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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. 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.”
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