malik@star.DEC (Karl Malik ZK01-1/F22 1-1440) (05/12/84)
Subj; a Cage story (from 'A Year from Monday') Down in Greensboro, North Carolina, David Tudor and I gave an interesting program. We played five pieces three times each. They were the Klavierstuck XI by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Christian Wolff's Duo for Pianists, Morton Feldman's Intermission #6, Earle Brown's 4 Systems, and my Variations. All of these pieces are composed in various ways that have in common indeterminancy of performance. Each performance is unique, as interesting to the composers and performers as to the audience. Everyone, in fact, that is, becomes a listener. I explained all this to the audience before the musical program began. I pointed out that one is accustomed to thinking of a piece of music as an object suitable for understanding and subsequent evaluation, but that here the situation was quite other. These pieces, I said, are not objects, but processes, essentially purposeless. Naturally, then, I had to explain the purpose of having something be purposeless. I said the sounds were just sounds, and that if they weren't just sounds that we would (I was was of course using the editorial we)--we would do something about it in the next composition. I said that since the sounds were just sounds, this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered within themselves, where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance, as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of sounds. Finally, I said that the purpose of this purposeless music would be achieved if people learned to listen. That when they listened they might discover that they preferred the sounds of everyday life to the one they would presently hear in the musical program. That that was all right as far as I was concerned. However, to come back to my story. A girl in the college there came back backstage afterward and told me that something marvelous had happened. I said, "What?" She said, "One of the music majors is thinking for the first time in her life." Then at dinner (it had been an afternoon concert), the Head of the Music Department told me that as he was leaving the concert hall, three of his students called, saying "Come over here." He went over. "What is it?" he said. One of the girls said, "Listen."