a conversation

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John Cage and Roger Reynolds: A ConversationAuthor(s): Roger Reynolds and John CageSource: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 4, (Oct., 1979), pp. 573-594Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741573Accessed: 30/07/2008 17:07

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John Cage and Roger Reynolds:

A Conversation

IN 1961 Roger Reynolds interviewed John Cage in Ann Arbor, Michigan.' On August 28, 1977, Reynolds and Cage met again.

The following excerpts are drawn from that conversation.

Roger Reynolds: The interview that we did in 1961 was very im-

portant to me ...

John Cage: ... and to me ...

RR: Our earlier interview suggested a response. Instead of doing a commentary myself, however, which because of the nature of your work -so continuously evolving- would be presump- tuous, I thought it might be good if we made a commentary together.

What I've tried to do is make the questions in such a way as to establish the context that existed earlier. You troubled me when you remarked recently that the secret of a good interview was good questions ...

JC: Now I can put you at your ease by saying that the secret of a

good interview is good answers.

... as Duchamp said, if you have poor tools -which would be poor questions -that simply requires the use of greater skill in making good answers.

RR: In reading the 1961 interview, I was struck with the frequent use of certain words: "useful," "pleasing," "action," "change." I have tried to allow my questions to grow out of their context.

It seems to me that a particularly powerful aspect of your im-

"Interview with Roger Reynolds," Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Barney Childs and Elliot Schwartz (New York, 1967).

573

The Musical Quarterly

pact on music, and on art in general, has been to widen unexpectedly and decisively, what it is reasonable to do as a musician. Would you be unhappy with an effort to characterize you as a "teacher of acceptance"? I see important differences between, let us say, "emancipation" and "acceptance."

JC: I've often said that anything goes provided we start from zero. And it's in that spirit that I would be willing to be thought of as a teacher of acceptance. That is to say, we can accept whatever if we are empty to begin with. But very few people are empty. In fact, all those disciplines of the Orient both in India and in China and Japan were strenuous disciplines, and they were not, of course, for musicians but for people who were attempting to change their minds towards a state of emptiness. By emptiness is meant not collapse of life but rather the quieting of desire, the quieting of the ego. As Suzuki put it, the ego can act as a barrier to our experience (whether it comes from without or from within) or it can flow with the experience, which would mean it can be in this state of acceptance . . . whether it is from the night or from the day, through the dreams or through the senses. And he said that what Zen wants is that the flow take place, and that the flow out to the day come back through the night so that one is part of a whole circle of life, not just an obstacle to that life. The mind, in other words, can set itself up as an obstacle to the capital "m" Mind, or it can flow with that Mind. And Zen wants it to flow.

It was such teaching and such thinking . .. and I'm quite aware that the decision I made that led to my using chance operations, that in terms of the I Ching itself - not as a mechanism, as I use it, but as a book of wisdom - that I have opted for the hexagram that deals with receptivity or acceptance rather than the hexagram that deals with creativity and the imposition of one's ideas, for the female principle rather than for the male

principle ... or the Earth principle as opposed to the Heaven

principle (talking in terms of Yin/Yang). But if we're talking in terms of Yin/Yang, we're not at the height of Zen Buddhism. Because, in Zen, Heaven is Earth, Earth is Heaven, and so it is not female to have opted for the female . . . it is as male as female.

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Reynolds/Cage Conversation

Suzuki put it very beautifully at a philosopher's congress in Hawaii. One of the philosophers asked Suzuki what he thought of the lecture. Suzuki said, "It was excellent, but in Zen the im-

portant thing is life." The next day this same man asked him a similar question about another lecture, and Suzuki said, "That lecture, also, was very good, but in Zen the important thing is death." The man was indignant. "How can you say 'life' one day and 'death' the next?" Suzuki smiled and said, "In Zen, there's not much difference between the two."

Acceptance is very difficult in the light of such nondualistic thinking. Even in the Orient, even under the same influences that Suzuki was under, it's difficult to come to.

The man who is at the head of macrobiotics is Mishio Kushi. As I see it, his teaching is excellent but his understanding of

philosophy, of acceptance, of instruction is dualistic . . . He

speaks of Yin and Yang and of the opposites as having to be fused. Very much as a German philosopher would speak about the marriage of form and content.

