Talking to Morton Feldman (and 64 others)

Imagine being able to ask composers like John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen detailed questions about their influences and their methods of composition. This is exactly what Bálint András Varga did for his new book, Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers. Here, as a taster for this fascinating book, are excerpts from three of his conversations. First György Ligeti:

Noises do not influence me directly, but neither do I cut myself off from them altogether. The outside world makes an indirect impact. Music works with acoustic material, no doubt, but I do not think that the sounds of live or dead nature would influence me in a decisive manner. Various types of movement do. In my view, you see, music mirrors the processes of motion through sound. Machines play an important role… I have, after all, also written a piece for one hundred metronomes.

Although Atmosphères and Apparitions are not programmatic in character—I did not set out to render the sensation of flying in either piece—flying did have an indirect influence on their floating, on the continuous transformation of their musical patterns.

Without asking for my permission, Stanley Kubrick used extracts from Atmosphères, Lux aeterna, and the Requiem in the music of his science fiction film 2001. I was angry with him but I did like his work (apart from the mystical beginning and ending). While composing, I did not think of anything “cosmic” (Atmosphères is meant to convey “atmosphere” rather than “air”), but the film made me aware of the possibility of associating infinity with my music.

As far as Lux aeterna is concerned, the words only served as a chance for me to compose music which is in fact musica aeterna: as if it has been sounding from time immemorial and would be going on forever—we only hear a part of it. It emerges from nowhere, it is here and slowly disappears.

Interviewing Morton Feldman, Varga writes: I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

[On whether Robert Rauschenberg’s white pictures influenced John Cage]
What influenced John Cage in Rauschenberg was an answer to a philosophical question about life and art. Robert Rauschenberg is exactly my age. And brilliant. He said something that was very influential to a lot of young artists at that time. I think this is the influence of Rauschenberg, with his white paintings, to Cage. He said that he does not want either life or art. He wants something in between. A very influential statement: neither life nor art but something in between. And Cage would see this beautiful white thing in the shadows of the environment. He lived in a very beautiful apartment, Cage, and he saw where art and the outside environment could collage.

John Cage is only involved with music forms….That there is nothing there behind the material. So in that sense, John Cage is not a mystic.

Don’t you think that his music exudes an atmosphere and in doing so, it communicates something beyond the music, it communicates a way of thinking?
I think it asks a lot of questions. I think it’s the atmosphere of asking questions.

Whereas yours?

The atmosphere of answering them (laughs).

In that case, one must envy you: you seem to have the answers. Few people can claim that.

Only for my music. Only. You see, that’s another problem: I don’t feel that it’s a community. I could never listen to a piece of Boulez and get some insight from the piece. I could listen to a piece of Boulez and could say to him what I said once to Ligeti, who I like very much, we are very good friends, and I said to him: “György, you are too gifted to write European music”.

II.
Sounds do not surround you.

There are sounds right now.

I don’t hear them.

You don’t hear them?

No.

What sounds do you hear?

Nothing. I hear them but they are indigenous. In a place that builds modern buildings—do you hear the drilling that’s going on? It is absolutely like having a lion in a jungle. I mean it is indigenous to the landscape. It would be interesting if you would hear an Islamic chant. What’s happening here? OPEC, OPEC! (Vienna - where the interview took place - is the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In other words: I hear it like everyone else but it is not a source of . . .

. . . inspiration.

It’s not a source of anything. Most of the time I think of it as pollution. Noise pollution.

How about the sounds of nature, such as the wind, birds, and so on?

I have no contact with them. They don’t interest me at all. I can live very well without them.

So in composing, the sounds always come from within.

Yes, only when I am composing. Otherwise, you are crazy. I don’t go around hearing sounds. Some people do! Stockhausen, I am sure, is one of them.

