I question the appropriateness of writing about something other than this exhibition. But to write about it, some effort should be given to research. And I have resistance in talking to anyone who could tell me why Guston assembled these last works the way he did. My attitude is not unlike my father"refusing to ask for directions the time we were lost in Hoboken.

For me, the real research would be in re-enacting that special kind of loneliness Guston shared with others throughout the Seventies: A concern that something just might last a little longer, that our lifespan would not be a measurement of time documented on early, middle, late horizon. Two rabbis, who were very close friends, survived the Holocaust. One went alone to London, the other, to somewhere in South America. The rabbi in London wrote his friend, "Too bad you're so far away". "From where?" was the reply.

It was in the early months of 1951 that Philip and I first met, at one of those numerous gatherings John Cage gave at that time. A few weeks earlier, Cage had pointed out my first Guston - a mysterious red painting - at the now historic show of American abstract art at The Museum of Modern Art. After thirty years, I can still conjure up where it hung, as well as the distance between me and the painting. Guston's paintings tell you instinctively where to stand.

I have profited from this in how I maneuver my music into its acoustical space, not to imply one calculates an element of success by this projection. Rather than evoking a linear, vertical, or all-over reading in the viewer, Guston's time would be moving outward. To a great extent we respond to a painting as a visual replica of how it was painted. For example, Mondrian's plus-minus series neutralizes our visual completion of these paintings. It is all there, so to speak, but where, or how to look at them, is not.

If we pursue this, then Guston has always been a "public" artist. By that I mean, if he says something, he wants it to be heard, as it non-aggressively walks onto the stage of his picture plane. It is in the inflection of his "voice" that we discover the encyclopedic nuances of mood, regardless what imagery he was painting at the time. Both of these important factors - the artist's voice and the stage it speaks from - have their ancestry in the painter Guston loved most of all, Piero della Francesca. One of the most memorable afternoons I spent with Guston started off with, "So I'm not Michelangelo", as I was walking up the stairs to his studio. I looked at the start of a new painting for some clue to his depression. The clue wasn't there. "O.K. so you're not Michelangelo, you're El Greco." Guston's face lit up with relief.

A small Guston painting dating from 1967 hangs over my desk: On a white ground, just two elongated black shapes about seven inches from each other. Their positioning in the field is characteristic of how Guston freezes a painting during the Sixties. "That one on the left", he said, "is telling the other one his troubles."

The fact that Guston's stage became barer in his abstract paintings of the Sixties before the figurative period of the Seventies is significant. But I don't think of it as the end of something with Guston, nor as the usual tendency to bring work to the pitch of "high style", and then begin anew. It appears to go back full circle to the early abstract paintings of the Fifties, but now modulated to another key. In music the key or pitch center of a composition is akin to the picture plane of the painter. It determines the degree of audibility (visibility) as well as its timbre (color). Color was underscored in both Guston's earliest and late abstract painting, more to light the stage, the way I once observed Beckett light his stage.

A connection with Beckett is not remote. Beckett's voice is also so prevalent on his stage that it is difficult to distinguish what ist being said from who is saying it. As in Guston's painting we seem to be hearing two voices simultaneously. For a composer, this is a crucial problem: that the means or the instruments you use are only to articulate musical thought and not to interpret it. The composer, as the dramatist or the painter, is not "performing", but he creates a situation as if he were. I was first made aware of the painter in the dual role of actor by Mark Rothko, while we were standing in front of the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick. "What a great Jewish actor Rembrandt was, as if a tear could come from the corner of an eye at any moment."

In recent years I have become preoccupied with oriental rugs, discovering quite soon that what I was looking for had little to do with either the study or the collecting of rugs. I am mostly drawn to special examples of the nomadic Yoruk rugs from Anatolia. What the choice 19th Century Yoruk has that is unique is mood. This mood is closer to Jasper Johns that to Mark Rothko, tips over to Van Gogh rather than Piero. Kierkegaard both has it and writes about it. You rarely come across it in music.

The mood I'm trying to describe, like a fingerprint, is in all of Guston's work. One might argue that the figurative painting of the Seventies is a more appropriate language for it. Yet whereas the enigma in the earlier paintings was how this mood coexisted with abstract shapes, the same distance between mood-object is now present with an identifiable mythology of images.

If Guston's earlier abstractions seem pregnant with a content of sorts, without giving us a resolution into what might be considered concrete, the figurative work for me only tells some kind of closing statement, without giving us the beginning. After all, where did these images come from?

The oldest example of an early 18th Century Karakecili (Bergama area) rug keeps the design intact with all detail towards that end. The later or traveled versions weaken what was originally a powerful geometric shape. One does not think of "design" per se in the earlier rugs, but more of a totem-like image. The impact of the last Guston paintings in this exhibition is that they have about them the exhilarating feeling of not as yet being copied by others. They are like an isolated rug culture at its most unbridled peak of development.

One of the problems of an abstract art is that the solutions available are more determinate than one might imagine - some system or other, like radar, is guiding it along. Stravinsky came to this conclusion just in time to write what he felt were two of his most important works, in which a serialistic approach became more subordinate to his ear and consequently used as a tool rather than as a device. Late Stravinsky is another fascinating style change. With his plunge into the elegant abstractions of serialist thinking we need only ask how he did it, whereas in most of his earlier music you are kept busy with just why he might do something.

Guston's maneuverings, neither a device nor pre conceived, do have about them an inevitability: that things could only be this way and no other for them to work. Like Stravinsky, this achievement operated early and late. It has to do with the fact that neither of them lost sight of the nature of his material.

As a teacher of composition the most important thing I can convey to the young composer is an awareness of what exactly is material. There is a crucial discrepancy between having "ideas" and a sense of what the material is in one's own music. Stravinsky is a great example where material reigns supreme. Construction is kept at a minimum. The material is always "on camera." Schoenberg approaches the concept of material quite differently. With Stravinsky his material suggests the composition, while with Schoenberg his material is the composition. Essentially both approaches are the only two ways that have been devised as yet to compose music. This review of a composer's alternatives is important to my understanding of what Guston might have meant when he talked about the "impossibility of painting".

In most music you are either locked into adjusting historical alternatives as Stravinsky was, or to invent a process that more or less takes over, as Schoenberg did. In either case you do relinquish a great deal of potential insight, existing on still other levels of implication to your material. If "painting" is your material, then how you paint could mean more than what you paint. I don't think a happy balance can exist any longer between the two, unless there is a bull's-eye simultaneity which is so much in evidence in the recent Gustons in this exhibition.

Another reason I dwell on both Stravinsky and Schoenberg in this essay is that they both consciously attempted to arrive at various decisions within a given historical context. On the one hand, it added to their genius; on the other, it diminished it. Schoenberg's two voices were trying to reconcile traditional classic forms with an expressionistic language. It is a very uncomfortable battleground to hear, and one seriously questions if it was worth the effort.

With Philip Guston I arrive at other conclusions. There is not attempt in these last paintings towards any aspect of reconciliation with his past concerns. It was a new life, in which his past skills helped him survive on the new ground he immigrated to. All it meant for Guston was to pack only what he needed and go in search for the country of his heart.