Okay, as you remember Orpheus was a popular poet, he is like Frank Sinatra, it's in modern dress and he's walking down Paris streets and a girl stops him for an autograph and he goes to the "avantgarde-cafe"' and asks an elderly artist there what is he lacking? Why do all the other artists ignore him when he comes in, what's wrong with his work? And the old man hands him a book and says this is the latest rage. He picks up the book and he's looking at empty pages you see, and he is out of it somewhat and he hands the book back to the old man who looks over and says to him, "astonish us!"

Maybe it's because I'm Jewish; actually, the Christian point of view is that there was god and then there was the world and the Jewish point of view is almost as if there was the universe in order to have a god. It's a little different. In other words I'm not creating music, it's already there, and I have this conversation with my material, you see. I'm not like Stockhausen: Here, my friends, I give you . . . He is a great man like Schweitzer, he's playing organ, he is playing Bach on the organ for savages in Africa, I don't have that feeling about me, you know that there is a very funny conversation. Stockhausen asked for my secret, "what's your secret"... and I said" I don't have any secret, but if I do have a point of view, it's that sounds are very much like people. And if you push it, it pushes you back. So, if I have a secret: don't push the sounds around". Karlheinz leans over to me and says: "Not even a little bit?"

My grandmother said this, and it was based on an uncle, a son of hers, her favorite son, she said, "one must know everything and do nothing". My uncle Eddy. That was a millionaire living down in Florida who knew everything and all he did was go out with young women, go to the race track, and his whole life in fact . . . he dropped dead of a heart attack at 82 with a young woman in his suite in Miami Beach. He knew everything and did nothing and, but of course he worked very hard doing notbing. Nothing was very strenuous. But he didn't work very hard to make money. Once in a while pick up a phone, turned it into half million dollars, little conversation on the phone, some little gamble. He had an instinct how to make a million dollars, little conversation on the phone, some little gamble. He had an instinct how to be a millionaire?

There was a book by a very famous man, Bernard Bruck, he was a big financier and he was a friend of all the presidents and he never had an office, his office was a park bench in Central Park in New York. He would walk with very important people from his appartement to Central Park they just sit and countries were formed and destroyed on the park bench, somebody would come from some country and says, "Mr. Bruck, Brazil needs ten billion dollars". He said, "Well, let's talk about it, let's see if we can get it together for you". So I was in an airport and I had an hour and a half to kill and I see this book in a bookstore, How to be a millionaire by Bernard Bruck, so I bought it. And I started to read it, I used it in my seminar actually because it's a very interesting book. On the second page he says, first I must tell you is that if you would do now what I did, you would be in jail. He said: "I made my first million at 24, he said, because I figured out that the stock market in London closed at a different time because of the time difference and there were no laws at that time governing it. And so it would find out what happened on the London stock market by marking a phone call and I immediately would buy on the New York exchange, you see, no one else was doing it, they didn't think of it". And he was a kid, he said "that's how I made my first million", he said "When they found out they made a government law". When he talked about all the innovative things he did, then the government immediately made a law. It's reallv apropos of art, too. Debussy said in the turn of the century, nobody believed him, he said, "every work of art develops a law. But you don't begin with it". He knew it and we all know it, we all know that the way the sounds in every piece intuitively seems to do things. We all know this but immediately we want to conceptualize it.

I think what really makes a composer distinguished from another composer except for StocThausen, is one's instrumentation. And this is something that I know my most sophisticated students never talk about, no one ever thinks about. They feel it's an ad hoc thing, any instruments, it's the notes given to them from god, the ideas in a sense that give the work a certain distinction, naturally. You see, I feel that orchestration is another gift. And Varese once said to me, "orchestrators are born". He never said composers are born, he used the word orchestrators are born. And I really feel it's another gift and very few people have that gift. Maybe that's why it's not considered a parameter. I mean, Messiaen is not an orchestrator. That's not orchestration you hear, I don't know what the hell it is. It's Disney, it's Disneyland. It's technicolor, you know from the forties when they first came out, like a Doris Day movie, those crazy colors, you know how crazy the people look in the old techonicolor, that's Messiaen, just something is wrong someplace.

Somebody, an old man in Berlin, two days ago, he was about 84, 86, he told me he was the only composer alive in Berlin that was born in the 19th century. That was his distinction. Hes asked me what I thought composition was, he heard my piece, he liked it, though he thought it was too "colorful". And I said, "I'm not interested in color". I said "My definition of composition is: the right note in the right place with the right instrument!"

Schoenberg in his harmony book talks about the relationship between pitch and timbre. And he says that timbre is the prince of the domain, that the resulting timbre is to some degree more important than the pitch itself, as we think of as pitch. That's a very important idea. That's why I feel a lot of Webern's subsequent orchestration, and many people feel this, that his orchestration was somewhat arbitrary. That you just can't take a row and give it to a piccolo and then give the other segment to the doublebass. You can't be insensitive to the pitches here, you see, how they speak and go on. So, that whole Darmstadt world, or the Webern influence is that essentially instruments, were used just as another denominator of variation. And very few were sensitive to the instruments playing those notes. They associate usually pitch as tonal music. I don't, you see. In other words, something happened to pitch that was terrible. It was like these people get sex changes, it's as pitch went to Scandinavia and came back an interval, had a sex change. It had to come back an interval. It's like in my early piano pieces 1951, I would have a chromatic field and I introduced an octave, No one was doing that. Very beautiful, it worked. But even Webern had octaves. You are not supposed to hear anything out of the context.

