If that's your feeling, what possible advice can you have for the young English composer? -

I have very little advice to give and very little to suggest. If a student is perplexed and mystified, all I can tell him is, "Go to a good school, start learning from the beginning, if you can ever find that beginning, and never, never stop." You may even get there if you never stop. Brahms did.

For the rest, what's lacking in the music is what music everywhere has always lacked, a Blake or a Hopkins who would bring to it a more personal syntax, more involed with its own meaning, its own vocabulary. Reading letters of Keats or Byron, you discover they were often quite discontented with poetry. Puschkin has a marvellous, long poem where, after several halting lines, he breaks off to say, "Hey! What's wrong with my Muse? She's limping!" What composer has ever complained about music? The composer is always euphoristic, smug. He's married to a perfect Muse, a perfect bore, a blue-stocking! Today especially, when science and mathematics enjoy such prestige, he wants his music to be with the times. In America he reads Max Planck. In England. . . I don't know what he reads in England, but I'm sure there, too, he would like to feel that if something can't be measured it doesn't exist.

Like the tailor, the composer everywhere is always busy with the yardstick. He doesn't have the problem of truth. What I mean is, he doesn't work with the impossibility of ever reaching it, like the painter or the poet. For the composer the truth is always the process, the system.

-The general professional feeling is that you're evading the problem when you work without compositional ideas, without what you call systems . -

I'm evading their problem. I'm not evading my own. The difference is that, since my problem is not historical, it seems "fanciful". I just read an article in an English magazine called Tempo questioning certain views of mine. Well, according to this man in Tempo, it's more difficult to find "new but intelligible pitch relationships" than to write a music that "concentrates on sound". But why is it more difficult? He knows nothing of a music that concentrates on sound. He speaks of Ives; he doesn't understand Ives, doesn't understand his tragic frame of reference. The main thing about Ives - never forget it - is that he hardly ever heard his music played. All his life he was branded an amateur. An amateur is someone who doesn't stuff his ideas down your throat.

But he has nothing to worry about, that chap in Tempo. He's going to have it all. Pitch relationships, plus sound and chance thrown in. Total consolidation. Those two words define the new academy. You can tie it all up in the well-known formula, "You made a small circle and excluded me; I made a bigger circle and included you". A kind of Jonah-and-the-whale syndrome is taking place. Everything is being chewed up en masse and for the mass. Until recently, unless you worked in the avant-garde mainstream (which is to say, in the SchoenbergiWebern orientation), nobody knew what you were doing. Then, as serial music began to utilize and incorporate chance techniques, they became acceptable, too.

It may seem strange to call Boulez and Stockhausen popularizers, but that's what they are. They glamorized Schoenberg and Webern, now they're glamorizing something else. But chance to them is just another procedure, another vehicle for new aspects of structure or of sonority independent of pitch organization. They could have gotten these things from Ives or Varese, but they went to these men with too deep a prejudice, the prejudice of the equal, the colleague.

- Is the music public in England sophisticated enough to accept chance? -

I'm told the well-bred Englishman eats what is set before him without complaint. On the other hand, not every artist is tuned into a mass sensibility, and where else does consolidation lead? Such artists must find another road, the road of Kafka, Mondrian, Webern. For me, these men are what the Oral Law must have been to the early Hebrews, a sort of moral legend of the uninfluential, handed down by word of mouth. It may sound paradoxial, but Kafka, Mondrian, and Webern have never been influential. It's their imitators that are influential. That's what gives every artist his real prestige - his imitators.

The truth is, we can do very well without art; what we cant't live without is the myth about art. The myth-maker is successful because he knows that in art, as in life, we need the illusion of significance. He flatters this need. He gives us an art that ties up with philosophical systems, an art with a multiplicity of references, of symbols, an art that simplifies the subtleties of art, that relieves us of art. Whether it does this by the power of persuasion or the persuasion of power, I leave to the social pathologists.

I'm looking for something else now, something that will no longer fit into the concert hall. If music would ever take that road, that direction, that would be the real composer's paradise. It's only in the movies that he sits there beaming while 10,000 extras sing his requiem. I don't wish to press the point too strongly at this time, but I do feel the concert hall leads only to cross purposes for the composer. I would not only welcome its demise, it would be my dream. I never fully understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one. It would be different if the concert hall were more like a museum that ended arbitrarily, say, with Debussy. Until recently many museums ended with the Impressionists, and they certainly had a lively look about them. The new confuses the old. Sometimes they enhance each other, sometimes they do just the opposite. Manet, for instance, because of the "new", no longer looks so unfinished. Webern, on the other hand, has to compete with the stereotyped complexities of his imitators. The result is that his music no longer has the same shock. Take Opus 21, for example. It doesn't sound the same today as it did in 1950 when I first heard it performed. Why? Varese retains the same impact. Why not Webern? Is it because his art is an objective art or, shall we say, an art too subjective in its objectivity? Is this why his image is now so blurred, so almost submerged in the cultural mundation that has engulled it? It must be so ... Look at Josquin ... at Della Francesca. Through the centuries their work has never lost its intense focus on its own particular moment. It hasn't grown old and finally dropped dead of culture. At the exact moment, probably before it was seen or heard by anyone else, the artist in some mysterious way embalmed it. When Della Francesca painted the cross in the background, it had nothing to do with subjectivity, or objectivity -it was memory. There's something almost a little scary about this kind of art. Other artists keep away. They don't understand this "strange simplicity" in relation to anything as dramatic as the Crucifixion. They leave it alone ... intact.

