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Diary Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965 August 15. The role of the composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place, whether with those concerned or those unaware of what is being said. We talk, moving from one idea to another as though we were hunters. Christopher Lake Line Four Ring Two-One. Operator doesn’t answer. Everyone who’s coming’s still coming, others leaving for a day. (By music we mean sound; but what’s time? Certainly not that something begins and ends.) August 16. This is the day the workshop opens, but due to circumstances— a concert in Saskatoon—it opened yesterday. Tomorrow? (Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby. Got lost.) (Missed lunch.) Correspondence . Listening to music, what do I do? Those musical conventions assume I recognize relationships. They give no exercise to my faculty to reach the impossibility of suYcient auditory memory to transfer from one like event to another the memory imprint (Duchamp paraphrased). I managed in the case of Mozart to listen enthusiastically to the held clarinet tones. They reminded me of feedback. August 17. Plan: to meet as a group every day at four in the afternoon for discussion of my current concern: music without measurements, sound passing through circumstances. ¶The room where we meet is a biological laboratory. There’s a piano and an oven for drying fungi. We leave our music on tables there (each in the group has access to whom, as musicians, the others are). Each person is free to bring me his work, to discuss it with me privately. What else that happens happens freely: going to get a pail of water at the pump, I pass by the lab; two of them are in there talking about Vivaldi. August 18. First student was easy to teach: i.e., don’t consider your composition finished until you’ve heard it performed. (Today we had the second group meeting. During the first I had described Variations V for which I’ve not yet made a “score.” This involved me in a brief history of electronic music and finally a description of the antennae, photoelectric devices, etc., which enabled dance movements to trigger sound sources.) Two more [ 30 ] john cage ⢇ students visited: one with a poem and sense of drama. The other’s young. Is he also gifted? August 19. (The geologist leaves tomorrow. Our talks involved him in computer music; there’s a computer in his oYce in Calgary . He had written symphonic music which no orchestra ever played. Now he sees music as programming.) It seems a wild goose chase: examining the fact of musical composition in the light of Variations V, seeing composition as activity of a sound system, whether made up of electronic components or of comparable “components” (scales, intervalic controls, etc.) in the mind of a man. Five more people in the workshop today. August 20. Today’s yesterday. What happened? Hunted fungi; lunch; took notes on Leccinum species; discussed their work with two composers; continued component inquiry—discussing Young, Brown, Kagel; dinner—food’s getting serious: no green vegetables; Alloway lecture on pop and op; boat ride after midnight: “Wow!” Started exhibit of mushrooms in dining room, giving Latin names and remarks about edibility. There’s a convincing young poet here (his physical stance, his energy of spirit, his face). He wants his poetry to be useful, to improve society. Will he only make matters worse (KwangTse )? August 21. [He knows about canon and permutations. Does he need to know about variation (Alloway’s talk about op and systematic art)?] It’s the place, the people, the land and air with its mosquitoes and all, more than that it’s music and painting: zoologists, poets, potter, they too are with it. Buckminster Fuller: the practicality of living here or there. A teacher should do something other than filling in the gaps. (Gave my lecture Where Are We Going? and What Are We Doing?—four texts superimposed. Seems to me the life has just about gone out of it.) Questions. No tundra, nevertheless a northern sense of heightened well-being. ¶Another farewell. August 22. Lindner invited several of us to see his paintings: observation of nature—stumps with moss and lichen; skilful rendering of what he sees. His devotion is to his foregrounds; the backgrounds are best when he doesn’t do...

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