Let’s turn to Karlheinz Stockhausen for our final snippet. Here the Master describes what one might find in one of his best known pieces:

In Hymnen there appear national anthems, that is, completely banal material as well as numerous other situations (recordings made in a Chinese shop, at a student protest demonstration in Aachen, at a ship’s christening in Hamburg, at a soccer match with crowds of people shouting, the squawking of birds, and boys shouting in a school yard). Linked to the American national anthem, you hear odd short-wave sounds (Morse signals, whistling, shrill screeching), as if someone has turned on a radio station at night, with distorted broadcasts. In the context of the “International” the words of a croupier: “rien ne va plus Messieurs Dames,” “faites vos jeux Messieurs Dames,” etc., are heard. Out of the “Rouge” called by a croupier in a roulette hall emerges a four-part fugue in four different languages on the word rouge, with all the different variations of the color red as listed in the color catalogue of a London paint company.

Longer excerpts will follow over the coming weeks. Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers by Bálint András Varga will be published towards the end of this month by the University of Rochester Press.

Every Day is a Good Day

This is the title of a travelling exhibition of prints, watercolours and drawings by John Cage that will open at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead in mid-June, continuing on to locations in Cambridge, Huddersfield, Glasgow and Bexhill on Sea over the course of the following eighteen months. Echoing Cage’s use of chance, the exhibition will be selected and installed using a computerised version of the I-Ching.

Peter Dickinson’s volume of interviews, CageTalk: Dialogues with & about John Cage, remains essential reading. To celebrate the opening of Every Day, we offer the following short excerpt from Dickinson’s interview with Cage himself:

PD I’d like to try to see whether you feel the Zen involvement needs understanding by those who want to account—in a very Western, logical way—for what you’ve done since about 1950.

JC I’m not sure. I’m thinking, for instance, of a very close friend with whom I feel utter sympathy—Morton Feldman. I would say Morty has no closeness to Zen. His closeness is to Western psychology, don’t you think?

PD Yes, I do. But he wouldn’t go all the way with you in taking his own tastes and desires, as you call it, out of his music.

JC No, he wouldn’t at all. But he feels very close to my work. He also has, so to speak, as deep an understanding and experience of my work as anyone. And yet he has no experience of Zen.

PD The golden opportunity to get yourself out of your music was the discovery of the I Ching?

JC I was first introduced to the I Ching by Lou Harrison before I went to Seattle, and it made no impression on me, but I remembered it. And later, Christian Wolff brought me a copy that his father had just published— of the Bollingen edition, a translation from the German of Wilhelm by Cary Baynes. At that point, when I saw it—I’m speaking now of the chart with the hexagrams—I suddenly understood how to write the Music of Changes.

PD When Feldman called out, “You’ve hit it?”

JC Yes.

PD A kind of eureka?

JC [laughs] We were at a point with his work, my work, and Christian Wolff’s work with the charmed help of David Tudor—a very intoxicating point—where things were happening quickly and richly.

PD It must have been wonderful to come across a performer like David Tudor?

JC Yes. Another great moment that I enjoyed was the close association with Merce, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. The four of us were often together.

PD Would you account for 4’33”, which everybody knows and talks about in terms of Rauschenberg’s completely white and completely black canvases or of the Buddhas who, when asked to make a statement, said absolutely nothing?

JC All of that. Actually, I wrote a text, which has never been published, called “A Composer’s Confessions,” and in it I described the silent piece before I wrote it. But I didn’t give myself the right to write it until I saw the white paintings of Bob’s.

PD You’ve said quite often that 4’33” is the piece of yours that you like best.

JC Yes.

PD Why?

JC Well, I listen to it all the time! [extended laughs] I wish you’d ask me such questions all the time. [more laughs]

PD You listen to it all the time by your selection [Cage: Yes], but in a concert hall it’s given to a paying audience.

JC The pieces that are given [laughs], that aren’t that, are a terrible interruption! [extended laughs]

PD So all sound is an interruption of the silence?

JC I consider it my responsibility not to interrupt that, you see.

PD But you’ve also said there’s no such thing as silence?

JC True. But there are, in fact, things to be heard when you listen to nothing— to no music.

