Art Is Whatever You Can Get Away

It Was At Harvard Not Quite Forty Years Ago That I Went Into An Anechoic [totally Silent] Chamber Not Expecting In That Silent Room To Hear Two Sounds: One High, My Nervous System In Operation, One Low, My Blood In Circulation. The Reason I Did Not Expect To Hear Those Two Sounds Was That They Were Set Into Vibration Without Any Intention On My Part. That Experience Gave My Life Direction, The Exploration Of Nonintention. No One Else Was Doing That. I Would Do It For Us. I Did Not Know Immediately What I Was Doing, Nor, After All These Years, Have I Found Out Much. I Compose Music.

I Imagine That As Contemporary Music Goes On Changing In The Way That I'm Changing It What Will Be Done Is To More And More Completely Liberate Sounds From Abstract Ideas About Them And More And More Exactly To Let Them Be Physically Uniquely Themselves. This Means For Me: Knowing More And More Not What I Think A Sound Is But What It Actually Is In All Of Its Acoustical Details And Then Letting This Sound Exist, Itself, Changing In A Changing Sonorous Environment.

Out Of The Work Comes The Work.

Look At Everything. Don't Close Your Eyes To The World Around You. Look And Become Curious And Interested In What There Is To See.

Ideas Are One Thing And What Happens Is Another.