I knew I was going to be a professional the day I first became practical. Practicality took the form of copying out my music neatly, keeping my desk tidy and organized - all the unimportant things that seem unrelated to the work, yet somehow do affect it. Through the years that passed since then, I have always found it more beneficial to experiment with fountain pens than with musical ideas. I remember for a time I had an idee fixe that if I found the right chair to work in, all compositional problems would become non-existent. I actually found that chair . walking in Chinatown one day with Robert Rauschenberg. It was an old-fashioned accountant's chair, tall and sturdy, with the word "Universal" printed in gold letters across the back. Rauschenberg found a chair, too, I remember. An elegantly lean chair with a fast-moving swivel seat. I thought it was very much like him.

I don't want to imply that practicality is another word for comfort. I rather mean that it brings us closer to the work establishing a rapport with it, rather than encouraging a network of ideas that keeps us outside it.

This is where the practical differs from the technical. The technical, no matter how fool-proof, is always in the realm of the speculative - a notion about perfection - the system. But what happens when these gods fail us?

Kierkegaard says that all speculative philosophy cannot equal in complexity the dialectic of a woman who has been deceived. He goes on to explain that such a woman cannot find an object for her pain, because love cannot grasp the thought that it has been deceived. In art, it is the system itself that holds out the false promise, that deceives. We might almost say that art is in pain, because it is unable to believe this deception is taking place. The artist feels his work goes badly because he is not reaching technical perfection. Actually, he is looking into the eyes of a deceiver, who constantly throws him back into the dilemma - the paradox. Is it lying to me or not, he asks himself. He ends by believing the lie, in the face of all evidence against it, because lie needs this lie to exist in his art. This brings up the question we thought we had decided earlier in our life: What is technique? Is it just the ability to hit a nail into a piece of wood? This needs very little practice. But to take a Mozart concerto, or a work by Webern, and to re-write it - now, that does need practice! So maybe we have the answer, and technique is simply imitation. But who did Mozart imitate in order to write his own concerto? Haydn? But suppose one is so unluckily constituted that he does not, or cannot, imitate? Where then is technique? Is it perhaps a question of hitting the nail, but at an impossible angle? But we all know this is just a poor, honest country-cousin called Craft.

Let us allow this question to stand for a while. Recently I chose some pictures by Mondrian for an exhibition at St. Thomas University, in Houston. Clearly Mondrian envisions a Utopia. He endlessly reduces, endlessly simplifies in the attempt to get at this Utopia. Yet the way it is painted is hesitant and slow . . . anything but the absolute certainty of this absolute state, this Utopia. Mondrian is in the painting, though in terms of his conception, one would think he would have chosen to remain outside.

In Guston we see a different aspect of the same duality. Here the visible structure (the part of the structure that we see, really see) is arrived at very slowly, very precariously. Yet the way it is painted is Chassidic - exalted.

On yet another level, Guston's conflict is between the personal, which is anti-process, and the impersonal, which is process. Where he differs from a painter like Picasso is that with Guston the historical is not an analysis of history, but a sort of distillation of hundreds of years of seeing, touching, observing, watching, waiting, deciding. Where Picasso analyzes, Guston continues. Where Picasso is saturated in a history lesson, Guston is saturated in history.

This duality I speak of - this contradiction -does not exist in music. There is nothing in music, for example, to compare with certain drawings of Mondrian, where we still see the contours and rhythms that have been erased, while another alternative has been drawn on top of them. Music's tragedy is that it begins with perfection.

Renoir once said the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different tones. In music, the same note, written by two different composers, gives us - the same note. When I write a B flat, and Beno writes a B flat what you get is always B flat. The painter must create his medium as he works. That's what gives his work that hesitancy, that insecurity so crucial to painting. The composer works in a pre-existent medium. In painting if you hesitate, you become immortal. In music if you hesitate, you are lost.

All activity in music reflects its process. This has always been true, and it is more and more true as time goes on. Whether it is too late to change this remains yet to be seen. But the question here is not pre-determinate or indeterminate. If I have a resistance to process, it is because I don't want to give up control. Control, of the material is not really control. It is merely a device that brings us the psychological benefits of process - just as relinquisting quishing control brings us nothing more than the psychological benefits of a non-systematic approach. In both cases, all we have gained is the intellectual comfort of having made a decision - the psychological comfort of having arrived at a point of view. The question at hand, the real question, is whether we will control the materials or choose instead to control the experience. Varese expressed the same idea in a different way when lie said of himself and another man that he wanted to be in the material, while the other man wanted to remain outside.

How true this is of Varese! His musical shapes respond to each other, rather than "relating" in any sense that the word is used today. This is what gives his music that almost stationary grandeur, like a sun standing still at the command of a latter-day Joshua.

Mondrian, Guston, Varese - three artists who are in the work, artists who chose control not of the materials at hand, but of the experience. The system cannot help us here. Can we really say it is just a reductive, simplistic image Mondrian gives us? How can we think so, when we feel we are entering it? There is no thesis here, no antithesis, no synthesis. On the deepest level there is no contradiction because the work has been done on its own terms. This is really speculative. The only criterion for this kind of art is, how truly personal, how truly omniscient is it.