A very funny incident happened to me many years ago. I was in a Chinese restaurant in New York and in came a group, a very strong group, like the Darmstadt group in New York, from Princeton University, Milton Babbitt and all these people, they all came in, they had some kind of meeting and they were in New York and they went into this Chinese restaurant and I was there with my wife. And I grew up with these people, I went to school with them. And they waved and I waved and then, I was getting up, I payed the check and I passed their table and I shook hands and they were all kind of looking at me and I said, "Boys, forgive for speaking in broken music!"

I once asked Paul Zukofsky: "When you have something difficult to do, how much time do you give it?" And Paul said, "I work on a passage for an hour. If I find that it's not gonna work I don't play the piece." He gives it an hour, and then of course within that hour as he is working it out he is thinking that "Maybe if I play it over and over again later on it's gonna get better" in other words he knows that he is gonna have the same problem with that passage, which is not his problem, in other words it's due to the composers.

I do the same thing in my music. I sit down if I have any problems, half an hour anything. I realize that has nothing to do with anything else except concentration. In other words, years ago painters used to be very upset, they killed themselves with cocain and drinks, they would say, "the work is so difficult for me to get -" They were difficult, not the work. And I feel that when I can't work it's want of concentration. And through the years I found for myself ways to know my level of concentration.

I work with the pen and that's a very interesting phenomena because when I work with the pen everything is crossed out. Some pages there is nothing crossed and it's usually those pages when there is something in a continuity, you see. Many times I make my continuity later, which essentially is the way Tolstoi worked. I don't necessarily work in a continuity.

Usually my pieces began maybe on the tenth measure, kind of getting into it. And then I would look at it and throw away the first ten measures. And that's why my music has always that opening, you see, because I borrow from all different things. I tell you how I get my opening. I got it from Kafka. I read an article once on Kafka and I was very fond of Kafka. You'll notice Kafka's first sentences: "Someone has been telling lies about Joseph K.", you know that's Kafka, you are in the world of Kafka. We were all reading Kafka in New York at about twenty, twentyone, fantastic thing. I took that idea and I put it into my own music. Kafka definitely influenced my feeling of how to begin a piece. Immediately in the atmosphere. Not like Bartok, mesto or something, another mesto.

I work everyday more in terms of feeling that I have done a day's work. Now, it could be two hours, it could be sixteen hours, it could be two days going into each other without sleep. Unless I feel, that the day's work is completed. I'm not counting how much work I do, I just psychologically feel that I have to do a day's work. By day's work I don't mean, you know, seven hours, it could be any time. Sometimes a day's work is waiting, Stravinsky worked that way. Stravinsky talks about waiting and he would sit around and wait. I clean my Teppich, I read books on Teppich, I clean the house, always waiting. I learned from painter friends, I have one friend, he became very successful, he had three houses, he had one in Florida, he had one in Woodstock, and he had another studio in New York. Everything was waiting, all different sizes of canvases were already stretched, well, he was a millionaire already. All the paints are there anything, in case he might want to use acrylic even though he didn't have it, it was all there, all the possibility, all the parameters of work, not of art, but of work was ready for him, so that if he comes in he doesn't waste any time with the preparation. I'm very much the same, it's very important for me to have all the types of paper waiting, I'm very sensitive to paper. Pens are very important for a lot of reasons, because of my eyes.

Mahler and Freud. You know that he saw Freud, and there is a document written by Freud -if anybody is interested, Freud's greatest English student wrote the definitive book on Freud in two volumes, and it's in this book, Ernst Jones, first big Freudian.

Mahler tells Freud that his father hit his mother and there was always much violence. Mahler as a little boy runs out of the house, comes into the street and there is an organ - winder playing and then everytime when there is stress, Angst, the Kitsch would come out in the music. This is all documented, this interview. And so it wasn't a lapse into bad taste with Mahier, it was autobiographical, which is the nature of the symphonic form anyway, the cyclic form is you wake up with a headache and then you get rid of the headache, and then you take a walk in the Wald and then you come back. So was makeer keeping this literary aspect of the autobiographical Angst. And so it works in Mahier only because he is orchestrating anxiety and that's what saves it. Just like with Ives, he is orchestrating his background. Ives also was literary. Ives couldn't write a note unless it's literary. To some degree Debussy is totally programmatic. But it was orchestrated.

In fact, the more literary you are, the more you have to orchestrate because you are setting up that particular type of - you are telling the people, '"yes I know what it is, I know what it is, but listen!" VII When you hear my new stringquartet, there is a section that appears to be tonal. And I had an idea which is to take something and then finally have it disintegrate. And so finally what I did was that the beginning is presented straight, then make other connections, say from A-Z I do C-A-B-F. It's all constructed, so I could place anything against anything else and it would seem normal because the design of that little module is perfect, the whole thing is a nightmare, it's like a jigsawpuzzle that every piece you put in fits. And then when you finish it, you see that it's not the picture. That was the idea. The jigsawpuzzle, everything finishes and it's not the picture. Then you do another version and it's not the picture. Finally you realize that you are not gonna get a picture. It goes on for an hour. It's very beautiful. The only thing I don't like about it: it was idea-oriented. Because I knew a priori by the nature of the material that it's gonna have stages of disintegration. Now, what was interesting only about it's disintegration was that only the process of disintegration was variation. Do it in different varying degrees of abstraction and various degrees of it's literaryness.

