The "TRACK" numbers refer to the tracks on the CD copy of this interview.
The links within the interview link to footnotes at the bottom of the page.
TRACK 1
EH: Maybe first can you tell us something about the piece with Merce Cunningham (1) that will be premiered this weekend?
JC: Right. I don't have any part except to listen. I don't travel with the company anymore. At any rate, I've been for a number of years now interested in an idea of Marcel Duchamp, which is a musical sculpture of sounds lasting that don't change and that when there are several of them produce a sculpture that one can walk around, for instance. And I made first of all some years ago for a festival in Yugoslavia made a piece called "A Collection of Rocks". And that was done with a number of high school children--it was between 150-200 of them in Zagreb. And the place where the performance was was in the 2 floor foyer of the Philharmonic Hall. So that I was able to give different places in the foyer--places where the sounds would come from--and I was able to have say ten flutes so that a single tone could be played by five, and then those five could be spelled when they were losing their breath and so forth so that the sound could last an electronic length of time. And then with chance operations both the places and the pitches and the instruments and so forth were organized. It was like the Duchamp idea except that he thought of it as one set of sounds that would simply last like a sculpture whereas I made a composition by moving from one such combination to another, each one lasting an appreciable length of time. Then, the Cunningham company travels not with very much in the way of acoustic instruments but with electronics. It's not recorded music but it's music that uses amplifiers and loudspeakers and different electronic possibilities. There are a few acoustic instruments but they go through electronic transformations and so forth like (Takehisa) Kosugi's (2) violin or (Michael) Pugliese's percussion instruments. So I wrote it in French because the original Du Champ statement was in French. I called it Sculpture musicales. And the sounds can be any sounds produced by at least three of the musicians. It could be four, but if you had only two it would be like a line, rather than like a three dimensional situation. And the sounds start in what in graphic art is called hard edge so they don't fade in or in any way change but just start abruptly and remain at the same loudness and then stop abruptly. And the silence between two such sounds and since it's plural there must be at least two. The next situation starts from different places and lasts any length of time and then stops abruptly. That's the basic idea. But further than that for each performance--here in Berkeley there will be only one, so one won't get to see this difference--but for each different performance by the company a different number of such events takes place and lasts for a different amount of time, and that's determined first by one of the players and then at the next performance by another one of the players. So it's not part of the-those details so to speak, are not part of the composition but are given to the performers to determine. I haven't heard it yet. It was done once before at what was called a preview of this piece in the south of France at Arles (3) and there they had eight loudspeakers and they were all quite powerful. Here I think we'll have at least sixteen different places for the sound to come from and each of the performers will choose which loudspeaker his sound is to use. And the technical doing of this--of having an abrupt togetherness of a plurality of sounds--would normally be a situation that would have to be conducted, but there's some kind of a gadget that David Tudor found of which there are now four in the world, and this is one of them that we have, that makes it--I don't know how it works--but it makes it possible to have four different things start in absolute unison and stop absolutely together.
EH: That's quite a trick.
JC: Isn't that marvelous?
EH: So the players may not actually start precisely together but it releases the sound altogether?
JC: It does, yes.
TRACK 2
EH: In letting the players determine the details each time, and I like how you have a different player doing it each time so there's no hierarchy among the players, does that alter the overall duration of the piece?
JC: No, the duration of the piece is the duration of the dance. And the relation of the music to the dance is not in any way fixed. The only thing that fixes the relation of the music and dance is the curtain coming down at the end. At that point the audience begins to applaud and if there is any music they won't hear it. (laughter) So, if they're going to hear it without the dance, it has to begin before the curtain goes up, which sometimes happens. The dance itself, I understand, is 26 minutes. I saw the dance in the studio at Westbeth (4) in New York, before it was done at Arles, but I haven't seen it since. And this will be the first time that I hear the music, this Friday--no Saturday. I was somewhat concerned about the piece because it is, of course, the kind of sound that many people don't think of as having anything to do with music at all--namely the burglar alarm, or any kind of steady sound that doesn't go to another sound. This kind of sound which doesn't seem to be musical if it is taken as being musical then opens up the field of our enjoyment of sound enormously. We now can listen to the sounds of traffic with pleasure simply because they change. It was brought to my attention that in his Critique of Judgment, Kant said that music was like laughter in that simply by the fact of the presence of change in the sound that the aesthetic faculties could be pleased.
