Indeterminacy: New Aspect Of Form In Instrumental And Electronic Music

Notes Includes booklet.

Late in September in 1958 I was in Stockholm in a hotel. I set about writing the present lecture which I was obliged to give a week later at the Brussels Fair. I recalled a remark made years before by David Tudor that I should make a talk that was nothing but stories. The idea was appealing when he gave it to me but I had never acted on it. A few weeks before, in Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen had said, "I'll publish your Brussels talk in Die Reihe." I replied, "You'd better wait and see what it is I write." He said, "No matter what it is, I'll publish it." My intention in putting 90 stories together in an unplanned way is to suggest that all things, sounds, stories (and, by extension, beings) are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not over-simplified by an idea of relationship in one person's mind. Most of the stories are things that happened that stuck in my mind. Others I read in books and remembered, those for instance, from Kwang-Tse and Sri Ramakrishna. The 2nd, 15th, 16th, 46th, and 75th stories are to be found somewhere in the literature surrounding Zen. David Tudor: piano, whistles, tape machines, and amplified slinky.