Two guys visit Hadyn, two journalists from Cologne, they ask him about literary, programmatic pieces and he says, "yes" he says "oh, I wrote this piece which was a dialogue between god and a sinner." Big theme, right? And they said, "What's the name of that piece?" he said, "I forgot." He forgot this important dialogue. Finally, after he got rid of the literary element, it just was a piece of music and he didn't know which was, the theme, it was just a piece of music after a while. He probably forgot. Because this is something in a sense that you have to realize, that say a great renaissance painting, say a Piero della Francesco, a very reverential, religious painting like Michelangelo - Andre' Malraux once said, "what pope could tell Michelangelo what to paint?" - because people were complaining that it was like Hollywood, they were programmed, they worked for the Vatican, and that was his answer, "what pope could tell Michelangelo what to paint?" - but there is that combination of maybe an abstract painting, you go to the National Museum and take a look at that fantastic Piero, nothing could be more literary then, Christ and the dove, you don't know where the dove is, and the three wise back in the pool and the reflection and the calmness, unbelievable masterpiece, totally telling you a story, at the same time fantastically abstract, at the same time.

There is a marvelous story about Duchamp and an art student in San Francisco many years ago. Duchamp goes to this art school and he sees this kind of tough, macho San Francisco painter and Duchamp looks at this picture he doesn't know, he says to the fellow "what are you doing?" and the painter says "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing". Duchamp pats him on the back and says "keep up the good work!"

That's another reason why I work on the piano. It slows me down. If you don't work at the piano then it's what Hemingway refered to as the difference between writing and typing. If you don't write at the piano you are typing. Do you know the way Hemingway wrote? It's very interesting because the fact that he wrote about Michigan and his doctor father and the ducks, he wrote very much from something he picked up from Gertrude Stein, who observed it in Cezanne. And yet the subject has nothing to do with the Cezanne. He also picked it up with Gertrude Stein's idea about what went in English literature. Essentially he tried to get back to Chaucer, Gertrude Stein, she said "in the beginning was the word. Then they put two words together, then they made a sentence, then they made a paragraph and they forgot the word". "Sumer is acumen in", it's great, "sumer is acumen in", the phonetic feeling of the word. So he would sit in a cafe' and in black, in block letters he would write "BACK HOME IN MICHIGAN" - this is only a parody, right - and he would look at one word, to another word and to another word and then he would form the sentence, rather than just saying, writing some boring version of back home in, you know. Very very important and the sound of the word in relation to another word just sitting there like an idiot and writing these things and then waking up one day and your name is Hemingway.

Michael von Biel studied with me a long time ago and I said, "well, let's work together". I was working on some two-piano-music and thought it was interesting and he was already a sophisticated young composer so I said "let's work on some two-piano-pieces". So the first lesson he comes and all the music is in the middle. And I said "Michael, no matter what you are gonna do, if you write always in the middle it's gonna sound hke a choral. No matter what you do." The next week he comes and he has middle but he has a lot of bass. And I said "Michael", I said "be careful with the bass. It's lugubrious. Be careful with the bass". The third lesson he comes, a lot of high notes. I said "Michael, be careful with the high notes, it's 20th century affectation behind that." He got very upset, he got hysterical: "No low notes" he said, "no middle notes, no high notes! What kind of notes?" And I grabbed him by the tie, that was the day when young men wore ties, and I said "Michael, high, middle, low, alles zusammen!" He didn't need any more lessons, he got the formula "Alles zusammen, Michael!"

In America they say: "On August tO, the priest is gonna come in and you are gonna get it at 10 o'clock in the morning. And that will be 8 months from now." But in Paris you are condemned to death and you never know when they come and get you. They feel it's much more humane to be taken by surprise. So you can either have the French way here or you can have the American way. And the American way there are no surprises, you see, I would prefer never knowing when you are gonna hear something, when you are gonna see something.

For them taking the picture is enough. I mean, after all, you go to the Himalayas. It costs you all that Geld, you have to walk up the Himalayas, it takes you two weeks, you nearly can get killed and then on top of the Himalayas you take a little Browny camera, that you payed drei Marks for, on top of the Himalayas and you start taking pictures! That's what it amounts to, that's what they are doing! They break their neck. They spend 20 years working and then they start, and then they give you their pictures developed on cheap paper, not on good kodak-paper, on a little Browny and they want the Nobel-prize! It's not gonna happen. All the great composers were great orchestrators. Name me a great composer besides Karlheinz Stockhausen, who is not a great orchestrator.

I did one lesson on the street with Varese, one lesson on the street, it lasted half a minute, it made me an orchestrator. He said, "what are you writing now, Morton?" I told him. He says, "make sure you think about the time it speaks from the stage to out there. Let me know when you get a performance, I'd like to hear it." And he walked away. That was my one lesson, it became like instant, one lesson and I started out, I was about 17 when I knew him, and from then on, I started to listen.

I see ideas as a bunch of children in the house all yearning for attention. "Change my diper, change my dip -", I was in a car we are going up to Cape Cod, and this nasty kid, I wanted to give that kid a smack, we are riding, go up and get there, get to Boston to stop. The kid: "I want a Coca-Cola!". "Wait, honey, another half an hour." "I want, I want my Coca-Cola now! I want my Coca-Cola now!" "These three notes have to be done this way now! These three notes have to be done -!" Really! That's the way I see it. Like a bunch of Kinder vying for attention. In fact, I don't even tell my students this, because other ways they get confused, I don't even consider the art of composition. I consider it, I call it the "band-aid-treatment". Just a band-aid, that the meaning, it started to bleed, the interval started to bleed, you put a band-aid on it not to see the blood, you see. Who wants blood on the page? Conceptual blood.

