Happy New Year!

Here’s an anec­dote to her­ald in 2011:

‘At one time Karl­heinz [Stock­hausen] and I would talk and ex­change ideas. You know the story about the talk about singing? Well, he was writ­ing a song for Cathy Berber­ian, who I later also wrote for, and he said, “if you were writ­ing for a singer, would you write music, or would you write for the singer?” And I said, “I would write for the singer”, and he said, “well that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us, be­cause I would write music.” So then he wrote this song for Cathy, and he asked her to whis­tle. And she can’t whis­tle. So that’s the dif­fer­ence be­tween us. Hmhmhmhm!’

— John Cage

FROM: Steve Sweeney Turner and John Cage, ‘John Cage’s Prac­ti­cal Utopias: John Cage in Con­ver­sa­tion with Steve Sweeney Turner’, The Mu­si­cal Times, cxxxi/1771 (Sep­tem­ber, 1990), p. 469.

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This post first appeared on an older version of this site: v2.chrisswithinbank.net/2011/01/happy-new-year/