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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.
Up in Stockholm, however, when
we played it at the opera as an
interlude in the dance program
given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn
Brown, I noticed that it had
become melodic. Christian
Wolff prophesized this to me years ago.
He said — we were walking
along 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 told me the other day in
Copenhagen, “I demand two
things from a composer:
invention and that he astonish me.”
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