I got a copy of Boulez first sonata and the slow movement is just two pages and there were different attacks there, and it looked familiar, I don't know what, I felt something, I couldn't articulate, I'm looking at it and it's registering. About three years later I'm looking through all scores and there is a religious song of Webern, also two pages. And I look at it and I get a pencil and I get the Boulez, and I mark the attacks, the kind of attacks, and then I took the Webern, the kind of attacks was exactly the same. So, evidently, that was no accident, so, evidently Pierre felt that if he had the distribution of those kind of attacks in a short piece of approximately the same duration as Webern, he had, almost in a kind of Voodoo, it's not normal, it's '"spinnst", the Voodoo kind of sucking the blood of the enemy, you see, you are gonna get a strength, that's essentially what it is. And isn't that tradition, if we suck out the blood and the knowledge of the past, we are gonna get it's strength, it's what they refer to Reagan as the Voodoo economics? This is Voodoo tradition. Maybe there is some kind of primeval hangover? Let us talk about these things. We are not talking about history, we are talking about a few people, that's history. We are not talking about all the Kinder hanging around Darmstadt.

I once had a wild six hour discussion walking the streets of New York with Boulez, how he is telling me, he is really telling me but he is using Ives, "Oh, Ives, the amateur!" And I think it's absolutely outstanding, I think it's absolutely incredible why one would think about Ives as an amateur. No. He wrote fantastic things, like the conception of the 4th symphony, I'm talking about the one with the four pianos, he never changed anything, Mahler was changing things all the time. Why was he an amateur? Because he wasn't a European? A man does all these innovations, he is an amateur, I, for years, I'm still called an amateur. I'm one of the few original people writing music, I'm an amateur! Is it only that -, I never understood that John Cage is an amateur, I'm an amateur, Ives is an amateur.

But some jerk, some jerk in Budapest, in a sense, copying Bartok is a professional! I never understood this . . . To me the definition of professional is someone who doesn't have a job. If you don't have a job in Europe you are professional.

I remember once I heard a marvelous discussion with very famous abstract painters at the art club and the discussion was, when is a work of art finished? Wonderful discussion. And none of them had any formal answer. De Kooning said "the last stroke finishes it", Philip Guston said "when he walks away from it, that's when it's finished", and each one had a different attitude about it. For me it was very influential in my life because what the painters taught me was to ask essentially; oh I ask many questions when I'm working, if I would have to say which I would put on top, I would say: "What is needed in this piece? How much do I take out? What's needed, what's needed?" Now what is very interesting when I first did my early graph music, things had to come in a certain time span. Now it didn't have to come exactly in the beginning of the time span, and as you know it can come anywhere, like crossing a street, that's why I called them "Intersection", to me time was the distance, metaphorically, between a green light and a red light. It was like traffic, it was a control. So I always controlled the time, but I didn't control the notes. When I started to do my free durational music, I controlled the notes but I didn't control the time. So both these ideas meant that I had to leave something out.

There was a marvelous painter in New York hat was always drunk. And he shared the studio with another painter, a very good painter. He just died, and the good painter would pass by the other man's studio and he would take the picture away and give it to this man's dealer. He would watch the picture and take it away and give it to his dealer, because, he was always so drunk, he didn't know that there was a picture on the easle. He would just come into the studio drunk and start painting again. But the whole idea is that the guy used to kill the pictures, used to overwork the pictures. So he used to just work very seriously 12, 11 hours, then he would run out of whisky, go down and get whisky and while he went down the other guy would take the picture and he comes up, looks, like Charlie Chaplin, no picture, he puts a new canvas on.

One of the problems about functional harmony is that it hears for us, see. We no longer have to hear. We are the found object, you see. Where it's listening for us. Harmony is like going to a public accountant to do certain work, or it hears for us, it's fantastic, it's marvelous, we don't have to hear anymore. But we have to be smart. We have to be smart, like Mozart, to make sure that it's the best kind of harmony that's working for him. Here, very beautiful, very beautiful. Listen how harmony hears for us (plays Mozart) Beethoven could have gone home after that one! Sensation, beautiful, gorgeous!

I always liked what Freud said about mankind. He said "Men are gods with artificial limbs" men are gods with artificial limbs! Rather than - see the artist has an incredible problem. Especially if they are young and they are growing up because everything is right. Bach is right and his Kinder are right. Gluck is right, Palestrina is right, Karlheinz is. right, everybody is right. The confusion of a young artist growing up is not the confusion that everybody is wrong and I'm right, the confusion is that everybody is right, am I wrong? So, you're intimidated, because every system works, because they set it up that it does work, and it's the nature of western men to do fantastic things, and so it works. Hegel works, Kierkegaard works. Kierkegaard said "it doesn't make any difference because eventually what is gonna happen to me is that I will be part of his system, he is gonna incorparate me in his system". So if he doesn't work alone, you see. And then someone else incorporates, this is the formula of Stockhausen, and it is based on a military formula. And the military formula is this: "You make a small circle to exclude me, I'll make a larger circle to include you". And essentially, this is a dynamic in history. And then after 300 years we look at it, we refine it and we start all over again.

