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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 last 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 one of
two things from a composer:
invention or that he astonish me.”
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