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Time, too, is a physical measure to me, and in
music I must feel a physical here and there and not only a now, which is
to say, movement from and toward. I do not always feel this sense of movement
or location in, say, Boulez’s Structures or those fascinating
score-plans by Stockhausen (I have not yet heard his
Momente for voices and
thirteen instruments, but the title augurs well), and though every element
in those pieces may be organized to engender motion, the result often seems
to me like the essence of the static. A time series may very well postulate
a new parable about time, but that is not the same thing as a time experience,
which for me is the dynamic passage through time. Nor, of course, are these
composers concerned about “dynamic passage through,” which
betrays an essentially
dramatic concept, Greek in origin, like all of my ideas of musical form.
The very phrase exposes the gulf between myself and the Teddy Boys of music,
and between me and the Zen generation as a whole, and so does their favorite
word, vector, which for me is a metaphor in no way analogous to a musical
experience, vector being a spatial concept to me, music a purely temporal
art.
Igor Stravinsky
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