EH: Simply through change.
JC: Simply through change. And here you see there is for a goodly period in the music no change at all, so that if one can enjoy that one gains mastery over so much of the effects of modern technology. The hums and constant drones and so forth, and if you hear one of them, instead of being annoyed you can look for another and finally construct a sculpture around which you could walk, even at home.
EH: Those kinds of hums and buzzes really define the areas...
JC: Define the world...
EH: You walk into the kitchen and hear the refrigerator and certain hums and you walk into another kind of room and hear other kinds of hums.
JC: Right. And if we can get to the point of enjoying those sounds, which I've done now, I'm no longer annoyed by them at all--in fact, I cultivate them (laughter). Or cultivate the paying
of attention to them, you know.
EH: From what you say, it sounds like there's not much change in the course of these individual sounds and there's not much change in the kinds of droney sounds that we're talking about in the environment...
JC: No. This is not what Kant was talking about.
EH: No, no. But it's slow laughter. It sounds like it's very slow laughter.
JC: Yes. The people who told me who heard it at Arles, one of them was Klaus Schöning, (5) whom you may know, he noticed immediately that when the sound stopped, that the sound of the dancers' feet on the floor of the stage immediately gave great pleasure.
EH: Became much more apparent.
JÇ: Yes. And the sound of a distant train or of an airplane overhead became part of the experience of seeing the dance.
TRACK 3
EH: It seems that to achieve this kind of attitude of appreciation requires very much patience because of the slowness of the change, but also it's a tricky balance it seems because a lot of our problems in our society can be traced to accepting things the way they are and then letting people who make important decisions about the world just run amok.
JC: I think if we speak of society now we're speaking of something of which we have very little experience, because the number of people is greater than ever has been on the planet before. I think that my circumstances have greatly changed and I think much of it comes from the larger number of people living. It's not a bad thing that they are alive but it's an unfamiliar thing to those who become noticeable in the society. What I mean specifically is that I am asked to do more things than I can do. And I'm given almost no time in which to do something that I could say think of privately to do. In fact, I don't have to have any ideas anymore, because other people tell me what I should be thinking. (laughter) What would you like, you know? That's almost not asked much anymore. It's more would you do this, would you do that.
JC: As I notice people's ideas I think many of them have to do with the, still with the 19th Century rather than with the 20th Century and here we're nearly finished with the 20th. Old ideas that have to do with ownership and constant use of one thing, the idea that a work of art that one knows perfectly well can yield even greater beauties if one pays closer attention to it--which is a 19th century idea that you only reach the profound points after long, long enjoyment, you know. Whereas now, much closer to us is the uniqueness of each experience, and musical composition is, not only in my case but in the case of many others, such that no two performances are the same.
EH: So that offers a very special chance to appreciate beauty.
JC: Yes, and to pay attention immediately because that's the only time you'll have in which to do it.
TRACK 4
EH: During your lifetime, our sound environment has changed into one that is primarily recorded or amplified or made by machines of one kind or another. Do you think of any impact
that that has on the human spirit or the human consciousness--do you think this is a loss of some kind that we're not so often paying attention to the wind and the water and the sounds of nature?
JC: No, I listen to all of those.
EH: But I don't think most people do.
JC: Maybe they're not musicians. Hm?
EH: True.
JC: Or musically attentive. But I think more and more people realize that they can listen with enjoyment even without playing a record.
EH: That there's always something going on.
JC: And in my case it's this acceptance of the burglar alarm really that has opened up that door that along with almost everybody else had remained closed.
EH: Is this out your experience living in New York for so long?
