morning - radio - transcribed while listening
i've been working not on music but on my mode of consciousness
give up my intentions as far as the sounds are concerned
if an intention arises then I have to wait until I have no intention and then the sound changes from there
it comes from an involuntary
does that allow for an unmeasured sounds
does the initiation of the sound
you have to reach a state I have to begin but after the beginning
what form of how to you attempt to reach that state of consciousness
is that intentional
no.. to reach that mode is intentional
so my intention is directed there (or will) toward the task
your will is directed toward reaching the state of consciousness out of which the music will come involuntarily
what… what.. did you did you uh come upon that state of consciousness as part of your daily life and discover that it created music or did you search for it
well its a search and its an ongoing search
it came from a task I gave myself in 1957 responding to a recorded environments
i gave myself the task of listening to everything all the time from that point and when I became more and more aware of not listening and bringing myself to listen then I began to listen inwardly as well as outwardly
i realized very slowly over a long period of time
the activity of performing or framing a performance and the intentions that accumulate produce an anxious kind of mode or can
and i became bothered by the "flurry" of activity and how it tends to mask so many things - for instance all the sounds we're hearing right now: the creaking and the fire snapping and so on
i feel that that is part of the relationship that I have to work with all the time
gradually i realized that I had to learn to bring that kind fo listening into the kind of music that I was making and intending to do something produced a particulary kind of feeling and then there was a certain delay time
we seem to be governed by Now by the morality of not wanting that feeling*******
that might be the reason we recognize you as an artist because you make that feeling clear to us but there must be a morality
don't you think
there must be a morality producing the antipathy towards that feeling that you don't find in composers say of 100 years ago
from the music of 100 years ago you get the feeling that that music is glorifying those anxieties
there was a clear
the composer of 100 years ago had a clear function
the function of his work was clear
for instance Bach in the church writing for the church
certainy there was anxiety but the function of the music was clear
people must have valued that anxiety because you hear the anxiety in the music
and you hear well that must have been a valuable sort of feeling
beings were valuable to the indians to eat
that must have been a value to that feeling of anxiety
to have it so much in the news
so if your music is about a state of mind or a place in your consciousness where there's no anxiety i don't think you would have been
you'd only be at home in this time don't you think
it's very natural for you to feel that way
natural? i don't know
i'm not sure I can agree with the idea you've developed about anxiety
anxiety being in the music
projecting it in other music
it has to be a little more specific to understand what we're talking about
i'm talking about the kind of performance anxiety i had
there was an anxious movement in the music i wrote at the end of the 50s
all through the 60s there was a dissolving a working with that kind of anxiety a fragmentation dissolution of tonality say this dissolution of musical materials had come from from all of that all of that time so that i mean there are two things for me and one is the move into this meditative sort of work and the idea of changing my consciousness my own consciousness of my work
and the other was the theatrical development when I began to work with materials other than just sound
and it was a kind of way of disorientation of roles disorientation of the audiences role with the music
a drawing of attention to the situation and the boundaries of the situation
do you feel that this situation that we're in right now is anxious
was it achieved in a way of non-intention
well certainly our particular interaction is one that has a certain amount of premeditation but there were no guarantees about how we would talk what we would talk about
so there was an establishment of a frame and a deliberate deliberately I would rather not know what questions come up
I couldn't have imagined a question other than
in order to find what would come forward n myself at this point and that is very much related to the way that I'm working
trying to find what is there
what is there
rather than uh um trying to guarantee some particular thing in advance
why did you um how is your voice involved in why did you choose in the area of sounds that you chose
well because it's very direct
it's a direct connection with the inner world
this is where I can manifest what is occurring within myself without uh without a translation from myself to an instrument say
although I'm using my accordion which has been a part of my life for 30 years
the accordion seems like a part of you
a lot of the work I've been doing has been involved with just vocal sounds the meditations sonic mediations