When a work gets three quarters in and most composers feel that's the time they got to wrap it and be interesting I usually go the other way. I mean, I can understand psychologically why a composer does this after 3/4s in, many times, in my new string quartet, on the third hour I start to take away material rather than bring in, make it more interesting, and for about an hour I have a very placid world. I don't use the drama, essentially. I don't use any of those words. No, because they need the crutch, the umbrella to write a piece. I say that history has changed! History, before 1950 you needed a terrific idea and you had to know how to use it, and the idea also has to be a part of the Zeitgeist.

So, when Grieg came into Berlin at 24, Grieg, you know, out of the blue, out of the north, sat down at 24 (sings) 24-year old, young guy, nobody ever heard of him, from Scandinavia, Zeitgeist, the 4th, everything, fantastic, had a big success he couldn't write another good piece after that. So, you needed that, so you need a terrific idea. Now you need a terrific non-idea, that has to be terrific, but it's a nonidea. What's a non-idea?

But you see, what happens. It's not a question of a non-idea, but it's like an exercise. Let us be intelligent Menschen, it's an exercise to get rid of the old ideas. If we are gonna say "let's have a non-idea", we can't have that, and then we are left, we are left without all the things we know. Let's think about that which we don't I like a think-tank. Someone else's idea is your non-idea. I have been having my non-ideas for the past 20 years. I remember once I was talking to Stockhausen about time. He got furious at me! He said "you are not writing your music in heaven", you are writing your music here on earth, and a sound is either here or here, or here!" I said "Yes. The only difference for me is that a sound is either (softly:) here or here". His idea was this (hits the table strong) and my non-idea was this (-) (laughs) very funny conversation about Zeit.

He wanted measured, he wanted time measured out, and I wanted time felt, a more subjective feeling for time, you see.

One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen was a woman from Chicago, a contemporary Martha Graham, her name was Sybil Shearer, Sybil Shearer would come and stand on one leg and then move something like this, and then just stand, put her leg down and stand there. She would create where you have an after image even though something is standing still, you are looking, you are having some kind of kinetic hocuspocus. Nothing is happening, she is just standing like this. But because of what she does you are seeing the changes. In other words, when she stands still, you cannot believe she is standing still. Actually she is not standing still, because she is standing in an anticipating way, which you already are living out, the suggestions and the possibilities of some kind of kinetic mouvement, hallucinary. I said to Cage, he took me, I said "how does she do that?" and Cage said "She's concentrating. You are into her concentration." you see, just like we are into someone's concentration. Why is that the performer goes on the stage and feels the audience and the change of the audience throughout the whole performance? It's not magic, it communicates. They don't have to go "buh", he hears the vibes, as we say.

And it's the same thing in art. Philip Guston said something fantastic. He says "the problem with most art is, they don't know that everything is revealed on the canvas. They think they could hide in the painting." Everything is revealed. It's the same thing with everything else, you see. Just like everything is revealed in art, everything is revealed by people that look at art. So this whole idea of completing things, is maybe not as necessary we think, it's not telepathy.

In other words, if someone is staying on the stage doing nothing and we are sitting there, we are gonna be watching our person. And the same thing that's with Rothko. That's when he said to me is it there?" "How much of it is there?" Not if it's all there, but how much has to be there for it to be there? And that's very very important -. Someone without my experience could take a look at the manuscript and the manuscript certainly doesn't look the way it sounds on "Triadic Memories it 5 empty, doesn't look very interesting, sounds another way. If I was gonna judge by the manuscript I would say nothing is there. The pedal is doing a lot of work, the over-all, how the piece is.

I was into the shadow. And that's what the subject of the Beckett opera is. The subject of the Beckett opera is that our life is framed in shadow all around us, we cannot see into the shadow. Being that we cannot see into the shadows, our life is framed in shadow all around us, we cannot see into the shadow. Being that we cannot see into the shadows, our existence is only this much and we are fluctuating the shadows of life and death.

There is a good non-idea, isn't it?

So you would say, well, how am I gonna present that on the stage? Am I gonna have shadows? That was the problem with Rome - opera, I told them it's too literary. That's an idea of a non-idea. Then they say "'let's have the light going from shadow into light." "'No" I said "'no, that's another, that's not good." I said, '"for us to go into the shadows means a lot of work" and they had to spend, it was very expensive to make it like a Rothko painting, the gradation of the shadows rather than just a kind of easy symbolic visual aspect of shadows. Shadows are really shadows, you know. And the stage looked marvelous, the gradation, you know. And shadows around everything, everything ust shadows.

I remember when John Cage moved to the country in the early days I went up there and I got out of the car and I said to him "what's that smell?" He said "That's clorophyll." I didn't know what it was. What's that smell? I just came from New York with all the gas. And the clorophyl bothered me. Then they once took me to the Sierra Nevada, I was teaching there near by and they went high and higher, you know, they wanted to show me what Lufi really is, and they went higher and higher, after a while no trees were growing, higher and higher and I said "please, I'm gonna choke to death!" I couldn't breath, I needed oxygen, I got sick, so all my associations with nature were disasterous. They took me once in the Mediterraneum, a gorgeous place, fantastic laguna, I nearly drowned to death, enjoying the Mediterraneum. I don't go anywhere during summers, I don't leave the city hardly. The only time I went anyplace was to Turkey, I love Turkey...