RR: You credited your Aunt Phoebe with introducing you to "music the whole world loves to play." What is your impression of the musical engagements that the average person seeks now? For

instance, in certain areas of contemporary life it appears that there is a growing trend for people to enjoy things being done to them. I ask my question in reference to your statement in the earlier interview that "we must arrange everything so that

people realize that they themselves are doing it and not that

something is being done to them." What does the whole world love to play now?

JC: I don't think we can any longer speak so very generally. First of all there are more people now. Secondly, there is a definite fusion between East and West (Aunt Phoebe had the notion they were separate). Finally there has been a great ac-

ceptance, both in so-called serious music and in popular music, of technology, of technological changes. All these things have acted to multiply the differences between things that now are

actually done and enjoyed. So that rather than there being an audience, or rather than there being a stream of music, there

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is actually a great multiplicity ... a coexistence of acceptable dissimilars ... Don't you think? ...

I didn't go to Pauline Oliveros' recent New York concert, but people who were there were deeply impressed by the excellence with which it was done, and by the "usefulness" - coming back to a word that you say I used and which I still like - the "usefulness" of her performance, and usefulness in the sense of the Mind.

RR: . . . and of an intimate relationship to life as she has chosen to lead it recently ...

JC: Yes. I connect her work, as I do Riley's and La Monte Young's, and certainly others, with the Northern School rather than the Southern School of Zen Buddhism. It's a music that is concerned with gradual enlightenment, not sudden experience. The Northern School was the one which insisted that Zen must be learned by sitting cross-legged and deep breathing, gradually, and it is precisely this breathing and this sitting cross-legged that is the nature of Pauline's work and of Terry Riley's work and of La Monte's work. It has produced a music that is inarticulate. It is not speaking. Discourse is absent, and the growth of the experience . . . or the experience of the experience, the experience of the Mind is being presented as it is, and as it is at that moment.

RR: "Presented" or "offered"?

JC: Whichever.

It can then be followed by the listener, and the listener can

put himself in a state of participation mystique. It's the only thing that the listener can do. He must identify with the performer. The experience is not interesting unless you identify with it.

Now the difference between Terry Riley and Pauline is the difference between articulation and nonarticulation. I'm now

speaking quite literally. When I said "inarticulate," I didn't mean it in a bad sense. I meant it in the sense that the icti of music of the past are absent in the work of Pauline whereas

they are present in the work of Riley and of Glass and of Reich.

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There are large audiences for that kind of music (of Riley and Glass and Reich), but I myself can't use it. I don't like those icti, I don't like periodicity. In the case of Conlon Nancarrow, I have less difficulty, precisely because of the changes in the beat

length. But in the case of Riley, Glass, and Reich the fixed beats give me great difficulty.

RR: There is an extraordinary experience to be had in Conlon Nan- carrow's music: a simultaneous independence which is insisted upon. There is not the meld that is such a necessary part of the pleasure of the music of those we've been speaking of just now.

JC: I have another problem with Nancarrow, but it's not the one I'm speaking of now. The problem arises through the energy which is relentless in his work. That kind of energy is also present in the very beautful work of David Tudor, his electronic music. I am thinking of the piece called "Tone Burst" that goes with Merce Cunningham's dance "Sounddance." The energy is so incalculable, which is what it is with Nancarrow too. I remember a piece of Nancarrow's for two pianos. I was sitting there in this room in Mexico City, and it seemed as though these pianos were going to ...

RR: . . . that they were marching upon you ...

JC: ... and in my state of acceptance, of course, I was delighted to be so overwhelmed. But friends with me resisted; they couldn't accept it. And I found with a number of people whose feelings I respect, that they are put off by this wave of energy which I myself don't find objectionable.

On the other hand, I think if I listened to Nancarrow for long, that I would have to finally say, please turn if off. The music that I don't have to turn off is precisely the music with us when we don't have any music . . . and that is the "Mind" with the

capital "m." That is what I meant by my silent piece in 1952, and it is still that piece which is my favorite music. That's why I have - if I do have - any difficulty with any other music

(even if it's my own). It's because of that love that I have that difficulty.

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Coming back to your question, you can see immediately that some audiences are ready for Nancarrow, some are not. Some are ready for Pauline, some are not. Some will find, as I do, other things quite useful. ..

I don't think Nancarrow likes my ideas or my music . . my interest in chance and chaos and disorganization ...

RR: He said he does, indeed, like things "a certain way."

JC: And he likes them more the way Merce has them in choreography. But he did notice that it was interesting to have a music that was, so to speak, disorganized in the presence of a dance that was quite differently organized.

RR: Nancarrow is now feeling just the point you are making because he's concerned with the problem of synchronizing two player pianos ...

