“Recently I heard news from Europe that Bouez is adopting the chance techniques of John Cage and perhaps myself. Like Mathieu, he is going to show us Katzenjammer Kids how an ambitious Frenchman can really do it. It was easy for Napoleon to reach Mosow. And it will be curious to observe Boulez straggling home to Darmstadt.
Boulez has neither elegance nor physicality. His sound consists of a million gestures, all going upward (ertainly not to heaven) – an étude, a caricature of our times, a homage to Artaud and Franz Liszt.
Nevertheless, he is a magnificent academician, and it will be thanks to his sucess that we will be able to hear more of Varèse, John Cage, Christian Wolff and myself.”
Fightin’ words.
“He alone has given us this elegance, this physical reality, this impression that the music is writing about mankind rather than being composed”
Referring to Varèse, some beautiful words. I feel they can be extended to most any music written at a time. In some ways music is a reflection of the mood and psyche of a composer, all of which is impacted by the society a composer is living in. Art as a reflection -kind of a modernist idea, huh?
Edit: For citation purposes; Feldman, Morton. Give my regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman. B.H. Friedman, ed. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000.