A Year from Monday

CONTENTS

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pp. vii-

FOREWORD

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pp. ix-x

When Silence was published, I gave a copy to David Tudor. After looking it over, he said, "Too bad the Juilliard Lecture isn't in it." That text is included in this collection which, except for the Lecture on Commitment, written while Silence was in preparation, and many of the stories found here ...

DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) 1965

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pp. 3-20

This text was written for publication by Clark Coolidge in his magazine Joglars, Providence, R.I. (Vol. 1, No. 3, 1966). It is a mosaic of ideas, statements, words, and stories. It is also a diary. For each day, I determined by chance operations how many parts of the mosaic I would write and how many words there would be in each. ...

DIARY: EMMA LAKE MUSIC WORKSHOP 1965

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pp. 21-25

Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshop at Emma Lake in July 1965, I received a request from the editor of Canadian Art for an article having fifteen hundred words. Since I was busy with a number of projects, I was on the point of replying that I had no time, when I noticed that I would be at the workshop for fifteen days ...

SERIOUSLY COMMA

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pp. 26-29

Admitting that, no matter what, one thing follows another (Wolff: "becomes a melody"), that there's no space between activities (Variations III), one asserts that this isn't two-dimensional linear-fact (or multiplicity of such facts interrelated) but unbeginning, interminable field-fact. ...

HAPPY NEW EARS!

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pp. 30-35

I have made two concert tours in Japan, one in 1962 with David Tudor, the other in 1964 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Both of these visits were made possible by the Sogetsu Art Center, a lively organization which is part of the flower-arrangement school in Tokyo established by Sofu Teshigahara. ...

TWO STATEMENTS ON IVES:

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pp. 36-42

In April 1964 Michael O. Zahn of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrote asking what my view of Charles E. Ives and his music was. I replied, as below, in handwriting on stenographic notepaper, a supply of which I generally have around. I didn't keep a copy of this letter, but when Mr. Zahn wrote to thank me his pleasure was such that I asked him to send me a Xerox. He did. ...

MOSAIC

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pp. 43-49

In March of 1965 I received from the Kenyon Review a copy of Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (St. Martin's Press, New York). I was informed that a book review by me would be welcome but that whether or not I wrote it I might keep the book. ...

DIARY: AUDIENCE 1966

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pp. 50-51

This text was written on the highways while driving from an audience in Rochester, New York, to one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following the writing plan I had used for Diary: Emma Lake, I formulated in my mind while driving a statement having a given number of words. When it had jelled and I could repeat it, ...

DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) CONTINUED 1966

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pp. 52-69

Once one gets interested in world improvement, there is no stopping. I began the following text immediately after finishing the first one. I gave it a length approximately the same but slightly different. The notebooks in which I wrote it were with me wherever I went. I finished it early in September 1966 in Pontpoint (par Pont-Sainte- Maxence) ...

26 STATEMENTS RE DUCHAMP

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pp. 70-72

Had Marcel Duchamp not lived, it would have been necessary for someone exactly like him to live, to bring about, that is, the world as we begin to know and experience it. Having this view, I felt obliged to keep a worshipful distance, though I had met him in the early 'forties, and in the late 'forties had written music for his sequence in Hans Richter's film Dreams that Money Can Buy. ...

JASPER JOHNS: STORIES AND IDEAS

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pp. 73-84

This article was first published in the Jewish Museum catalog of the work of Jasper Johns early in 1964. I began work on it in September 1963. I searched for a way of writing which would relate somehow to the canvases and personality of the painter. The absence of unpainted space in most of his work and, what seemed to me, an enigmatic aura of his personality ...

MIRO IN THE THIRD PERSON: 8 STATEMENTS

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pp. 85-88

One day I telephoned Mir�. He was in a New York hotel about to leave for Europe. Our conversation was in French and I had never met him. I asked him to make a gift of a painting to the Cunningham Dance Foundation, explaining that this gift would make possible a European tour on the part of the dancers. ...

NAM JUNE PAIK: A DIARY

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pp. 89-90

Among the letters I don't throw away when I go through my letters with the intention of throwing away as many as possible are those sent to me by Nam June Paik. We met in Darmstadt in 1958. Most of his letters are self-sufficient. They require no replies. However, one day Paik wrote to say that the Galeria Bonino in New York City ...

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

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pp. 91-94

Eleven composers who had written music for the dance (of whom I was one) were invited by Selma Jeanne Cohen in 1962 to write for the sixteenth number of Dance Perspectives, the issue which was called composer/choreographer. In order to stimulate our thoughts, Miss Cohen gave us quotations from established figures in the field. ...

JUILLIARD LECTURE

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pp. 95-111

In 1952 I was invited to speak at the Juilliard School of Music—not by the Director but by the students. They were having a series of meetings and students from other music schools were also attending. My lecture was in four parts, in all of which I applied processes of collage and fragmentation to texts which I had written earlier. ...

LECTURE ON COMMITMENT

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pp. 112-119

This lecture was written for the Beta Symposium at Wesleyan University, February 1961, while I was a Fellow at the University's Center for Advanced Studies. I was one of several members of the academic community all of whom, including President Victor Butterfield, were addressing the students on the same subject. ...

RHYTHM ETC

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pp. 120-132

In October 1961, Gyorgy Kepes, Professor of Visual Design at M.I.T.'s Department of Architecture, invited me to write an article that would appear in a book on the module, one of a series of books devoted to problems of form that he was preparing for the publisher, George Braziller. ...

HOW TO PASS, KICK, FALL, AND RUN

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pp. 133-140

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham's cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, ...

TALK I

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pp. 141-144

The thought has sometimes occurred to me that my pleasure in composition renounced as it has been in the field of music, continues in the field of writing words, anc that explains why, recently, I write so much. I know however that sometime soon I will renounce that too. I admired Buckminster Fuller when he began his lecture at the YMHA in New York ...

DIARY: HOW TO IMPROVE THE WORLD (YOU WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE) CONTINUED 1967

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pp. 145-162

Now that the following text is written (it was published in the summer of 1967 by the Something Else Press, New York City, as a part of their Great Bear Pamphlet Series, using a color structure which followed a suggestion by Dick Higgins), I plan, circumstances permitting, to write further on the same subject. ...

AFTERWORD

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pp. 163-167

Not knowing exactly what day a year from Monday—the day eight of us had arranged to meet in Mexico—would be, I decided it was early in June 1967. When people wrote or called asking me to do something in that month, I said No. (Exception: the benefit for the Cunningham Dance Company sponsored by John de Menil ...