JC: ... I know. He told me, "I have finally come to a point where I am making a music which I know you will enjoy" . . . Before that, he didn't see how I could enjoy his music. The reason I could enjoy his music was because of this flexibility of the beat; not that it's suddenly flexible - as I would want it to be in my own work - but that it's gradually flexible produces gratitude in me.

RR: When I asked you about sounds that had been distasteful to you, such as Beethoven and the vibraphone, you mentioned Muzak. I especially admire the impulse to seek resistant materials, and wonder in this connection if there are any sounds you have recently come to find distasteful.

JC: The only problem that I am aware of in terms of sounds themselves . . . it's still the vibraphone for me. I haven't come to terms with it. There was a piece of Morton Feldman's in which he liked what he'd done so much that he asked me if it didn't change my mind about the vibraphone, but the vibraphone was precisely the thing that kept me from hearing that piece of his.

RR: You mentioned the idea of using distasteful sounds as a means of coming to terms with them ...

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JC: ... but I really am not inclined to make a piece for vibraphone!

RR: Perhaps that relates to what you feel can be achieved in the way of transformation by chance operations, by indeterminate combinations. It seems to me, and I put this forth tentatively, that you have perhaps become a little bit less intent than you were previously upon things being "expressive of themselves."

JC: I don't know yet what you're asking... I still would like

things to be themselves...

Things are not themselves when they are something else than themselves in our reception of them. If, for instance, I rent a car and put on the brakes and a sound immediately comes that suggests that the brakes are not functioning properly, then the sound is no longer a sound. The sound is a reference to the brakes. So that if we're speaking, as we are now, of sounds in the field of music, we're speaking in terms not of artha in Indian philosophy (which is "success" and "failure") but of liberation, of moksha. And when the sound comes from the malfunctioning brake, we're back suddenly out of moksha into artha. We must save our lives rather than live aesthetically. We must react to the message, the warning that is being given.

RR: Presumably the vibraphone does not give you a warning ...

JC: Yes it does . . . as does the smog in our air. It suggests that inventions have taken place that oughtn't to have.

RR: ... so it's the impulse that's given rise to the vibraphone that makes it so difficult to deal with as a sound...

JC: I find it sickeningly sweet ... Even though our sunsets, as Nor- man 0. Brown has pointed out, are more beautiful with our smog than they were when the air was clean, it would be better for the air to be clean ...

I can come back to your question. For very, very long I've realized that things must not be just beautiful, but that there must be things that are difficult for us to accept in among the things which we accept easily. And that kind of thinking was in my mind even before I studied Zen Buddhism. So that when I made the preparations of a piano, I deliberately put in sounds

579


which were unpleasant, just as I knew that one of the things that makes the organ so fascinating to the ear is the auxiliary noise that goes with it. This is what the vibraphone so lacks. As a human being, I actually search out - more than I do the pleasurable - I actually search out the unpleasurable. I look to see where it is that I am irritated . . . and not that kind of irritation that comes from soupy sweetness ...

RR: We talked about time as a foremost consideration and you said provocatively: "We must find some way to be able to go in all directions, not just forwards and backwards in time." Have you come upon any unfamiliar temporal experiences recently?

JC: Most of my life as a composer I've resisted improvisation. It's one of the things, recently, that I'm coming to terms with. And

being anywhere in the time is part of my notion of improvisation.

At the present time, if I were asked to teach, I would call it "structural improvisation." By that I mean an improvisation that exists in a given period of time, and that time is divided into "rooms." The instruments, whatever they happen to be, are played in such a way as to make the difference between those rooms clear. But where the sound is in the room is not

important. Or you could say it could go "in any direction" . . .

RR: ... I'm having trouble with the use of a spatial or volumetric

image for different time experiences ...

JC: . . . Say there were a dozen people improvising together with

the kind of instruction I've just suggested, would you then have trouble?

RR: As a doer or as a listener?

JC: Either.

RR: I think I might have trouble as a listener...

JC: I don't think so.

RR: . . . experiencing a fresh temporal sense, but I can easily

imagine as a "doer" having rather curious temporal ...

JC: . .. no, I think in both cases the . .. experiences would be

.. quite ... marvelous.

580


RR: If we were to be doing that kind of activity, if you were to be teaching in that way, what might you be willing to say about the "room" ... the idea of the "room"?

