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. . . when i first went to
seattle and my friends morris
graves and others took me to a small aquarium near the in the market near
the sound and it cost ten cents and when you got in there were just these
boxes of water and i had been warned that if i saw nothing just to wait
and after a while a clam went up from the bottom of one of the tanks and
went to the top and then having gotten some air sailed back down this way
and when he arrived at the bottom that disturbed others and they went up
and shortly it was a magnificent display i thought of that when i was at
the crown point press on january and i was going to make some prints and
i decided to make a series called on the surface i took the whole
sheet of paper for the images at the beginning and i cut the same size
up into different shapes with chance operations sometimes with straight
lines and sometimes with curved lines and then placed the templates at
chance determined points and turned them according to which of 360 degrees
and when they crossed the surface at the top i then divided the template
so that the work began with large shapes and ended after 35 prints with
very small shapes and it went down gradually to the golden section in 35
degrees i enjoyed that work so much and then i had the project of a piece
for orchestra i decided to do it the same way to cut the music paper up
with the same means and to put the templates at chance determined points
on the music paper and the whole paper would potentially be sound but there
would not be any space between ledger lines let’s say and the next ledger
lines of the next instrument so that everything would be sound whatever
you’d hit then i noticed that whereas for the etching the top of the
paper
was important and going down was interesting for music going up and going
down were not interesting what was interesting about music was going from
the left to the right and so i had to change the direction and the meaning
of the chance operations . . .
John Cage
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