For the rugs, listen the degeneration of rugs happened when people wouldn't, sit for three month like an idiot 10 hours a day, you see, they started to use synthetic dyes, - well, they started to value their time, that's when the rug world disappeared. I am very interested in the rugs in the sense of being involved with the amount of work and solitary time involved - I spent a lot of money in London auction for a very classic late 18th century turkish rug from the Bergama area and I'm telling you the work, the level of work in that rug in relation to something say to the late 19th century was just extraordinary. Not that the late 19th century didn't have good things.

I got the idea again from the Teppich, the different color of the dye and the light. And I also got the idea, it's a very important idea, let's say in Monet, the refraction of the light. In other words, Monet was the first painter to look into the light. And everybody else had different kind of light structures. They either had overhead light or Vermeer would have the light from the side. That's a very interesting study, the light structures of painters, there are many. For someone like Jackson Pollock there is no light, it's just an invention. There is overhead light, the French were the most interesting in trying to use natural light. There was the overhead light like in Courbet. But Monet was the first one to actually look into the light. Nobody wants to look into the light. And he got the refraction, very interesting word because I think that is the same thing naturally with sounds in terms of the beating.

In other words, I'm listening to a kind of symbolic harmony, I'm listening to what I feel the acoustical reality, is, how much it takes to really hear it. Also silence is my substitute for counterpoint. It's nothing against something. The degrees of nothing against something. It's a real thing, it's a breathing thing. I work very moduly, I don't work in a continuity, I work moduly. And many times I like to work moduly because then I turn it around! If I just think in terms of a module, I could take this in another place like Frankenstein, and I could put it over here. . . . (draws)

I got this idea when I was a young man not from John Cage, not from modern art, not from Miro. I got this from Tolstoi. In a marvelous book that his daughter wrote him writing War and Peace What they did was this, on an old-fashioned typewriter, and I suppose the letters were small in Russian, they wrote these long lines, in the house they were called noodles. What he then would do with his daughter, is, they would cut up every sentence, you put the sentence on the table and like film-editor, he would rearrange - and it's a marvelous book where she writes about the whole experience writing War and Peace. I work the same way now. And Burroughs Naked Lunch, he worked the same way, you see, it's very much like a film. It also made a situation, if I have something A to F, I'm talking about a complete set. I'm very interested also in retrograde. And I have pieces where I don't repeat the tones retrograde, but I repeat the whole module retrograde. It's more demonstrated in the stringquartet, in a sense, where it starts off, where the continuity seems not that strange to the ear, and then I would use it again, just like in serialism, but complete sentences and then I would do it by ear in terms of the alienation, how strange I want it to be. I do it by ear and so, very quickly I look at my material and I could see. The reason is that I want to bring back a kind of fake association. Also I do something very important. I, instead of figuring out series, I do my series underneath on the musicpaper, instead of making series, because I don't work in a continuity, the continuity comes later. In other words, I'm not involved in linear information. And so, very quick, I see possibilities in new things. I could assemble, where all of a sudden if I were involved with visual continuity of what is that, I have it all, alles zusammen, marvelously, visual. And not only am I fighting the overtone series, but I'm also fighting, not tonality, I prefer Stravinsky's word polarity. And it seems as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

Well, a friend of mine once told me the way, in an Irish country-village, how they give directions. They would say "well, you walk on the top of the hill and there is a church on the right. Ignore " "Ignore it!" they say. That's the way I ignore polarity, I ignore it, I just ignore it. And then, the more I ignore it the more I'm not involved with this polarity. But I hear it as separate but equal as down South separate but equal. That took many years.

What I picked up from painting is what every art student knows. And it's called the picture plane. I substituted for my ears the aural plane and it's a kind of balance but it has nothing to do with foreground and background. It has to do with how do I keep it on the plane from falling off, from having the sound fall on the floor. Most people have a sound that doesn't fall on the floor by giving it a system. Harmony or twelve tone, you see. Without the system it falls on the floor. That young fellow that was improvising that stupid piece, he didn't know that he was just falling on the floor every two minutes off his chair. Now, this could be an element of the aural plane, where I'm trying to balance, kind of co-existence between the chromatic field and those notes selected from the chromatic field that are not in the chromatic series. And so I'm involved like a painter, involved with gradations within the chromatic world. And the reason I do this is to have the ear make those trips. Back and forth, and it gets more and more saturated. But I work very much like a painter, insofar as I'm watching the phenomena and I'm thickening and I'm thinning and I'm working in that way and just watching what it needs. I mean, I have the skill to hear it, I don't know what the skill is to think it, I was never involved with the skills to think it.

I'm the only one that works that way. But it 5 like Rothko, just a question of keeping that tension or that stasis. You find it in Matisse, the whole idea of stasis. That's the word. I'm involved in stasis. It's frozen, at the same time it's vibrating.

So essentially I am working with three notes and of course we have to use the other notes. But the other notes are like shadows of the basic notes. So then all I have to decide is where I'm gonna start on the three notes, chromatic, you know. When after a few years I added another one, I added four notes, because the four notes then would give me the relationship of either two minor seconds or two major seconds. And also in a sense give me a minor second, a major second, a minor third and a major third. In other words, at least I have a little more textures if I want to isolate. Essentially a piece of about three or four minutes is just orchestrating the four notes.