PD This is now fascinatingly logical in the Zen manner but illogical in the European manner. Was it something of this sort—your insistence on getting yourself out of your music—that caused difficulties with Boulez when you were quite close at one point?

JC I suppose so. We had a very interesting correspondence; I think ultimately it will be published.

PD Some of it was very technical?

JC Oh yes. Some of his letters to me were just absolutely marvellous in terms of information. His handwriting was so very small; mine was scrawly and large. He wrote on pale blue, transparent airmail paper—on both sides—so the writing on one side affects the reading of the writing on the other side. It was very difficult. We used to get microscopes—because it was in French besides. [laughs] We were struggling to understand it.

As we have had to omit Peter Dickinson’s footnotes from this post, we should point out that ‘A Composer’s Confessions’ and Cage’s correspondence with Boulez have since been published. It is also worth mentioning that Cage did not always choose 4’33” as his favourite piece. Nearly twenty years ago Dickinson was asked, by a leading music magazine, to review a ‘recording’ of the piece. The CD was fully packed, complete with booklet notes, but 4’33” was the only work on the disc. Dickinson offered to review it with the normal heading, then a blank space and his name at the end. Sadly the editor declined.

CageTalk is available from your favourite bookseller.

On the trail of Samuel Barber

As we approach the centenary of Samuel Barber’s birth and the publication of Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute we are pleased to post the following account of Dickinson’s meetings with Barber’s friends and colleagues. The interviews, versions of which form the core of this new book, took place in 1981 for a BBC documentary on the composer.

For some years I had been hoping that Samuel Barber would be able to visit Keele University, where I had started the Music Department and its Centre for American Music programme in 1974. Copland and Carter had already been; I had met Cage and Thomson in London; but Barber proved more elusive. Finally I learnt that he was too ill to travel and we had to be content with honouring him at the University with a performance of the Violin Concerto and two performances of the Piano Sonata.

Barber has always been low in personal profile compared with Copland, but his music is just as regularly played throughout the world. I was curious about the success of a composer who hardly seemed American at all, had very little obvious originality in his work, and was often regarded as old-fashioned. So when the BBC invited me to put together a Radio 3 documentary with Arthur Johnson as producer, I looked forward to going on the trail of Samuel Barber. The series of interviews we were given forms the basis of my book Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute.

To start with, Barber was fortunate all his life. His father was a respected doctor in West Chester, Pennsylvania; his aunt Louise Homer was an internationally known opera singer; and her husband Sydney Homer was an accomplished composer of songs and an influential adviser to Barber at all stages. The family lived near enough to Philadelphia for him to become one of the first students at the new Curtis Institute, founded and liberally endowed by Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1924.

At the age of nine Barber wrote a note to his mother warning her that he was meant to be a composer and not an athlete. At Curtis, though, he was a triple major – in composition, piano and voice. He was always a good pianist and has recorded his Hermit Songs with Leontyne Price. As a singer, he recorded Dover Beach in 1935 and did some professional singing. However, as a result of prizes, awards, friends and family, he was able to concentrate on composing.

It was at Curtis that Barber met Gian Carlo Menotti. Eighteen himself, he was asked to look after the gifted seventeen-year-old from Italy who couldn’t speak English. Menotti has described the beginning of a friendship that lasted over forty years:

'Sam was the very first friend I made in America. I had learnt that he was the idol of the Curtis Institute. He too studied composition with Scalero, but also piano with Isabelle Vengerova and voice with Emilio de Gogorza. He was considered a genius in all three courses. Not only was Sam enormously gifted, but he was very handsome and very intelligent.'

Obviously Menotti was going to be an essential source in every way so Arthur Johnson and I arranged to visit him at his country estate Yester House, some thirty miles outside Edinburgh. Menotti was as charming as ever and, even though he was surrounded by French TV making a film for his seventieth birthday, he gave us about two hours, all preserved on tape. It soon became obvious how much Menotti and Barber had in common. Both came into contact early on with strong musical traditions and, unlike many an enfant terrible of twentieth-century music, they accepted them as they found them. In both careers they achieved popular appeal but, as time went on, some critical disdain came their way. All the same, both could afford, in the words of Liberace, to “cry all the way to the bank.”