JC: I can say that the first room is three minutes and the second room is five minutes and the third room is two minutes . . . and, given the instruments which you have, put some of them in one room and others in another room and still others in the third room. We could begin that way, so to speak, in unanimity. And it would be quite marvelous.

RR: How would we be aware of the dimensions of those rooms?

JC: Of the time? ...

RR: . .. for example, would there be an awareness of the arrival of the end, in which something might or might not wish to be completed?

JC: Not necessarily . . . another way to proceed would be to leave the question of structure variable from one person to the next ... It's very similar to a walk in the world, or through nature. If I'm in the woods, I can come to a spot where Tricholoma

personatum is growing; and why isn't it growing over there where Lactarius is growing? Or why, in the woods, is there a

clearing over there, but not here? ...

RR: Is that a matter of reflecting on the sequence of things?

JC: In music, of course, it is. But, from a distance it needn't be...

RR: I have another question related to time, but I'm unhappy that I'm unable to get a grip on what you're saying ...

JC: I think that, in my case, what is mostly gone is the sense of

progression from one thing to the next. But in what I've de- scribed to you there are now these rooms which are separate . . .and in each one of them the succession is gone, but the difference between the rooms is ...

RR: ... the material that can emerge?

JC: ... I have avoided improvisation through most of my work. Im-

provisation seemed to me necessarily to have to do with memory and taste, likes and dislikes. What delights me in this thing

581


that I call "structural improvisation" is that the performer, the improvisor, and the listener too are discovering the nature of the structure ...

RR: ... of the rooms as a group of occasions ...

JC: You could say that, yes.

RR: ... and the rooms are distinct in terms of their duration ..

JC: ... and of the sounds in them.

RR: You said instruments, I thought. Did you mean the means that one can use to make events?

JC: . .. the means that one can use to clarify the structure.

I have been doing it with three pieces now. One is called "Child of Tree," and there is also "Branches." "Child of Tree" is short and "Branches" is any length. In Kyoto, I played "Branches" for an hour and a half with the dance company. It's done on cacti and plant materials. The new one is called "Inlets." It's done with shells which are made to gurgle through being filled with water and then tipped. We solved the problem of the amplifying of these gurgles. They're so quiet that they can't be heard by an audience unless they are amplified. Yet, the nature of the sound is that it comes from a resonant chamber in the very room where the loudspeakers will be and this produces the immanence of feedback. So it needed special microphones.

RR: I still want to go back. The reason this presents you with new

temporal experience is that structure is being defined in a new way?

JC: Improvisation . . . that is to say not thinking, not using chance operations, just letting the sound be, in the space, in order that a space can be differentiated from the next space which won't have that sound in it. I'm perhaps too young at this work to know how to describe it.

From one improvisation to another, not only the structure but the instruments could change ...

RR: You said regarding Christian Wolff's notion of "zero time"

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that "it is mysterious, and therefore eminently useful." In what ways are mysterious things useful?

JC: I used that word in contrasting the teachings of Mishio Kushi in macrobiotics - which depends on pairs of opposites - and the teaching of Suzuki which didn't. Suzuki invariably left the impression in my mind after one of his classes that I didn't understand what he had said, whereas Kushi is very clear. You know precisely ... that you oughtn't to eat tomatoes but you may eat broccoli. He's that specific. Whereas Suzuki always kept us guessing. In fact, he gave a whole lecture on the sub- ject of not being clear. Finally, he laughed (quietly). He said, "Isn't it funny that I come all the way from Japan to explain something to you which is not to be explained?"

What was your question?

RR: It was regarding the usefulness of the mysterious ...

JC: Well, we go immediately - if we accept it - into the field of

poetry. . . where the ground is not fixed. In terms of the Indian rasas there are the four white emotions, of the perma- nent emotions, and the four black and the one, tranquillity, which must be combined with the others. So that, if we're in that state of mystery, we're in what, in Indian rasas, is called "the wondrous"; and we are at the same time tranquil. That is very much like being in the state of poetry...

RR: You have spoken of the attractions of making processes as

opposed to the making of objects, with, for example, begin- nings and middles and ends. It seems as though certain processes result in situations that are so strongly characterized as to take on a kind of "eventness" or "objectness." For instance, in the Etudes Australes you direct in the introduction: "Each hand plays its own part and is not to be assisted by the other." Given materials of very wide frequency range for both hands, an extremely characteristic situation results. Do you feel that processes sometimes result in objectlike situations?

