We’ve now played the Winter Music
quite a number of times. I
haven’t kept count. When we
first played it, the silences seemed
very long and the sounds seemed really
separated in space, not obstructing
one another. In Stockholm,
however, when we played it at the Opera
as an interlude in the dance program
given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn
Brown early one October, I noticed
that it had become melodic.
Christian Wolff prophesied this to me
years ago. He said — we
were walking along Seventeenth Street
talking — he said, “No
matter what we do it ends by
being melodic.” As far as I
am concerned this happened to Webern
years ago. Karlheinz
Stockhausen once told me — we were in
Copenhagen — “I demand two
things from a composer:
invention and that he astonish me.”
- John Cage
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