A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings

FOREWORD

FOREWORD zyx Whenzyxwvutsr 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 and there in this book and those brought together under the title How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run, consists of what I have been writing since 1961. The question is: Is my thought changing? It is and it isn't. One evening after dinner I was telling friends that I was now concerned with improving the world. One of them said: I thought you always were. I then explained that I believe—and am acting upon—Marshall McLuhan's statement that we have through electronic technology produced an extension of our brains to the world formerly outside of us. To me that means that the disciplines, gradual and sudden (principally Oriental), formerly practiced by individuals to pacify their minds, bringing them into accord with ultimate reality, must now be practiced socially—that is, not just inside our heads, but outside of them, in the world, where our central nervous system effectively now is. This has brought it about that the work and thought of Buckminster Fuller is of prime importance to me. He more than any other to my knowledge sees the world situation—all of it—clearly and has fully reasoned projects for turning our attention away from "killingry" toward "livingry." However, when I recently reread my Juilliard Lecture, I was struck by correspondences between the thought in it and the thought I consider most recent in my mind, e.g., "We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use," 1966; and "Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing," 1952. My ideas certainly started in the field of music. And that field, so to speak, is child's play. (We may have learned, it is true, in those idyllic days, things it behooves us now to recall.) Our proper work now if we love mankind and the world we live in is revolution. The reason I am less and less interested in music is not only that I find environmental sounds and noises more useful aesthetically than the sounds produced by the world's musical cultures, but that, when you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I'd like our activities to be more social zy IX and anarchically so. As a matter of fact, even in the field of music, this is what is happening. Already in the '50's we had the Once Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Gutai Group in Osaka and Tokyo. Now as one travels around he encounters groups so to speak wherever he goes: the Zaj Group in Madrid, Fluxus here and abroad, Bang3 in Richmond, Virginia, the construction in Stockholm of the Hon*by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt. When he comes back to New York City, he finds himself in the thick of a group of artists and engineers giving a Festival of Theater and Engineering, a group that plans, under the name EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), to stay together, as families used to but rarely any longer do. We have moved, one may say, from the time of the family reunion to the present time that brings people and their energies and the world's material resources, energies, and facilities together in a way that welcomes the stranger and discovery and takes advantage of synergy, an energy greater than the sum of the several energies had they not been brought together. Coming back to the notion that my thought is changing. Say it isn't. One thing, however, that keeps it moving is that I'm continually finding new teachers with whom I study. I had studied with Richard Buhlig, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg , Daisetz Suzuki, Guy Nearing. Now I'm studying with N. O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Marcel Duchamp. In connection with my current studies with Duchamp, it turns out I'm a poor chessplayer. My mind seems in some respect lacking, so that I make obviously stupid moves. I do not for a moment doubt that this lack of intelligence affects my music and thinking generally. However, I...