For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964)

This music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it. It requires for its performance independent self-discipline (unpoliced by a score defining fixed relationships and timings) and a capacity and special alertness for responding to what one's fellow performers are doing, the sounds they are making or changing and their silences. The responding can be variously deliberate (there is time and you are free) or must be quick and sudden (there are precise requirements which appear unpredictably). At the time (1964) I was concerned to make a lively situation for the performers, and shift about the difficult and the free areas of their playing (for example, the more unusual difficulty of articulating timbre changes in a situation where you are busy coordinating with others' unpredictably appearing sounds; or, the freedom to choose any pitch at your leisure). The resulting sounds and silences were to be the music, and the fact of its emerging in this way was to be the source of its expressiveness.

In the meantime, others pointed out the pedagogical character of this activity and some social implications (for instance, a kind of democratic interdependence). Where the presence and internal activity of the players can only be imagined by the listener, these latter aspects of the music are evident only to the experience of the players. For the listener the sounds can only speak for themselves and for the devotion and skill of the players.

Two further thoughts: the score and its requirements for making this music is such that anyone seriously wishing to, whether or not musically trained or professional, can read and use it; the music might be an incentive to do that; that is, to make performers of listeners. And, a more general thought, the movement of the music (and, I think, just about all the music I have worked on) is towards melody in its largest sense (as well as, sometimes, its familiar sense of the singable line). This may not be always obvious, but then the times are not conducive to easy optimism.