JC: What you say about a process giving the impression of becoming an object is true, and it's that that keeps the world, so to speak, going. That's why we go on to the next process, because

583


we notice where the [previous] process gave the impression of

becoming an object. That's why we get ideas as we go along doing our work - to which we're committed - that may lead to a greater freedom in the next one.

On the other hand, in the improvisation work, the tendency is back toward the object, because the process is, so to speak, un- touched. It is so free . . . It's improvisation . . . it's as though your head were in the clouds. So you keep your feet on the earth. (And if your feet are on the earth, you keep your head in the clouds.) There I'm back at Kushi's level of thinking ... but nevertheless it's some kind of guide.

RR: In Ann Arbor I asked you about the practice of some composers who were then beginning to introduce chance or indeterminate elements into otherwise controlled compositions. In answering, you expressed dissatisfaction with the way this "maintained the

concept of pairs of opposites and the play of these opposites." Later, you stated, "It is absolutely essential for us to change our minds fundamentally." This, and other attitudes that you held in 1961, were uncompromising, not unlike those of the Zen Master Tokusan who responded to monks seeking en-

lightenment with the statement, "Whether you speak or do not speak, thirty blows of my stick are just the same." With

regard to the introduction of indeterminacy into otherwise controlled situations and uncompromising attitudes on your part (in certain regards like Tokusan), I'm wondering about

your present notion towards compromise and firmness, towards the achievement of fuindamental change. Do you still feel you're trying to bring about fundamental change?

JC: It's this sort of person, I think, that I am. But at any given moment, because I am in the process of searching, I don't know what to say in response to the question. If I look at Silence, for instance. I think, "Oh, the person who wrote that had marvelous ideas." Even the person who wrote A Year From

Monday. I was reading the foreword and afterword of A Year From Monday, and I am very impressed by the strength and the inspiring nature, and the uncompromising character, and so on. And I couldn't help thinking, "Are those qualities still

584


with me?" They may be and they may not, who am I to say? Your question is a little bit like saying, "Are you enlightened?"

RR: I don't think so.

The motivation for the question arises from the idea of your constant- in my view - redefinition of what is reasonable. It's not at all unreasonable to decide that to be uncompromising is unreasonable...

JC: . . . Actually I'm very anti-German. On the other hand, I'm

practically Germanic in my insistence on doing what is neces-

sary . . . and not fooling around with things that are a waste of time!

RR: It appears that we are all more and more in the habit of citing others. Silence was a detailed representation of your views as

you had chosen to present them over a period of decades. More

recently, you have often reiterated the ideas of respected others, most notably Thoreau. Also, in the written instructions

preceding your scores, individual words are placed in quotes, as though drawn from a context of meaning somehow signifi- cantly different than (I'll do it) "common" understanding. For example ". . . 'sounds' as it 'looks,'" the "illustrations" in the Thoreau text, "shifting gears," etc. It made me wonder about whether we are now having access to some new kinds of perhaps less formal information.

JC: I don't know what you're asking.

RR: I'm asking about the citing of others, first of all. You were

just referring to Silence and the qualities you recognized in whoever it was who wrote those books, and this reminded me of Buckminster Fuller's notion of the continuity of personality and the mystery of that continuity. But if, in fact, my impression is correct, there has been an increasing tendency on your part, in your writings, to cite the ideas of other persons, which is also a tendency one finds growing everywhere. I added another dimension to the phenomenon of citation because even in the way we write, I find myself, and I see in your instructions, more frequently the use of single words in quotes. This

suggests that they are drawn from some other realm of mean-

585


ing not found in the dictionary. And I'm wondering whether there's some new kind of information that's available to us and we haven't been able to formalize now.

JC. I hope so. The citing has actually in my case gone beyond citing to using. In two of my recent texts (the first is called

"Writing through Finnegans Wake" and the second is called

"Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake") the words are all Joyce's but they find the name of "James" and "Joyce" through the whole book. They're mesostics. The second one is the same idea, but I kept an index of the sylla- bles that I had used to express the "J" of "James" and never

permitted a repetition. That reduced the text from 125 pages (the length of the first one) to something between thirty and

forty pages.

This has brought me beyond citing Joyce, it's brought me to

using Joyce. And the same with Empty Words, which took me over a year to write. I was using Thoreau, not just reading him. You could say this began with the use of the I Ching apart from reading it. And then in the Apartment House which I did with Renga, I used the drawings of Thoreau in combina- tion with the music of Billings and Law and French and others, and I found ways of making a new music just as I'd found

ways of making a new text.

