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Although it had been prepared some years earlier, this lecture was not printed until 1959, when it appeared in It Is, edited by Philip Pavia, with the following introduction: In the general moving around and talking that followed my Lecture on Something (ten years ago at the Club), somebody asked Morton Feldman whether he agreed with what I had said about him. He replied, "That's not me; that's John." When Pavia recently asked me for a text on the occasion of Columbia's issuing a record devoted to Feldman's music, I said, "I already have one. Why don't you print it?" [In this connection, it may be noted that the empty spaces, omitted in the It Is printing but to be encountered below, are representative of silences that were a part of the Lecture.} LECTURE ON SOMETHING 128/SILENCE To bring things up to date, let me say that I am as ever changing, while Feldman's music seems more to continue than to change. There never was and there is not now in my mind any doubt about its beauty. It is, in fact, sometimes too beautiful. The {!twor of that beauty, which formerly seemed to me to be heroic, strikes me now as erotic (an equal, by no means a lesser, flavor). This impression is due, I believe, to Feldman's tendency towards tenderness, a tenderness only briefly, and sometimes not at all, interrupted by violence. On paper, of course, the graph pieces are as heroic as ever; but in rehearsal Feldman does not permit the freedoms he writes to become the occasion for license. He insists upon an action within the gamut of love, and this produces (to mention only the extreme effects) a sensuousness of sound or an atmosphere of devotion. As ever, I prefer concerts to records of instrumental music. Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music, and Feldman's eminently, is a celebration that we own nothing. This is a talk about something and naturally also a talk about nothing. About how something and nothing are not opposed to each other but need each other to keep on going It is difficult to talk when you have something to say precisely because of the words which keep making us say in the way which the words need to stick to and not in the Way which we need for living. For instance: someone said, "Art should come from within; then it is profound." But it seems to me Art goes within, and I don't see the need for "should" or "then" or "it" or "pro-found." When Art comes from within which is what it was for so long doing, it be-came a thing which seemed to elevate the man who made it a-bove those who ob-served it or heard it and the artist was considered a genius finally or given a rating: First, Second, No Good, until work in and it is of the nothing. which then goes something simply It seems we are riding in a bus or like a manufacturer subway: so proudly he signs his But since everything's changing, art's now going utmost importance not to make a thing but rather to make And how is this done? Done by making something in and reminds us of nothing. It is im-portant that this be just something, finitely something; then very it goes in living. and becomes infinitely nothing Understanding of what is nourishing is changing Of course, it is always changing, but now it is very clearly changing, so that the people either agree or they don't and the differences of o-pinion are clearer Just a year or so ago everything seemed to be an individual matter. But now there are two sides. On one side it is that individual matter going on, and on the other side it is more not an individual but everyone which is not to say it's all the same, - on the contrary there are more differences. That is: starting finitely everything's different but in going in it all becomes the same mind Intersection within broad limits the responsibility of H.C.E. Which is what Morton Feldman had in when he called the first ones the composer the music he's now writing Feldman speaks of that come along. no sounds, and takes He has changed from making...

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