It all began with the Greeks. They were the ones who said that for something to be beautiful, it must also be sensible. Nothing has ever demonstrate& this idea more perfectly than music. As we listen, we are impressed by the precision of its choices. At the same time, music sings to us of things transcendental. We are given simultaneously the two essential things - that which is beautiful, and that which is logical. Yet we cannot say music changes our lives. It carries us to exalted heights perhaps, but when it is over, we are exactly where we were before our journey. All we are left with is just this duality - of precise means creating indeterminate emotions.

All this, of course, does not refer to the present situation. What music rhapsodizes in today's "cool" language, is its own construction. The fact that men like Boulez and Cage represent opposite extremes of modern methodology is not what is interesting. What is interesting is their similarity. In the music of both men, things are exactly what they are - no more, no less. In the music of both men, what is heard is indistinguishable from its process. In fact, process itself might be called the Zeitgeist of our age. The duality of precise means creating indeterminate emotions is now associated only with the past.

Of course, many composers - notably Stravinsky - felt the most compelling aspect of music has always been its architecture, its forms. They do not admit to this duality, this dichotomy. But we do - don't we? If these men want such purity, such freedom from all ambiguity, why haven't they invented a new art form - as Malevich did so many years back? They invent nothing new, nothing really original. They steal other people's thunder, and then refuse to admit it thundered for other purposes than their own.

But let's make things clear. I am not lamenting the death of poetry and emotion. This is my generation as well as Boulez and Babbitt's, and I, too, want things to be "what they are". I, too, am interested in facts, not philosophy. I, too, like Boulez, wanted music to be an autonomous object.

But it was all too good to be true, you see. It was all much too good to last. No dichotomy? It was almost like a state of grace. Something had to happen - and it did. The closer I came, on my own terms, to a really autonomous situation, the more I felt the first warning that a new dichotomy was about to take place. The form this warning took was a strange resistance of the sounds themselves to taking on an instrumental identity. It was as though, having had a taste of freedom, they now wanted to be really free.

Franz Kline once told me it was only rarely that color did not act as an intrusion into his painting. Guston, too, felt this. Most crucial to him was the immediacy of where the forms were placed; his color had to continually go through states of erasure to get to that visual rightness.

In music it is the instruments that produce the color. And for me, that instrumental color robs the sound of its immediacy. The instrument has become for me a stencil, the deceptive likeness of a sound. For the most part it exaggerates the sound, blurs it, makes it larger than life, gives it a a meaning, an emphasis it does not have in my ear.

To think of a music without instruments is, I agree, a little premature, a little too Balzacian. But I, for one, cannot dismiss this thought. In creating this indeterminate situation I began to feel that the sounds were not concerned with my ideas of symmetry and design, that they wanted to sing of other things. They wanted to live, and I was stifling them. It is not a question of a controlled or a de-controlled methodology. In both cases, it is a methodology. Something is being made. And to make something is to constrain it.

I have found no answer to this dilemma. My whole creative life is simply an attempt to adjust to it. There is very little concern, very little involvement with anything else. It seems to me that, in spite of our efforts to trammel it, music has already flown the coop . . . escaped. There is an old proverb: "Man makes plans . . . God laughs". The composer makes plans . . . Music laughs.