JC: No, it's out of the remark of Marcel Duchamp. And I must say that I thought the normal thing to do in response to a burglar alarm is to hope that it will stop. (laughter) But now, I don't feel that way at all. I listen very carefully and see if I can find other parts of the sculpture of which it is a part.
EH: Find the variations in it and find what else is going along with it.
JC: Or the absence of variation even.
TRACK 5
EH: Now at the Cagefest, (6) which was a concert last Saturday night incorporating a dozen or so of your works, at the same time there were also speakers surrounding the audience and performers out in the audience and several things happening at the same time but that was an entirely different kind of impact from these unchanging sounds. You were in the audience there weren't you?
JC: Right.
EH: What did you think of the performance?
JC: I enjoyed it. It was what I would call a music circus and the different pieces that were played formed it.
EH: Did you find yourself identifying the different parts...
JC: No, I was trying to, um, I was paying attention to the coming together of all of the elements and the experience as a whole. I couldn't avoid of course doing what you say, noticing that the Socrate was being played or that...but I was surprised at how many things were played that I couldn't remember having written. (laughter) And yet, I don't cultivate my memory actually and I must have forgotten quite a number of things. Because these were not sounds that could have come say from the highly indeterminate pieces such as Variations III or IV, but were played at the keyboards and that had--so to speak--melodies (laughter) and I couldn't recognize them at all.
EH: There was a list of about seven or eight keyboard pieces of yours, some of which I had never heard before. So some of those you'd forgotten what they really sounded like?
JC: Right.
TRACK 6
EH: How long has it been since you wrote a deliberate melody? (laughter)
JC: I'm writing two series of pieces now. One is called "Music For..." (7) and then the title is completed by how many players play so it could be "Music for One". The purpose of that piece is to start from one and then go up as far as I go...so far I'm at eighteen. There are eighteen parts now. But I would like to have eventually in the neighborhood of 100 parts. In other words, you'd have an orchestral work that started from scratch so to speak and at no point involves a conductor.
EH: And for any size orchestra or chamber group.
JC: Yes, that's what I want. What I have in mind. The other group of pieces that I'm working on has a similarly simple title. It's either "One" or "Two" or "Three" and so forth and I made 101 (8) in that group for the Boston Orchestra. The first one in the group is a piece called Two for flute and piano. And the flute has only three notes and whether you're willing to accept that as a melody I don't know. But I showed it to Morton Feldman before he died, it's the last piece of mine I showed him and he liked it. The three notes are the D above middle C and F and A flat. And it lasts ten minutes. And in the first minute, in a kind of time bracket, so that the first D is heard and it's pianissimo, it can start anywhere between 0-45 seconds and end anytime between 30 seconds and 1 minute and 15 seconds. And after you hear the D, again this is a little bit like the sculpture, except that it's only one sound, but it doesn't change. After the D we hear the F in the next overlapping time bracket--goes from one minute to one minute and 45 seconds and so forth, and then you hear the A flat and then it comes back but you don't hear any other sounds than those three.
TRACK 7
EH: There's a remark that you make on the recording of Indeterminacy about I think an early keyboard piece that you and David Tudor used to play that had long pauses and that the more you played it the more it sounded melodic. And was it Morton Feldman? Someone, a colleague of yours had predicted that that would be the case, that no matter what we do it ends up sounding melodic..
JC: That was Christian Wolff who said that, yes.
EH: Do you find that that's still the case?
JC: Yes and it seems to be happening as I think of it now at least in my experience it's happening to these sounds that simply last and that obviously aren't melodic but are beginning to give the kind of pleasure that melody always gave. That's a kind of....uh...I was going to say mystery but maybe we could say a kind of musical koan?
TRACK 8
EH: You said that you were never very gifted with harmony.
JC: And now that's changing. (laughter)
EH: How is that changing?
