If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble. - Morton Feldman

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.