George Brecht’s notes read:
We drop the idea of an ‘ideal’ eighth-note, and consider a notational eighth-note to be a direction for an action: it has an operational definition. There is a specific minimum amount of information required to define this action in terms of sound duration, frequency, amplitude, etc. Traditionally this information has been provided (for any specific eighth-note) by the context of the piece in which it occurs, and by traditional (or period styles) of performance.
In some recent music (e.g. the Intersections of Morton Feldman) some or all of the defining characteristics of a sound have been left unspecified. The part left undetermined by the composer is supplied by the performer out of his nature, from the nature of his instrument, or the nature of the situation (Christian Wolff: Duo I).
When sounds arise consistent with the nature of their source, there is music. (Each defines “consistency” and “source”: with Stockhausen the source is the composer, the consistency, conformance [sic] to his intention; with Cage the source is where the sounds come from, the consistency “naturalness” [wu-shih?]).
In performing this new music (with much compositional indeterminacy) the performer confirms his own nature, in exactly the way the composer, in composition, confirmed his. The “virtu” of virtuosity must now mean behavior out of one’s life-experience; it cannot be delimited toward physical skill. The listener responding to this sound out of his own experience, adds a new element to the system: composer/notation/performer/sound/listener, and, for himself, defines the sound as music. For the virtuoso listener all sound may be music.
Brecht’s evocation of the Zen Buddhist term wu-shih in this passage signals an approach to experience and behavior that is ordinary, unaffected, and therefore “natural.” Brecht may have become familiar with the term via Alan Watts’s book, The Way of Zen (1957).
© 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