JC: It's changed through the experience of hearing Pauline Oliveros's work with Stewart Dempster--have you heard that? There's a CD out called "Deep LIstening" and they play together improvising using accordion, trombone, didjeridoo, voice, and playing again sounds that don't change and don't move from one to the other but simply exist so to speak in the space of time. And in a cistern in Washington they made the recording and the echo is 45 seconds long and the sound is perfectly beautiful. And the harmonies of course are the coming together of these sounds whatever they improvise. They have nothing to do with dominant tonic and so forth or triads or seventh cords. They're simply combinations of sound. So I've talked with Pauline since then and it's evident that everything is harmonious.
EH: In the sense that whatever is happening simultaneously creates a harmony.
JC: Creates a harmony. So, it's unavoidable. And that's what we both agreed and it made us chuckle or laugh. And to have spent my life...(laughter) but it's true. I was unhappy in the presence of theory.
EH: The idea of functional harmony doesn't make a lot of sense to me either.
JC: Right. And it was the structural means of European music. Not through too long a period. Only about what would you say 300-400 years?
EH: Yeah, which seems like a big sidetrack but in the overall..
JC: If you take the globe as a whole...
EH: The rest of the world wasn't paying attention fortunately.
JC: No. A small phenomenon. (laughter) And another person whose life is devoted to harmony and with whom I've had not arguments but we thought disagreements is James Tenney. And I heard a piece of his just about a year ago in Miami which was absolutely thrilling to hear. And it began with here again a single sound repeated by different instruments and then gradually becoming microtonal slightly off and then the intervals grew larger and it went on for about 30 minutes and slowly one felt the extent of the pitches to the very low and the very high.
EH: So this was a very gradual unfolding of harmony.
JC: Right. And a marvelous experience for me. That came first and then recently, actually
at Skywalker in Marin County, I heard Pauline Oliveros's work.
TRACK 9
EH: I wanted to ask you something else about this sound design workshop up at Lucas Film. They played excerpts from a couple of films, Star Wars and something else maybe, and in those cases that's sound that is used with extreme intention. It's very deliberate. It's there only for the sake of stirring up emotion and drama and creating a reaction, which is just about as opposite approach as possible to your approach to sound, being non-intentional. How did you find yourself listening to that? How did you react?
JC: Well, I admired the way the sounds were found and put together and it was clear that they were the result of paying attention, not so much to the effects really--the effects on the emotions--as to the effects on the credibility, I guess. For instance how to make the sounds of a great mass of rats? And it turned out to the sound of chickens (laughter) mixed in with some other animal sounds that was put together with the images of rats who never made such sounds. (laughter)
EH: But that made it more believable.
JC: It made it believable and it was fantastic to see that the composers or sound engineers whatever you wish, did that so effectively.
EH: So the technique was very impressive.
JC: Very impressive. I remember years ago when I was studying with Schönberg he held the composers in Hollywood in high esteem, even those who studied with him, which was rare for him. But they become very gifted in doing the work that they have to do.
TRACK 10
EH: Do you still write any percussion music?
JC: I think of myself as a percussion composer and my piece "101" for the Boston Symphony is really a percussion piece. You don't hear the sound of the strings as strings. You hear their sound as though they were frictional percussion instruments. It's complete col legno even though they have been given pitches to play you don't hear those pitches. And they're in such a harmonic confusion (laughter) that it sounds like percussion.
EH: Lots of drummers playing strings.
JC: Yes that, but all playing quite quietly so it's really a very beautiful sound to hear.
I think the critic in Boston said it was a kind of primordial sound. (laughter) Is it Daniel Schmidt, (9) doesn't he live here in Berkeley?
EH: Yes, with the gamelan group?
JC: Yes. Well he made some contrabass marimba tones for that performance in Boston. They were perfectly beautiful. Very very low sounds. I think in the neighborhood of...I forget actually how low it was but it was between 25 and 50.
EH: 50 Hertz?
JC: Right. You could feel the sound coming very slowly through the building, you know.
EH: It was probably almost more of a physical sensation.