You can either do two things with music, you could be involved with variation, which in simple terms means only vary it, or you could be in repetition. Reiterative. What my work is, is a synthesis between variation and repetition. However, I might repeat things that, as it's going around, is varying itself on one aspect. Or I could vary repetition. But again it's a performance, I see it as I'm doing it. Very important concept in my work.

I'm defining, it's a redefining of Kunst, not society. It's not a redefining of Kunst in society or society into Kunst. It's redefining of how free one can think and still have all the wonderful things notation, instruments, the making of things, the unmaking of things, see. It still has to do with that. The other has to do with its aspect in society, philosophy, psychology, to make a relation between the one and the other. I cannot make a relationship between music and society. I don't know what society is because it's a//es, everything. My teacher Wolpe was a marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street on 14th street and 6th Ave, and at that time I just became involved, I was 20 years old, I became involved with artists in Greenwich Village all these people. And he was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said "what about the man on the street?" At that moment he said what about the man in the street, Jackson Pollock was crossing the street, the crazy artist of my generation was crossing the street at that moment.

I think that art is a fantastic phenomena. It's relation to society what one individual could do two, three, four or five, the capablity that one could do, say in a free society, I do feel that Kunst reflects society, that within a controlled society you cannot have a free Kunst. But yet Kunst is separate, the way chemistry is separate from other physical things, separate but related- We have special problems! When we are making Kunst it's like, you have no time to think of society, it's like with a krank, with a sick person, you are fixing something. You have no time to think about what this person is, you see? You are taking care of something, It's not philosophy, the orchestra, musician, I mean, you have no time, your hands are full. For you to talk about society is as if I had a bunch of dishes and you asked me for a match, you know, which we do in a joke, everytime we see somebody with a lot of dishes we say "do you have a match?"

I know what you want. I once did one Hollywood movie, but I was fired. And I tell you why I was fired. The director's wife was the star and the story opens up, is that she's coming from choral practice, she is a young girl in choral practice and then she walks through Central Park in the finster. So they wanted me to have the music. So I picked a piece of Josquin, that they were practicing in chorus. And so the director says to me "Write a part for my wife." So I said "I can't write a part in Josquin, like another part in Josquin" But what Idid was that, she was an alto, and it's just a moment instead of all the altos singing, for two measures I had her terrible voice just sing a little something and then I went back to the chorus. So, and then she is raped. And then we had a story conference with ten people, the writer, the director, it was a big Hollywood movie, and it's called kind of POV-conference, point of view, and whose point of view is she being raped? One has to establish, in sense, what the point of view is in relation to the looker when she is being raped. So I wrote the rape music. And the rape music was a string quartet playing just an E-major. Just a celesta with one finger playing against a chord sehr scho'"n in the orchestration, beautiful and she is being raped. And it's his wife, he says "My wife is being raped" this is the actor's studio, he was a famous man, so he acts everything out, "My wife is being raped and you write celeste music?" he said "I want something like papa papa papa" (Shostakovich's 5th symphony) that's what he wanted. And I was fired. I grew up with their lawyer and he says "Call me up just the day after the conference" and he says "We got a problem, Morty. They want you out of the film." I said: "Great. How much am I going to get?" Hesaid "I'm going to give you the whole thing." So I got all money. And at that time it was a lot of money. I got about 17 000 Dollars for one conference. Then I got a call from Aaron Copland. They hired Aaron Copland. And he is laughing, he says "what happened?" He knew that I was writing the music for the film, and I told him what happened. He says "That means I shouldn't go to any conference, ha?" he says "Ok, I'll do it in my house in the country." And it's true. I found out, he never went to a meeting, never had a discussion. He laughed. There must be a connection here with this story.

But remember, I always like to use tennis as an example. Where does the person know where to stand? Who was the Greek that said "Give me a place to stand and I move the earth." (G. W.:'Archimedes')

And the right register. And I always like when a tennis player knows where to stand on the court. They all stand differently, nobody has the same opinion. So I could be learning how to play tennis and I could be learning how to hit the ball right, and I could do everything on play court. What good does it do when I play the game everything changes, doesn't it? Everything changes. If the wind is going this way, it's changing. I think we are getting closer to it in Zen. And one of my favorite stories is the young man that goes to the Zen master, and I think he has to go for seven years. And the Zen master gives him a broom. And for seven years he is told that he has to sweep the house. So he is sweeping the house and he is over there and the Zen master is here with a sword. This guy is sweeping with a broom and the Zen master screams, yells and comes behind here and the young man lifts the broom, after a while the young man listens and he hears him over there and so he turns the other way and he waits, or he gets out of the way, he stands over there, and the game of listening, so the perception of listening comes in, you see. So all the nuances of listening, getting ready and naturally going in the right direction in terms of the body, at the time when seven years is over, he graduates and they give bim a sword and take the broom.

Or the other wonderful story written by Herrigel. You know the book, it's a marvelous book, where the European got very good and he hit the bulls eye. But when he was with the Zen master, they were shooting and trying to feel the bull's eye in the dark. To have a sense in the dark, to go boom, not in the light. So, maybe that's the difference. Craft is something you do in the light, sItill is something you do in the dark. Like making love. If you want to make love in the light, you have no skill, next subject.

I got a phone call from Metzger: "Would you write something about Schubert? What do you think about Schubert?" I said "I never think about Schubert." I couldn't write about Schubert. If I want to think about him as a composer, I can't say very much. If I want to think about him as a genius, you don't have to say anything about him, you just say Schubert, that's enough.