This doesn't account for all of my recent work, but it accounts for a large part of it - this concern for the use of the past to make a future.

RR: Does this relate in any way to that recurrence of words that are in quotes? . . .You're so precise with words in your writ-

ing...

JC: I'm not quite clear about that, because in my directions in music I'm frequently, deliberately ambiguous ... or vague . .. or almost precisely vague.

RR: Let's take that phrase "to be played so that it 'sounds' as it 'looks.'" What would have been different if you had left out the quotes around "sounds" and "looks"? ...

JC: At the present time I can't recall why I put them there. There

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certainly was a reason, otherwise I wouldn't have put them there, but at the present moment, since I'm not there, I don't know why I did it.

RR: There was another example in Lecture on the Weather, where

you mention the graphic indications. You refer to them as "illustrations," in quotes.

JC: I guess it's because I don't think that the word "sound" or the word "look" there is precise, and the word "illustration" is no longer precise in my mind either. In these Joyce texts, because of a suggestion from Norman O. Brown, I'm elimi-

nating the punctuation from the mesostics. But instead of

eliminating them altogether, I'm broadcasting them on the

page through chance operations. Now, the question is, is that an illustration? . . . it is and it isn't.

RR: It has to do, then, with an enlargement of our experience, and in that sense it would follow the theme that I tried to suggest about your work at the beginning, that we are more and more

willing to think of a larger number of things as reasonable.

JC: I have hoped, and it hasn't always worked well, that through that kind of giving of instructions something might happen in a person that would be original to him rather than dictated

by me.

On the other hand, at the suggestion of Frederick Rzweski, who had a class at the Creative Music Foundation in piano playing, six of his students had errgaged in making a performance, simultaneously, from my Solo for Piano from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra. They had all taken different

parts of that solo and realized them and put the performance together. When I heard the rehearsal, I was surprised to see that one fellow, toward the end, arranged some percussion instruments at the piano and proceeded to play an obviously ABA chinoiserie ... absolutely foolish, the sort of thing that I would

by no means have intended. So I asked him afterward where he had found the permission to do that in my notation. He showed me one of those segments, and when I glanced at it

quickly, I saw that it was difficult to understand and that it

might have led to what he did. It was one with both horizontal

587


lines and angles that were chance placed-not placed at random, but through the I Ching-and there were some points . . . I didn't study it carefully, and he claimed that that had permitted him to do what he did. He explained it to me. I thought, well, I'm just not a very good composer, to have written directions in such a way that this kind of thing that he was doing could have happened.

After letting a little time pass, I went back to him, and said, "Now show me more precisely what you were reading." Then I saw that he was reading the lines, whereas I had intended that he read the points. The points would only have permitted him to play two or three sounds in that whole time, whereas he was playing a whole composition of his invention out of these lines. We went back to the beginning and it showed that all that those lines meant was a choice between some beaters. So there is such a thing as understanding something of what is intended, rather than misunderstanding. Christian Wolff happened to be there too, and he said he found it very enlightening. He said that also in his experience when people played things incorrectly, it was because they had not understood the directions.

Even when the directions are ambiguous they still can be understood ...

RR: You remarked in our earlier talk that Asian philosophies are "concerned with the acceptance of Nature, not its control," and that, in contrast, Americans were more able to "see the possi- bility of what you might call irresponsibility." I have felt that Asian patterns of thought don't use "acceptance" in the sense of "resignation," but more in terms of patience with regard to how long they may have to wait for satisfaction. I wonder if there is a distinction between the control of Nature, which Art used to attempt, and influence over human beings which it now increasingly seeks.

JC: I'm in agreement. We really hope that Art can play a part in the changing of minds so that the world will become a place where all of us can live, rather than just some of us. By "all of us" we include, as the Orientals so beautifully did, the world itself, the fact of Nature. We would like it to continue instead

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of just be brutalized . . . We would like this earth not to become just a garbage dump...

RR: You would enjoy knowing what Toshi [Ichiyanagi] is doing. He is writing and lecturing widely about sound pollution in

Japan. He has written a book on it. He is in a state of personal agitation, and you know what a Buster Keatonian sort of figure he is...

"Garbage dump" is the right image . . . This is one of the rea- sons I thought about the potential misunderstanding of Asiatic

philosophies and "acceptance." Toshi is an apparently quiescent person, in certain senses, but he is not accepting in the sense of resigning himself. He is aware of the necessity of extraor-

dinary patience. Inside, perhaps, the Asians are far more firm in their ideals than are we ...