JC: Yes, it was very beautiful. And the percussionist who played them was somewhat unhappy that I had given him too few sounds to produce. He wanted to play more and we tried to...we also wanted to hear more than I had written but I didn't want to change the composition so instead I thought of the idea of a tremolo. But a tremolo didn't really work because you could begin to hear icti.
EH: The individual attacks?
JC: Yes, and that took away from the magic of a single sound that had its own character without being repeated.
EH: Too busy.
JC: Right. So we used uh...I think there were seven performances altogether and we used them to try first this and then that with respect to the attacks. I think the best though was when there was just a single attack.
TRACK 11
EH: I wanted to ask about a work of yours that's published through computer.
JC: Oh, yes, "The First Meeting of the Satie Society"
EH: Yes.
JC: It's available here in the Bay region through the uh..
EH: Whole Earth 'Lectronic...
JC: Yes, the WELL.
EH: Yeah, the WELL. That's a very exciting medium, which was really kind of predicted through some of the suggestions in your diaries about how to improve the world and so on.
JC: Mmhm.
EH: Have you done any more works in this way, that are available through bulletin boards or electronic access?
JC: Not yet. But I would like to. I think it's the proper way to distribute.
EH: Yeah, because it overcomes all kinds of problems about storage and rights and ownership and all that.
JC: Right
EH: Do you use computers very much in your work?
JC: I do, but I need an assistant for that, and at the present time I don't have one. My last assistant was a German, her name was Kristine Tappe (?). And we were able together to put the next book, my Norton lectures at Harvard, on floppies, so that all the printing will be done from her... uh from her...
EH: Right from the disc.
JC: Right.
EH: When will that be published?
JC: Shortly, in the Spring, actually.
TRACK 12
JC: I want to complete the Freeman Etudes. (10) I began them eleven years ago and finished sixteen and sketched the second group of sixteen.
EH: These are for violin?
JC: Yes, violin solo. And the reason I've started again is that the playing of Irvine Arditti of the first sixteen is so astonishingly fast. I heard him play all sixteen in 56 minutes in London and then six months later to play all of them again in 46 minutes. And I asked him why he played so fast and he said "In your introduction you say play as fast as possible." So that gave me the idea that where the subsequent sixteen become impossible because of there being too many notes, that I write out all the notes, but simply say, "Play as many as possible."
EH: Ah hah.
JC: And that avoids the notion of using technology to synthesize the work, which I wanted to avoid.
EH: That will also guarantee each performance being different.
JC: Right. And it assures that the work will remain a challenge, which is, in a sense, the history of violin solo writing.
EH: Posing technical challenges for the player.
JC: Right.
EH: I have read that the first sixteen were among the most difficult pieces ever written for solo violin.
JC: It's because of the constant leaping and changing of uh...this that and everything.
TRACK 13
EH: I've always wondered if some of your chance determined compositions, if you're ever tempted to change things because you don't like the results.
JC: I was asked this same question last night after my conversation with Merce Cunningham at Wheeler Hall. I've used chance operations as you know for nearly forty years now. And when I began I was aware of one of the advices given in the I Ching or one of the statements in the I Ching. And it says if you don't like the answer, you have no right to ask a second time. So I've always taken the answers as being true. And if I don't like what the result is, I ask myself why don't I like it? And very shortly I'm not disturbed by it. What can be disturbing are not the answers, but the questions. I may be asking the wrong questions. For instance, when writing "Apartment House", (11) which went with "Renga", (12) again for Boston Orchestra to celebrate the bicentennial, I had the problem of writing forty-four harmonies, and I still had at that time trouble with harmony. I wanted to have the pieces played exactly as they were in 1776. But Seiji Ozawa said, "We want to know how you feel about harmony, we don't want to just quote the old harmonies." So since I didn't feel well about harmony I had to find out what it was about harmony that troubled me so much. My first questions had to do with omitting at least one, two, or three of the notes of a four note harmony. And that of course worked only in the cases where the harmony was beautiful to begin with. But if those questions were asked, "How many sounds are present in the harmony?", and taking out one of them, it didn't in any way alter the pieces that were not beautiful to begin with. And some of them were really not beautiful at all. Finally, since I was writing under pressure, I had eight rather ugly pieces to deal with. They had been chosen through chance operations. And I finally realized that the only way to transform them was not to think of the harmonies themselves, but to think of each voice as separate from each other voice. And say, in a harmony there were fourteen notes in the bass. I would ask through chance operations, "Is the first note present or absent?" Or, rather, I asked first which were active and which were passive of say fourteen notes, and I would get the answer that the first, the seventh, and the eleventh were active, and the others were passive. That would mean that the first sound would last until the seventh, and then the seventh which was active would be active as a silence until, what did I say the eleventh?
