Anarchic harmony
”Music is everywhere, you just have to have the ears to hear
it.”
”Since the theory of conventional music is a set of
laws exclusively concerned with ’musical’ sounds, having
nothing to say about noises, it had been clear from the beginning that
what was needed was a music based on noise, on noise’s
lawlessness. Having made such an anarchic music, we were able later to
include in its performance even so-called musical sounds. - We need
first of all a music in which not only are sounds just sounds, but in
which people are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established
by any one of them, even if he is ’the composer’ or
’the conductor.’ Finally we need a music which no longer
prompts talk of audience participation, for in it the division between
performers and audience no longer exists: a music made by
everyone.”
”Most of my life I thought that I had to find an alternative to
harmony, but the harmony I was thinking about was the one that had been
taught at school. Now I see that everything outside of school is also
harmonious...
A changed definition of harmony; one that doesn't involve any rules or
laws. You might call it an anarchic harmony. Just sounds being
together.”
”In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the
anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic.
It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My
work became an exploration of non-intention.”
”My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear
the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I have yet heard.
We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind
about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that
doesn't speak or talk like human being, that doesn't know its
definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that
expressed itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying
attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal
performance, but each time attentively to how it happen to be this
time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transport the
listener to the moment where he is.”