Liner Notes (1962)

My earliest recollection of music — I couldn’t have been more than five — is my mother holding one of my fingers and picking out "Eli Eli" with it on the piano. Like almost everyone else, my early teachers were very bad. At the age of twelve, however, I was fortunate enough to come under the tutelage of Mme. Maurina-Press, a Russian aristocrat who earned her living after the revolution by teaching piano and by playing in a trio with her husband and brother-in-law. In fact, they were quite well known in those days. It was because of her — only, I think, because she was not a disciplinarian — that I was instilled with a sort of vibrant musicality rather than musicianship.

I realize now that that image of Mme. Press — a nonprofessional with all the ability and brilliance of the "pro" — that "dilettantism" — has always remained with me. She was a close friend of the Scriabins — and so I played Scriabin. She studied with Busoni, and so I played Busoni transcriptions of Bach, and spent more time reading his footnotes than playing.

The years passed almost identically, and with the same random quality of these opening sentences. I composed little Scriabin-esque pieces, gave up practicing the little that I did, eventually abandoned my teacher and found myself at fifteen studying with Wallingford Riegger, who was equally lax with me.

I must have had a secret desire to leave this dreamlike attitude to music, and to become a "musician," because at eighteen I found myself with Stefan Wolpe. But all we did was argue about music, and I felt I was learning nothing. One day I stopped paying him. Nothing was said about it. I continued to go, we continued to argue, and we are still arguing eighteen years later.

My first meeting with John Cage was at Carnegie Hall when Mitropoulos conducted the Webern Symphony. I believe that was the winter of 1949–50, and I was about twenty-four years old. The audience reaction to the piece was so antagonistic and disturbing that I left immediately afterwards. I was more or less catching my breath in the empty lobby when John came out. I recognized him, though we had never met, walked over, and as though I had known him all my life said, "Wasn’t that beautiful?" A moment later we were talking animatedly about how beautiful the piece sounded in so large a hall. We immediately made arrangements for me to visit him.

John at that time lived on the top floor of a tenement overlooking the East River on Grand Street. It was a magnificent view, four rooms were made into two. A large expanse of the East River, just a few potted plants, a long low marble table and a constellation of Lippold sculptures along the wall. (Lippold lived next door.)

The reason I linger at the memory of how John lived is because it was in this room that I found an appreciation and an encouragement more extravagant than I had ever before encountered. It was here also that I met Philip Guston, my closest friend who has contributed so much to my life in art.

At this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying." And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, "I don’t know how I made it."

The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn’t know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

In a few months I too moved into that magic house, except that I was on the second floor, and with just a glimpse of the East River. I was very aware at the time of how symbolically I felt that fact.

I had already become friends with David Tudor while I was with Wolpe. Now I introduced him to John. Soon afterwards Christian Wolff appeared, and then Earle Brown, who met John while he was on tour in the Middle West and decided to make a new life in New York in order to be with the new music.

There was very little talk about music with John. Things were moving too fast to even talk about it. But there was an incredible amount of talk about painting. John and I would drop in at the Cedar Bar at six in the afternoon and talk with artist friends until three in the morning, when it closed. I can say without exaggeration that we did this every day for five years of our lives.

The new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct, more immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore. Varèse had elements of this. But he was too "Varèse." Webern had glimpses of it. But his work was too involved with the disciplines of the twelve-tone system. The new structure required a concentration more demanding than if the technique were that of still photography, which for me is what precise notation has come to imply.

Projection II for flute, trumpet, violin and cello — one of the first graph pieces — was my first experience with this new thought. My desire here was not to "compose," but to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. In order not to involve the performer (i.e., myself) in memory (relationships), and because the sounds no longer had an inherent symbolic shape, I allowed for indeterminacies in regard to pitch. In the Projections only register (high, middle or low), time values, and dynamics (soft throughout) were designated. Later in the same year (1951) I wrote Intersection I and Marginal Intersection, both for orchestra. Both these graph pieces designated only whether high, middle or low register of the instrument was to be used within a given time structure. Entrances within this structure, as well as actual pitches and dynamics, were freely chosen by the performer.

After several years of writing graph music I began to discover its most important flaw. I was not only allowing the sounds to be free — I was also liberating the performer. I had never thought of the graph as an art of improvisation, but more as a totally abstract sonic adventure. This realization was important because I now understood that if the performers sounded bad it was less because of their lapses of taste than because I was still involved with passages and continuity that allowed their presence to be felt.

Between 1953 and 1958 the graph was abandoned. I felt that if the means were to be imprecise the result must be terribly clear. And I lacked that sense of clarity to go on. I hoped to find it in precise notation; i.e., Extensions for Three Pianos, etc. But precision did not work for me either. It was too one-dimensional. It was like painting a picture where at some place there is always a horizon. Working precisely, one always had to generate the movement — there was still not enough plasticity for me. I returned to the graph with two orchestral works: Atlantis (1959) and …Out of "Last Pieces" (1961), using now a more vertical structure where soloistic passages would be at a minimum.

This brings us to Durations — a series of five instrumental pieces, four of which were recently recorded by Time Records. In Piece for Four Pianos and others like it, the instruments all read from the same part — and so what you have there is like a series of reverberations from an identical sound source. In Durations I arrive at a more complex style where each instrument is living out its own individual life in its own individual sound world.

In each piece the instruments begin simultaneously, and are then free to choose their own durations within a given general tempo. The sounds themselves are designated.

The pieces, while looking identical on paper, were actually conceived quite differently. In Durations I the quality of the particular instruments together suggested a closely written kaleidoscope of sound. To achieve this I wrote each voice individually, choosing intervals that seem to erase or cancel out each sound as soon we hear the next. In the Durations with the tuba, the weight of the three instruments used made me treat them as one. I wrote all sounds simultaneously, knowing that no instrument would ever be too far behind or too far ahead of the other. Through thinning and thickening my sounds I kept the image intact. In Durations IV there was a combination of both. Here I was a little more precise in that I gave metronome indications. I also allowed the instruments to have their own individual color more pronouncedly than in the others.