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Just before setting out for Saskatchewan to conduct a music workshop at Emma Lake in July 1965, I received a request from the editor ofzyxw 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 and that if I wrote one hundred words a day it wouldn't be too much for me and the magazine would get what it wanted. I then replied with a certain firmness telling the editor that I would only do this if he would accept my work in advance, not change it in any way typographically, and let me see and correct proof (I was still cross with the editors of the Kenyon Review because of the way they had treated my text on Schoenberg's Letters). Everything was agreed to, and when the proof came there was nothing in it to correct. However, when it was printed in the January 1966 issue, a headnote accompanied it which suggested the frame of mind a reader might have were he to enjoy my text. Explanatory notes followed. All of that material is here omitted. Instead of different type faces, I used parentheses and italics to distinguish one statement from another. I set the text in a single block like a paragraph of prose. Otherwise I used the mosaic-discipline of writing described in the note preceding Diary: How to Improve etc. 1965. zyxwvut 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.) zy 21 (Missed lunch.)zyxwvutsr 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 sufficient 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. fThe 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 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 office 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...

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