EH: The eleventh.
JC: And then at the eleventh we would have another sound which would last through to the end. And we'd do that kind of action for each one of the voices. The result would be a stratification of the four voices in which each sound was at its own center. And it made a kind of...it kept the feeling of harmony but it transformed it into something spacious.
EH: It sounds like you bypassed the..
JC: The theory..
EH: The step by step harmony..
JC: Right.
EH: And elongated it.
JC: Right. And it made something surprising and refreshing.
EH: So that's a case where you recognized what...
JC: I finally found the right question to ask.
EH: The right question. Yeah.
JC: There was nothing wrong with the chance operations. (laughter)
EH: As usual...
JC: Or the answers. (laughter)
EH: I read that in composing ROARATORIO for the radio that you found that a lot of the sounds that you had recorded on location in Ireland and other places that were your favorite sounds were getting covered up by other sounds. Did you end up bringing them back to the foreground so you could hear them again?
JC: No, they remained covered up. (laughter) And had I had more time to work I would have covered up more, you know, because there's always something to hear, there's no problem. It's the depth in that piece I think that is interesting.
EH: So that was a case where you had to live with the results and face your disappointment?
JC: No, there wasn't any...there was always a curiosity on my part. It was uh...and there wasn't any...(pause)...I myself wasn't...(pause)...maybe I'm not being honest, I don't know. I think it's because the working period was so short, that there was no time to be disturbed. (laughter) I simply had to continue working.
EH: Thank you very much.
JC: Thank you.
EH: Thanks for your time.
JC: Thank you.
1. The Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley on September 22-24, 1989. On September 23, the program included the premiere of "Inventions" for which John Cage composed the music. Back
2. Takehisa Kosugi, succeeded John Cage as Musical Director of Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Back
3. July 19 and/or July 23, 1989 Théâtre Antique, Arles, France (both dates are given in the Merce Cunningham archives for the company performing in Arles; the program is not included) Back
4. In New York City, home of Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation since 1970. Back
5. Radio producer Klaus Schöning of WDR in Köln, Germany, commissioned "Roaratorio". Back
6. September 16, 1989 at Cowell Theater in San Francisco. Back
7. "Music for...: (1985) EP 67040-P 30 min voice, fl, ob, cl, hn, tpt, tbn, 4 perc, 2 pf, 2 vln, va, vc Parts without score (no fixed relation, title to be completed by adding to "Music For''- the number of players performing. Back
8. "101" (1988) EP 67265 indeterminate 4(picc, a-fl).4(ca).4(b-cl).4(cbsn) - 6.4.3.1 - timp - 4 perc - pf - hp - str (18.16.12.12.8) Back
9. Daniel Schmidt, founder/director of the Berkeley Gamelan. Back
10. Freeman Etudes (Books 1 and 2) 1980, Etudes I-XVI EP 66813a/b
Freeman Etudes (Books 3 and 4) 1990, Etudes XVII-XXXII EP 66813c/d Back
11. "Apartment House 1776" (1976) EP 6819 Materials for a 'musicircus' for any number of musicians (may be played with or without RENGA) Back
12. "Renga" (1976) EP 6818 Score (361 drawings by Thoreau sometimes superimposed) and 78 parts (for any instruments and/or voices) to be played alone or (as an occasional piece) with APARTMENT HOUSE 1776 or some other musicircus (live or recorded). Back