The thing is, it's not only individuals like Webern ... culture itself can reach a saturation point. Let's say that art as we like it began its swift march during the Renaissance with painting, appeared not too long afterward in England as literature, and emerged in post-Lutheran Germany as music. And then let's be fashionale and add, art died. It died a long time ago and what came after was analysis or sociology. Balzac, Proust - all that is sociology. Art became critical. Most music of the 20th century is criticism of past music. Just as we've been given an Existentialism without God, we are now being given a music without the composer. We want Bach, but Bach himself is not invited to dinner. We dont't need Bach, we have his ideas.

- You spoke of the article in Tempo. Do you agree with its basic assumption, that a musical composition can be conceived independent of the sound? -

It's an assumption that puts me in the classical position of the one sane man in the lunatic asylum. On a recent radio program with John Cage I mentioned Semmelweiss, who was stoned in the street because he asked doctors to wash their hands before they deliver women in childbirth. May I identify with this Jewish doctor? All I ask is that composers wash out their ears before they sit down to compose. How can I possibly answer so many authorities, so much talk about Beethoven's "logical sequences of ideas"? The fact is Beethoven himself was once very annoyed when someone called him a composer. He wanted to be referred to as a tone poet.

If the article accused me of killing melody, I would hang my head. But pitch relationships? I can't get that excited about pitch relationships. I don't deny the validity of the pitch set ... but in relation to the sonic experience today, it seems to me the equivalent of a baby's playpen, and just as full of toys and pacifiers.

It's true, generally speaking, that what gives us confidence in a composer is a certain uniformity, a certain consistency of tone felt throughout his work. We get this sense of a "world" in the Gregorian Chant, in Debussy, in the twelvetone. But in recent serial music, with aspects of timbre becoming more prevalent, with the objet sonore more included, more extended in terms of pitch organization, the music itself has become nothing more than a game of acoustical chance.

But how can you argue with logic? I have no real quarrel with that man in Tempo. I agree with everything he says about music . . . with one difference. I don't like it. I want to change it.

When you are involved with a sound as a sound as a limited yet infinite thought to borrow Einstein's phrase, new ideas suggest themselves, need defining, exploring, need a mind that knows it is entering a living world not a dead one. When you set out for a living world you don't know what to take with you because you don't know where you're going. You don't know if the temperature will be warm or cold; you have to buy your clothes when you get there. Wasn't there a renowned anthropologist who insisted one must go into the field alone, unobtrusive, in order to enter the environment without disturbing it and discover its true essence? That's not quite the way the Princeton University Music Department embarks on its expeditions into the new sound world. There are such crowds of them, they take so much with them. All their equipment, all their machines. They come to hear, but all they hear are their own machines.

- A world famous composer said on television not long ago that the one unforgivable thing in art is anarchy. One must learn the rules, he said, if it's only to break them. -

Yes, everybody keeps saying that. I've never understood it. I never understood what I was supposed to learn and what I was supposed to break. What rules? Boulez wrote a letter to John Cage in 1951. There was a line in that letter I will never forget. "I must know everything in order to step off the carpet." And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream . . . to crown himself Emperor. Was it love of knowledge, love of music, that obsessed our distinguished young provincial in 1951? It was love of analysis - an analysis he will pursue and use as an instrument of power.

And where did it all lead? It led to his writing an article in which he said Schoenberg was dead. I ask you, was that nice? "Schoenberg is dead", says Boulez. What need of Schoenberg now? But Stravinsky, that's quite another matter. Stravinsky, you see, is alive, and Boulez now "knows everything". He knows how to be silent about Stravinsky. He has learned everything, hasn't he? Yes, indeed. Everything to his advantage. Forgive me for injecting this jeremiad, but your question really carried me away.

You were asking about the rules. There's a parable of Kafka about a man living in a country where lie doesn't know the rules. Nobody will tell him what they are. He knows neither right nor wrong, but he observes that the rulers do not share his anxiety. From this he deduces that rules are for those who rule. What they do is the rule. That's why all my knowledge doesn't make me understand what Mozart did that I should also do in order to reach a state of artistic grace.

The composer's dilemma seems inseparable from the medium itself. He dreams of a music that will transcend the instruments and still remain magnificently idiomatic. To achieve this dream, lie naturally turns to the technical materials at hand. This is what Beethoven did with such great success in the last quartets. Boulez, in a latter-day vocabulary, repeats this performance, which has come to be considered the reality of music, the criterion of what "great" music should be. We have a choice, however, between this reality, and the reality, say, of William Byrd. Simply by having the genius to know his music was coming from those voices. Byrd has left us with an unfathomable mystery. Listening, we surmise that not "musical meaning" but human breathing brought music into the world. For me, it is the music of Byrd that is truly idiomatic, where much of Beethoven, always excepting the built-in suavity of the String Quartets, is acoustically out of control.

The tragedy is that Beethoven himself, contrary to all the evidence brought forward in the Tempo articles, was not essentially driving toward technical mastery, technical manipulation. He was a man who was going toward sound - and failed.

But who cares about all these rational arguments and rational authorities. Hindemith especially . . Hindemith, who couldn't write a note without going back to his Bach, really should have kept out of it altogether.

Quite the contrary, I claim the past. Beethoven, Bach, Schoenberg, Webern. If the pedant wants to understand me, he must understand my past. I'll take on all comers. I'll use the right language, call chords tn-tones. There will be no embarrassment as to my intellectual abilities. In fact, there will be surprises! Pierre . . . Karlheinz . . . Milton . . . are you ready?