After visiting Menotti, our interviews were based in New York – a mixture of composer colleagues, performers, friends, publishers and critics. Composers of very different temperaments from Barber, such as Copland, Schuman and Thomson, found much to admire in his work, and performers with whom he had worked closely were devoted to him.

It was May, which I remembered as fairly warm in New York, but for two days it rained constantly. On one of those wet days we visited Copland at his house, Rock Hill, Peekskill, New York (now Copland House, the centre for American creative arts) situated in dense woodland an hour by train from New York City. Copland recalled the inter-war years as times when he was a modernist getting all the brickbats, but Sam Barber was a conservative. Time has ironed all that out and the difference doesn’t matter. Virgil Thomson, at the age of eighty-five, was less easy to communicate with than Copland because of his deafness. Most of the interview involved shouting but his mind was as acute as ever. He characterized Barber as a composer for “high middle-brow taste”, like Rachmaninov, and began by talking about money. Charles Turner told us that Thomson had a habit of going up to Barber at parties and saying: “You’re the most successful composer alive!” Barber, with a retiring, melancholic and rather private nature did not always enjoy this.

Another composer we met was William Schuman, whose centenary also falls in 2010, who wrote much of his music whilst holding down important jobs including the Presidency of the Juilliard School of Music and then of the Lincoln Center. I asked Schuman what Barber’s style consisted of. He admitted that he once heard the Cello Concerto on the car radio without realizing it was by Barber and insisted this was not important and would not have mattered in previous centuries. The main thing is that the music is “perfectly made” – like Brahms.

This brought us to discuss the appeal of the Adagio for Strings, the one work everybody – dead or alive – knows by Barber. Dead, because it has been widely used as a funeral elegy ever since the death of President Roosevelt in 1945. Even Leontyne Price, who didn’t know about this, said she wanted it played at her own funeral. The universality of the emotions conveyed in the work is incontestable. Exactly what those emotions are is impossible to pin down. Virgil Thomson, provocative as ever, alleged the piece was a “detailed love-scene.”

Barber wrote for some of the greatest performers of the period. Unfortunately Horowitz, who had a crucial role in the Piano Sonata, was not well enough to see us but we met John Browning, for whom Barber wrote his Piano Concerto in 1962.

He stressed that Barber wrote for the public, much as a performer plays to the audience and aims to communicate. He mentioned some ways in which Barber would take account of the performer when a new piece was still rough. For example, the end of the first movement of the Piano Concerto became loud, not soft, at Browning’s instigation.

We met Leontyne Price, one of the finest singers of her generation, at her apartment in Greenwich Village. Barber wrote his Hermit Songs for her and they gave the premiere together. She sang Cleopatra in Barber’s second grand opera, Antony and Cleopatra, commissioned for the opening of the new Met at Lincoln Center in 1966. In her interview she confirms, with plenty of amusing detail, that the occasion was wrong for Barber’s music – and so was Zefirelli’s production. Although there were palpable mishaps and the work got savaged by the critics, Price insisted that she had never been in a flop in her life and she and Barber were very moved by the revised version put on by the Juilliard School in 1974.

Other people we interviewed make it possible to explore the sources of Barber’s music, the nature of its appeal and its historical position. The historian H. Wiley Hitchcock finds Barber a safe, careful composer working within limits, and very lucky in his opportunities. Barber himself agreed about his luck - “I was very lucky always.” Others compared Barber to Bach in writing old-fashioned music of high quality. A comparison with Benjamin Britten is sometimes made but it looks as if they never met. There is some common ground between Barber and William Walton. Both were strongly attracted to Italy and the music of both continues to reach an audience.