He is the best example to get a sense of where to put it. Just where to put it. It's not a question of periods, the place is just the key, just where he places it is so fantastic with the atmosphere. Where he places it is the atmosphere. Not too much, it just floats. It's within our reach but it 5 someplace no one else would put the melody there, in terms of registration. And it makes the difference, all the difference. There is a lot to learn in Schubert, just where he puts things. He is so effortless. Yes, remember my definition of skill is to do exactly what you want.

Ideas are given. Concepts are given, everything is given. How do you orchestrate it? That's not given. That's not in the books. We must make that decision. That's the only decision. This has to do with differentiation, has to do with form, has to do with contrast, has to do with the history of art. They are given things, but what instruments, how to use them, how to get away from this. In other words, you don't want to reveal your ideas the way Webern revealed his structures by his instruments. Webern does not orchestrate. He gives you the instruments and he presents his ideas like a lecture, with the instruments. We have to be careful not to do that. So what could be a new function for instruments. Rather than just the function of demonstrating information, compositional. Does it have another function? Is that it's only function?

And orchestration is also notation. So, we also are talking about, everything is metaphoric. Do you have the right notation for the instruments? You don't need a system, a notation, keeps you from flying many times, you see. So, what is the notation? So there are two things that composers don't think about: they don't think about notation and they don't think about orchestrating it.

You'll be free, the instruments free, instruments are like James Bond, you know, takes a "shhhh", he gets out of the building. Instruments are like James Bond. Crazy Karlheinz is after you, the automobile go "krchh" instruments are like that, they get you out of situation which you should not be into.

Instruments is the answer to the cul-de-sac, not ideas. At least I found it, and I found it because no one was interested in instruments, you know, no one was interested. And I said to myself "why isn't people interested in instruments?" And they are not unless the instruments could demonstrate the idea.

One of the problems with Kunst is that, it's not concerned with the medium, it's concerned with themselves, that the idea is Ego. And the minute we start taking away the Ego, we have to find other things to substitute the ego and we don't know what it is.

Material. And instrument is material, you see. We have been very distant from material, especially with the younger people, they listen to the early Schdnberg and Webern and they think it's fantastic colors, everything, but, it has nothing to do with color, it has to do with other things, they did it for other reasons. Differentation, variation, that had nothing to do with color, really. It had to do with ideas. So, I feel that one of the problems with music is that it never had its Matisse. They never had a Matisse. They had great artists. I mean, to use color right and wonderful doesn't mean you have a feeling for color. You have an intellectual rightness for color, not a natural rightness for color. Again, craft and skill. Tizian had craft, Matisse had skill, to understand what color was, to leave alone, to let go in a big area, you know. We had no Matisse. We don't know what color is. I think, music is open to color. And when I talk about color I don't mean the environment, I don't mean noise, I mean instruments together. It is fantastic. You can even get the idea, the instrument doesn't have any ideas, the instrument is ready to play any idea, that's the trouble with my students. They say "How can you write anything for the piano in 1978, how could you write anything for the piano?" I said "Leave the piano alone, it's not the piano's fault. It's what people write for the piano. There is nothing wrong with the piano. Leave it alone." And Western music depends on good instruments, not toys, not improvisational instruments. And the reason the piano is fantastic is because a good piano is a good instrument, a good violin is a good, perfected instrument. And we are not gonna have anything important for toys. I was some place, somebody wrote a piece for four recorders, And I said "In principle I feel that people should write what they want to write. In principle, there is nothing wrong with you writing for four recorders. But, actually" I said "you are making a big mistake. It sounds terrible."

- Notation, orchestration, instruments, metaphors, material. What is the function of these elements? Question by W. 7. -A metaphor could be exactly what the piece is trying to tell could be that music standing up in the vertical, a veitical translation perhaps, you see. The only problem is that in variation. One of the problems with variation in 20th century music is that they make the variation too obvious. You heard that it was a variation. I am interested now in a lot of music where the variation is so discrete, I would have the same thing come back again, but I would just add one note. Or I have it come back and I take out two notes. And I would vary the notes and keep the pulse, but very subtle.

Also I would almost consider a change of color as a metaphor, you see. Many times it is an instinct, why you would chose one word above another. If you are Wittgenstein you don't want to make it too clear, if you are someone else you want to make it clear. So it's a question of degree or, it's the varying degrees of clarity, to either make it clear, suggestive, or not too clear, but that's orchestration. So, the minute you think metaphorically in shades like the marvelous painter Ad Reinhardt, I don't know if his work is here, the gradation of greys, you see, I'm very into that. This is like Ad Reinhardt. You see the gradation. Do you hear it? Are you focused enough?

Another, I don't like variation, I prefer translation. I think the best example in the past ten years that got me into this is by meeting Beckett and trying to find out how he works. He would write something in French, the next sentence is in English, then he takes the English and he translates it into French. That has nothing to do with the first French-sentence back and forth. And then when I got this poem from him, I'm reading it and it's the same, doesn't sound the same, but it is the same.

Know thy instrument! You can't orchestrate unless you know thy instrument. Know thy instrument! Who was the Greek that said that? Know thy instrument! Know thyself! Who was the Greek? Socrates, Aristotle, know thyself, sounds like Socrates. I think it was Socrates. I think Francis of Assisi would tell you to know someone else.