JC: ...yes...

RR: In our earlier talk you stated that you had decided "not to make what I call negative or polemical actions, even when the

thing being fought against or criticized is patently evil." What

process of thought or experience has brought you to the point where you choose to write works such as Lecture on the Weather which includes (partly by chance, perhaps) very strongly phrased criticisms, and, more importantly, an eloquent and

pointedly critical introduction that you require to be read?

JC: It's what you were saying about Toshi. There's no contradic- tion between these things which are contradicting . . . If we take as the guide for our thinking and living philosophy struc- tured as it is in India, into artha, kama, dharma, moksha. If we take a German point of view, then everything must be con- sistent, but if we take this Indian point of view, then we can

speak about not being polemic, and then insist on being polemic at another time and those differences don't contradict one another.

RR: I'm not attempting to uncover contradictions but rather asking for a response.

JC: If I'm in the situation of being asked about the pollution of the air and of the water and so forth, then I will speak in that

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direction. If I am asked to make a piece about the Bicentennial as I was by Toronto, then I make Lecture on the Weather and I speak of the evil of dividing the world into nations, etc. But if I'm writing the Etudes Australes, I'm not obliged to do that.

It is not as though the problem had been dropped all together. Partly what is meant in the Etades Australes is that we must work very hard in order to play this music, and we must also work very hard in order to preserve our environment. There are certain correlations between those things.

RR: ... but that would be what you called "affirmative actions" ...

JC: ...yes...

RR: . .. whereas the Lecture on the Weather is an action that may create affirmative result; but (perhaps I misunderstood your original words) it struck me as being a far more critical and

polemical choice than you might have made fifteen years ago...

JC: It is. But it was an affirmation, on the other hand, of an an- archic, revolutionary point of view, and of the Thoreauvian

point of view.

RR: You've mentioned many times today the Indian philosophies. Have you become more interested in them?

JC: I have never discarded them. The ideas that I have encountered in the past I keep until I don't need them, and there are many that came to me from India that I still need. That idea that

you mentioned of patience also comes to us from India, in my experience.

Implicit in Oriental philosophy is the notion that time is ever-

lasting. The view of creation is so large that from a Western

point of view you could just give up, and feel no sense of

responsibility whatsoever, whereas they maintain it in that sense of grand creation. The image of the human being is so small in those Chinese landscapes, but so magnificent.

RR: You have had productive collaborations with persons such as David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, La-

jaren Hiller, not to mention Suzuki (which perhaps might not so much have been a collaboration). Thoreau has said in a text

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that you quote in Lecture on the Weather, "The only cooperation which is commonly possible is exceedingly partial and

superficial, and what little true cooperation there is is as if it were not, being a harmony inaudible to men." Later he says, "The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait 'til that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off." What are your present thoughts on collaboration and compromise, on the one hand, or, on the

other, cultivating an awareness of what others are doing while

continuing one's own work?

JC: I follow, and am interested in, astrology.

Thoreau, astrologically, must feel the way he did, that he must be alone. One of the difficult things for many people about his

personality is that he had so much difficulty getting along with even those very fine people that were there in Concord at the time he was. To not find Emerson acceptable was his condition. He found no one to his satisfaction.

My situation is different. I love to work with other people. I'm

very sympathetic and I try to identify with the other person. I try to change myself in order to do something that will be

just right for that person. I'm now doing it in the case of the violin and with Paul Zukofsky. I'm finding that it changes me much . . . much. I hope that it will change Paul a little bit . .. but it is changing me, and it will be fruitful ...

Say that I could collaborate with Boulez. I think it would be

mutually advantageous.

RR: Perhaps not so dramatically so as in the case of Paul.

JC. Really? Well then, maybe I'm at the heart of the matter. I'm

having more difficulty to find my way to write something than I have found before. But I'm doing it. And you know what it's leading me to? It's leading me to an understanding of the dance.

Merce Cunningham and I have exchanged ideas and ways of

working over the years, and yet it comes out so differently because music is free of the problem of physicality that the dance is involved in deeply. Two dancers moving quickly at high

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energy, if they bump, have, so to speak, an automobile accident, so that choreography in a very real sense is a traffic problem. It can't be left solely to chance operations any more than hunt-

ing mushrooms in the woods can be left wholly to chance operations. You have to arrange it so that things happen properly, in the physical sense of life against death.

