of them aspects conventionally limited to one or more of the others.
So it was that I gave about 1949 my Lecture on Nothing at the Artists’ Club on Eighth Street in New York City (the artists’ club started by Robert Motherwell, which predated the popular one associated with Philip Pavia, Bill de Kooning, et al.). This Lecture on Nothing was written in the same rhythmic structure I employed at the time in my musical compositions (Sonatas and Interludes, Three Dances, etc.). One of the structural divisions was the repetition, some fourteen times, of a single page in which occurred the refrain, “If anyone is sleepy let him go to sleep.” Jeanne Reynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, “John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.” She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.
At Black Mountain College in 1952, I organized an event that involved the paintings of Bob Rauschenberg, the dancing of Merce Cunningham, films, slides, phonograph records, radios, the poetries of Charles Olson and M. C. Richards recited from the tops of ladders, and the pianism of David Tudor, together with my Juilliard lecture, which ends: “A piece of string, a sunset, each acts.” The audience was seated in the center of all this activity. Later that summer, vacationing in New England, I visited America’s first synagogue, to discover that the congregation was there seated precisely the way I had arranged the audience at Black Mountain.
As I look back, I realize that a concern with poetry was early with me. At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed. Since the Lecture on Nothing there have been more than a dozen pieces that were unconventionally written, including some that were done by means of chance operations and one that was largely a series of questions left unanswered. When M. C. Richards asked me why I didn’t one day give a conventional informative lecture, adding that that would be the most shocking thing I could do, I said, “I don’t give these lectures to surprise people, but out of a need for poetry.”
As I see it, poetry is not prose simply because poetry is in one way or another formalized. It is not poetry by reason of its content or ambiguity but by reason of its allowing musical elements (time, sound) to be introduced into the world of words. Thus, traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e. g., the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way. Karl Shapiro may have been thinking along these lines when he wrote his Essay on Rime in poetry.
Committing these formalized lectures to print has presented certain problems, and some of the solutions reached are compromises between what would have been desirable and what was practicable. The lecture Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing? is an example. In this and other cases, a headnote explains the means to be used in the event of oral delivery.
Not all these pieces, of course, are unusual in form. Several were written to be printed—that is, to be seen rather than to be heard. Several others were composed and delivered as conventional informative lectures (without shocking their audiences for that reason, so far as I could determine). This collection does not include all that I have written; it does reflect what have been, and continue to be, my major concerns.
Critics frequently cry “Dada” after attending one of my concerts or hearing one of my lectures. Others bemoan my interest in Zen. One of the liveliest lectures I ever heard was given by Nancy Wilson Ross at the Cornish School in Seattle. It was called Zen Buddhism and Dada. It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible. They change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action. What was Dada in the 1920’s is now, with the exception of the work of Marcel Duchamp, just art. What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen. I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. I shall continue making them, however. I often point out that Dada nowadays has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked. What nowadays, America mid-twentieth century, is Zen?
I am grateful to Richard K. Winslow, composer, whose musical ways are different from mine, who seven years ago, as Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, engaged David Tudor and me for a concert and who, at the time as we were walking along, introduced me without warning to his habit of suddenly quietly singing. Since then, he has twice invited us back to Wesleyan, even though our programs were consistently percussive, noisy, and silent, and the views which I expressed were consistently antischolastic and anarchic. He helped obtain for me the Fellowship at the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies which, in spite of the air-conditioning, I have enjoyed during the last academic year. And he inspired the University Press to publish this book. The reader may argue the propriety of this support, but he must admire, as I do, Winslow’s courage and unselfishness.
—J. C.
June 1961
The text below was written for Julian Beck and Judith Malina, directors of the Living Theatre, for use in their program booklet when they were performing at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Greenwich Village, New York.
SILENCE
THE FUTURE OF MUSIC: CREDO
The following text was delivered as a talk at a meeting of a Seattle arts society organized by Bonnie Bird in 1937. It was printed in the brochure accompanying George Avakian’s recording of my twenty-five-year retrospective concert at Town Hall, New York, in 1958.
I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of “sound effects” recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of the imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.
TO MAKE MUSIC
If this word “music” is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS
Most inventors of electrical musical instruments have attempted to imitate eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments, just as early automobile designers copied the carriage. The Novachord and the Solovox are examples of this desire to imitate the past rather than construct the future. When Theremin provided an instrument with genuinely new possibilities, Thereministes did their utmost to make the instrument sound like some old instrument, giving it a sickeningly sweet vibrato, and performing upon it, with difficulty, masterpieces from the past. Although the instrument is capable of a wide variety of sound qualities, obtained by the turning of a dial, Thereministes act as censors, giving the public those sounds they think the public will like. We are shielded from new sound experiences.
The special function of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.
WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC
It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound