Stones (1968)
(Prose Collection 1968-74)

Stones is for me an extreme instance of combining maximum transparency, flexibility and freedom for performers with at the same time an unmistakable, irreducible identity. At least I think the latter was the case in 1968 when the piece was written. There are in fact now a number of pieces using just stones as sound source (see The Rock Book edited by Daniel Goode, published in 1995 by Frog Peak Music). I also think of the piece as the most economical I've done—a short paragraph of prose to bring about a large variety of performances, including quite long ones. The piece is part of a set (Prose Collection, 1968-74) made so as to provide material for performances which could include non-musicians, mostly at the time (1967- 68) art students in Great Britain. Hence no musical notation, just, verbal instructions (sometimes, though not in Stones, including numbers: for example, do something n number of times), realizable with or without the usual musical instruments. The origins of Stones, though, was simply this: a day at a stony beach during which I tried out the sounds different stones make struck against one another, and found them (the sounds) surprisingly various, distinctive (and beautiful) in the qualities of their resonances. With that memory I wrote the piece half a year later, and, showed it to Cornelius Cardew, who, smiling, showed me Paragraph 1 of The Great Learning, which he was just working on, and which includes the chorus members' use of stones to improvise sound gestures guided by the shapes of Chinese characters, from the Confucian text his piece was setting. He had gotten the idea from the use of tuned stone slabs in classical Chinese music.