And this is what I'm coming to with Paul Zukofsky, because the very act of holding the violin is somewhat unnatural, like

standing on one's toes. Yet, the thing that attracts me to the violin is the flexibility of it, which is comparable only to the

flexibility of the human voice. And yet the action of playing the violin is as baffling as dancing.

How does Merce work with chance operations in the dance? He had to do it differently than I did with, say, the Etudes Australes or the Music of Changes. I've decided to work with Paul as though I were Merce working with a dancer. In other

words, I will compose on the violinist.

At first I thought that Paul could tell me about the violin and I would learn something about it so that I could compose, as

usual, at my table and apart from the instrument. But the more he told me about it, the more baffling I found it. I am familiar,

already, with the fact that two violinists are in disagreement about what the violin can do. (Think of the difference between Malcom Goldstein and Paul Zukofsky . . . both of whom I

admire.) Each person is of course very different and unique.

I find this is connected also with my not teaching. Because I

think the students are in the same situation of being wholly different from one another. When I did do some teaching, I

became aware of their differences. Toshi Ichiyanagi was in the

class. We were approaching the Christmas vacation and I

thought, "Now that they have three weeks to themselves I can

give them something to do. I'll make a kind of summation of

what I know of them to get them to move." I gave what I

thought was a particularly good series of remarks about his

work to Toshi, and he very quietly said to me, "I am not you." As Schoenberg's pupils taught him, so Toshi was teaching me.

But it's not that that I object to about teaching; it's the realiza-

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tion that you can't really teach a class. You must teach the indi- viduals separately, and if you're going to do that, it takes so much time that I personally decided I didn't have time to do it.

RR: In 1961, I quoted you as saying that "an error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to a reality." At a conference held in Los Angeles several years ago, Richard Hoffman introduced (with certain daring, considering the per- vasive veneration for Schoenberg at these meetings) the word

lapse in discussing row irregularities. I liked his word, especially if it were understood to admit positive as well as negative irregularities. It seems to me that your compositional work reflects much concern with discipline and responsibility. If you agree, would rigor of varying sorts help to explain your perplexing statement?

JC: I feel myself in accord with what seems to be the spirit of your question. I have recently thought that were Schoenberg still alive, I could persuade him in conversation that by the use of chance operations I have not been unfaithful to him as a dis-

ciplinarian. In fact, that I learned from him what it was that led me to use chance operations.

He sent us to the board in a class in harmony, giving us all a

problem in counterpoint. There were some thirty people in the class. He said, "When you have finished a solution, show it to me, turn around and put up your hand." I did that, and he

said, "That is correct. And now another solution," and another, and another, and finally I said to him, when he asked for still

another, with some confidence, "There aren't any more solutions." I had always worshipped him. He really seemed to me

superior to other human beings. But now he seemed even

superior to himself. He said, "What is the principle underlying all of the solutions?" I was unable to answer.

Recently I've come to the view that the principle underlying all of the solutions is the question that we ask. That's why I said that in the case of an interview, the important things are the questions, not the answers. We can answer a question in

any way, but the questions we ask will determine, somewhat, the nature of the answer.

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It seems to me that that maintains the discipline, because rather than knowing the nature of what it is we're doing, we merely ask, and then the answer is given through chance operations. And the result is that instead of remaining what we were, we

possibly change.

RR: Only if we act with confidence regarding our responsibilities to the question that has been asked.

JC: We must do that. That's given. It says in the I Ching that if

you don't accept the answer, that you have no right to ask again. I have never used chance operations to arrive at a preconceived goal. In other words, I've never been in the situation of not

liking, and because I didn't like, changing the answers I re- ceived. I have sometimes renounced the questions that I've asked. I have thrown away some work, seeing that it was trivial, since I had not found the proper questions. But I've never thrown away the answers to the questions that I've considered to be useful questions to ask.

RR: ... and the connection with the Schoenberg example? You said

you believed that if Schoenberg were alive, you could ...

JC: . .. tell him that the principle underlying all of the solutions was the question that was asked. The question is the principle.

RR: I was asking about responsibility and discipline ...

JC: Perhaps we aren't clear about what a discipline is. I see a dis-

cipline as being a discipline of the ego, so that what happens is not a representation of the likes and dislikes of the ego. And

I see the closeness between the word discipline and disciple, and between yoga and yoke. What is concerned in each case

is the ego that is being controlled in such a way that it will not

act as a barrier to its experience, but that it itself will change. In other words, discipline is implicit in the idea of a question as opposed to a choice.

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a conversation

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