Barber never courted publicity, so he gave very few interviews. There are three in this book and the one with Allan Kozinn dates from the last year of Barber’s life. He asked Barber why he had not responded to the various currents of modern music and Barber replied:

'Ah, I was waiting for this. Why haven’t I changed? Why should I? There’s no reason music should be difficult for the audience to understand is there? Not that I necessarily address the audience when I compose, or for that matter, the players. Or posterity. I write for the present and I write for myself. I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience ultimately.'

Peter Dickinson’s Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute will be published in March. Two CDs of Dickinson's own works have recently been issued by Naxos. Coming next, the late John Browning on the piano concerto and working with Barber.

Merce Cunningham, the I-Ching & the first Happening

Surely any time traveller with an interest in the arts would want to touch down at the Black Mountain College in the ‘forties and ‘fifties. Who could resist painting with Willem de Kooning, discussing poetry with Jonathan Williams or building a geodesic dome with Buckminster Fuller? Had you been there in 1952 you might have witnessed, arguably, the first 'Happening' featuring John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who died last month. Here, by way of a tribute to the great dancer and choreographer, we post a short excerpt from Peter Dickinson’s interview with Cunningham, to be found in CageTalk published by the University of Rochester Press:

PD Do you actually use the I Ching?

MC I have used it in several dances. I could use it in all of them: sometimes because of practical necessities, such as the amount of time I have to make something, [laughs] I have to employ simpler ways like using coins. It’s the element of chance bringing up something my own experience might not produce. Even though I have made the movements that will be utilized in the dance, I use chance operations to devise the continuity so that what comes after what can be a new experience.

PD Wasn’t it when Christian Wolff’s father published the I Ching that it became a great discovery for John?

MC I don’t remember the exact moment. It must have been Christian Wolff who brought the book, and I remember very strongly the impression he [Cage] had of reading the preface where Jung asks the I Ching what it thought of being published in a different language. The answer was so extraordinary . . . I remember John being absolutely amazed. My own experience about it was that the book is so vast and the kind of thing it allows for is so open that if you asked it a question, the answers were always pertinent. Then I began to see that the numbers themselves—not what they represented in terms of hexagrams—could be used for my purpose. It was around that time that I began thinking much about space and dancing. I’d been taught that in dance there was the proscenium stage and there was a center of interest at the center of the stage, the most important part of the space. Even before the I Ching, that didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t have any other answer, I admit. Then I happened to read this quotation of Einstein’s where he said there are no fixed points in space. I thought that was perfect for the stage, and there’s no point that’s any more important than any other. In that sense it’s Buddhist or Zen. Any point could be important. Wherever anybody was, was in that sense a center. So I began to explore that by taking pieces of plain white paper and marking the imperfections, then drawing lines from one to the other; then taking another sheet of paper and drawing more lines because the imperfections are always different. Then I would superimpose them so that each sheet [represented a single] dancer’s space track. Where those [tracks] happened to coincide they could do something together. That eradicated anything about the center of the stage: it didn’t exist anymore. I thought that was wonderful! [laughs] Then I also found it was possible to make dances where the audience was all the way around you. One of the very first ones, called Suite by Chance, was done that way, and we presented it at Black Mountain College that summer - we were there with the audience all the way around us.

PD Did you find that you and John dominated the scene there?

MC Oh no, not at all. . . . First of all, from a practical and personal point of view, it was wonderful for me. I was there several summers, actually. The first summer John and I were there with Buckminster Fuller, Elaine and Bill de Kooning, and Albers, of course. What was so amazing was that, in spite of inadequate facilities for dancing, it was still made possible for me to work. The dining hall was the only big space they had, and they’d simply clear it every day. It was a community where the pupils and the teachers had a sense of interacting. You all ate at the same dining room and sat at different tables each day with different people, always having a crossing of ideas, listening to something totally out of the realm of dancing. As far as I was concerned it was marvellous to get out of it for a while. You could not only hear about something different, but it could make you change your ideas.

PD You took part in the happening at Black Mountain College in 1952. What was it like?

