Last night I had difficulties entering sleep so I put on Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus hoping that its infrequent and sparse pacing would help me reach the waters. But the opposite happened as I tried to deduce the structure of the pieces which seem to litter the darkness of the room. This morning I said I'd want to learn more about how this guy thought. Here he is in a 1983 interview:
TM: What new or emerging trends or composers do you feel have been important for the ’70s and ’80s?
MF: Nothing, we had nothing in the ’70s. We had —
TM: Or even the ’60s?
MF: We had popular music, like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but they’re show business. Serious stuff, if I may use that word, experimental stuff, if I may use that word, nothing, nothing. Cage and myself are still doing the most interesting work. The young people are a disaster.
TM: Why is this?
MF: They shouldn’t be in the field. It’s a field that requires immense talent. They have no ideas. What the hell they’re doing there, I have no idea. I taught a seminar on my own—I mean I loved the kids, I suppose. They’re not kids anymore, they’re your age, doctorate program. I said, “You like those crazy Arabs that tie yourself up with dynamite and you crash into a building?” I said, “My God, you’re not going to crash in here.” I said, “We have it fixed — it happens about ten years after your doctorate degree.” I want everybody to get out of music. It’s too difficult. It requires immense talent for ideas, when not to use ideas. And a feeling for instruments, and a feeling for sound, and a natural feeling for proportion, not a didactic feeling for proportion, all these things. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very, very difficult. Music is very, very difficult. I don’t even think it should be taught in universities anymore.
TM: Well, what should happen to it?
MF: I think it should disappear from academic life, because the tendency is to be very academic even without academic life.
TM: You yourself teach!
MF: I teach … I don’t know what I do. I don’t know what I do. What is teaching? Teaching is in a sense what happened with Hindemith. This is the story about Hindemith and Yale: He says to somebody, “You know, I invented a system where you can be stupid and get good results?” That was the whole idea—finding ways to make it democratic. It’s not democratic. I mean, composition is not democratic.
TM: You don’t teach that way, I hope.
MF: No, I don’t teach like that, but I let them hang. I teach by not teaching. In a way, I would play things, and I would be a devil’s advocate. I would ask a question, “What do you think about it?” I teach one thing, actually. I don’t teach composition per se, but I go at composition by way of its acoustical reality. That is, I teach orchestration.
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