Silence. John Cage

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СКАЧАТЬ point for reception. Relevant response (getting up in the morning and discovering oneself musician) (action, art) can be made with any number (including none [none and number, like silence and music, are unreal]) of sounds. The automatic minimum (see above) is two.

      Are you deaf (by nature, choice, desire) or can you hear (externals, tympani, labyrinths in whack)?

      Beyond them (ears) is the power of discrimination which, among other confused actions, weakly pulls apart (abstraction), ineffectually establishes as not to suffer alteration (the “work”), and unskillfully protects from interruption (museum, concert hall) what springs, elastic, spontaneous, back together again with a beyond that power which is fluent (it moves in or out), pregnant (it can appear when- where- as what-ever [rose, nail, constellation, 485.73482 cycles per second, piece of string]), related (it is you yourself in the form you have that instant taken), obscure (you will never be able to give a satisfactory report even to yourself of just what happened).

      In view, then, of a totality of possibilities, no knowing action is commensurate, since the character of the knowledge acted upon prohibits all but some eventualities. From a realist position, such action, though cautious, hopeful, and generally entered into, is unsuitable. An experimental action, generated by a mind as empty as it was before it became one, thus in accord with the possibility of no matter what, is, on the other hand, practical. It does not move in terms of approximations and errors, as “informed” action by its nature must, for no mental images of what would happen were set up beforehand; it sees things directly as they are: impermanently involved in an infinite play of interpenetrations. Experimental music—

      QUESTION: —in the U.S.A., if you please. Be more specific. What do you have to say about rhythm? Let us agree it is no longer a question of pattern, repetition, and variation.

      ANSWER: There is no need for such agreement. Patterns, repetitions, and variations will arise and disappear. However, rhythm is durations of any length coexisting in any states of succession and synchronicity. The latter is liveliest, most unpredictably changing, when the parts are not fixed by a score but left independent of one another, no two performances yielding the same resultant durations. The former, succession, liveliest when (as in Morton Feldman’s Intersections) it is not fixed but presented in situation-form, entrances being at any point within a given period of time.—Notation of durations is in space, read as corresponding to time, needing no reading in the case of magnetic tape.

      QUESTION: What about several players at once, an orchestra?

      ANSWER: You insist upon their being together? Then use, as Earle Brown suggests, a moving picture of the score, visible to all, a static vertical line as coordinator, past which the notations move. If you have no particular togetherness in mind, there are chronometers. Use them.

      QUESTION: I have noticed that you write durations that are beyond the possibility of performance.

      ANSWER: Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?

      * * *

      QUESTION: And about pitches?

      ANSWER: It is true. Music is continually going up and down, but no longer only on those stepping stones, five, seven, twelve in number, or the quarter tones. Pitches are not a matter of likes and dislikes (I have told you about the diagram Schillinger had stretched across his wall near the ceiling: all the scales, Oriental and Occidental, that had been in general use, each in its own color plotted against, no one of them identical with, a black one, the latter the scale as it would have been had it been physically based on the overtone series) except for musicians in ruts; in the face of habits, what to do? Magnetic tape opens the door providing one doesn’t immediately shut it by inventing a phonogène, or otherwise use it to recall or extend known musical possibilities. It introduces the unknown with such sharp clarity that anyone has the opportunity of having his habits blown away like dust.—For this purpose the prepared piano is also useful, especially in its recent forms where, by alterations during a performance, an otherwise static gamut situation becomes changing. Stringed instruments (not string-players) are very instructive, voices too; and sitting still anywhere (the stereophonic, multiple-loud-speaker manner of operation in the everyday production of sounds and noises) listening …

      QUESTION: I understand Feldman divides all pitches into high, middle, and low, and simply indicates how many in a given range are to be played, leaving the choice up to the performer.

      ANSWER: Correct. That is to say, he used sometimes to do so; I haven’t seen him lately. It is also essential to remember his notation of super- and subsonic vibrations (Marginal Intersection No. 1).

      QUESTION: That is, there are neither divisions of the “canvas” nor “frame” to be observed?

      ANSWER: On the contrary, you must give the closest attention to everything.

      * * *

      QUESTION: And timbre?

      ANSWER: No wondering what’s next. Going lively on “through many a perilous situation.” Did you ever listen to a symphony orchestra?

      * * *

      QUESTION: Dynamics?

      ANSWER: These result from what actively happens (physically, mechanically, electronically) in producing a sound. You won’t find it in the books. Notate that. As far as too loud goes: “follow the general outlines of the Christian life.”

      QUESTION: I have asked you about the various characteristics of a sound; how, now, can you make a continuity, as I take it your intention is, without intention? Do not memory, psychology—

      ANSWER: “—never again.”

      QUESTION: How?

      ANSWER: Christian Wolff introduced space actions in his compositional process at variance with the subsequently performed time actions. Earle Brown devised a composing procedure in which events, following tables of random numbers, are written out of sequence, possibly anywhere in a total time now and possibly anywhere else in the same total time next. I myself use chance operations, some derived from the I-Ching, others from the observation of imperfections in the paper upon which I happen to be writing. Your answer: by not giving it a thought.

      QUESTION: Is this athematic?

      ANSWER: Who said anything about themes? It is not a question of having something to say.

      QUESTION: Then what is the purpose of this “experimental” music?

      ANSWER: No purposes. Sounds.

      QUESTION: Why bother, since, as you have pointed out, sounds are continually happening whether you produce them or not?

      ANSWER: What did you say? I’m still—

      QUESTION: I mean—But is this music?

      ANSWER: Ah! you like sounds after all when they are made up of vowels and consonants. You are slow-witted, for you have never brought your mind to the location of urgency. Do you need me or someone else to hold you up? Why don’t you realize as I do that nothing is accomplished by writing, playing, or listening to music? Otherwise, deaf as a doornail, you will never be able to hear anything, even what’s well within earshot.

      QUESTION: СКАЧАТЬ