MC I don’t know in detail what the others did. There were about five or six of us—Bob Rauschenberg, John, David Tudor, myself, I think M. C. Richards and maybe another person. I’m sure John has described this, but we each simply did what we did. That is, I danced around through the public, which sat in the center with aisles between. It was a kind of agreed-upon length of time during which these things would take place. There was no connection other than what anybody looking at this could make. All these things were separate, and everybody was sitting facing a different way so that they would see or hear something in a different way. It wasn’t all fixed so that everybody was to look at it one way. At the end of it they brought out coffee or something! [laughs]

PD Did it feel like something that would have reverberations right through the 1960s?

MC No. And it didn’t have a name. It was just something we did. Later they called them happenings. It was an idea about theater that John had — that anything could be theater. It can, depending on how you act or think about it. It doesn’t have to have a reference, a meaning, or a connection. It can simply take place.

PD John’s ideas open up the skies, don’t they?

MC Yes, a large mind open to so many kinds of things. His reactions to things have often been so amazing to me.

Merce Cunningham died on 26th July 2009.

CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage edited by Peter Dickinson (‘The ideal introduction to Cage’ Times Literary Supplement) is available from all good booksellers. The photograph of Merce Cunningham with an unidentified dancer in Roaratorio (1983) is reproduced in the book courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

Starbucks and Old Vienna

The latest edition of Boosey and Hawkes’ trade newsletter, Quarternotes, contains a fascinating short interview with Viennese composer, Kurt Schwertsik. Asked why he favours the fleeting, everyday ‘music in the air,’ Schwertsik replies:

When I was searching for a basic strategy as an artist, John Cage was very important to me. He described how you could listen to everyday sounds – in the street, in nature, in conversations. I agree with Cage that we are people that live in the air…At Darmstadt I liked his Zen-inspired spiritual view…he reinvigorated my interest in the Dada movement.

Schwertsik is also one of the interviewees in Peter Dickinson’s acclaimed, CageTalk. There he describes his encounters with Cage at Darmstadt more fully:

He gave three lectures, including the “Lecture on Nothing” where he has those beautiful pauses. And he gave another lecture during which he lit cigarettes. Each one was somehow handled differently – smoked once, twice, not at all, or smoked to the butt.

Schwertsik goes on to describe Cage’s use of the I Ching in composing Music for Piano:

People were very upset. I remember Ligeti asking him if he would use chance operations and then select something that pleased him. He mentioned Kurt Schwitters, who used to look at the landscape through a little frame and then say, “Oh look, this is typical Schwitters!” He thought Cage might have been involved in an objet trouvé venture, which was not true – obviously.

Schwertsik was ostracized by Darmstadt as, under Cage's influence, he moved towards Dada:

I believe the function of art is to denounce seriousness. It should be fun. There’s a halo of awe around modern music. You achieve more if you’re not serious.

Hence, perhaps, the title of his 2007 composition for trumpet and orchestra, Divertimento Macchiato. “After the premiere,” he explains in Quarternotes, “my wife Christa suggested adding Macchiato to the title and this seemed perfect to me, as it captured an ironic image of modern so-called ‘designer coffee’ – more Starbucks than Old Vienna.”

Perhaps too it is fittingly Schwertsikian that he is incorrectly described as deceased in the second edition of Grove.

Divertimento Macchiato can be heard as part of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Scottish tour in April 2009, and his latest work, a ballet entitled Kafka Amerika, will be premiered in Linz in the autumn. CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage, edited by Peter Dickinson, is available from all good booksellers.

Cage on Future Radio

A few miles up the road from Boydell’s Suffolk office is the home of the stimulating and often outspoken blog, On an Overgrown Path. The associated Future Radio broadcast this coming Sunday (February 10th, repeated on Monday) will feature the music of John Cage. Anyone coming away from this programme with an appetite for more should investigate Peter Dickinson’s recent book of interviews with and about the composer, CageTalk, described as “a valuable and enjoyable read” by BBC Music Magazine and an “ideal introduction to Cage” by the venerable Times Literary Supplement. Available, as they say, from all good booksellers, some of whom may be found here.