'One of the initial consequences of the CD player was a propensity to have music playing in the background, always. The CD player was only fractionally as demanding of one's attention as the increasingly needy-seeming turntable. once you cleared the creepy hurdle of getting used to "digital black"—recorded silences on CD being an altogether different creature than vinyl LPs' louder, more textured silences—the reward was a greater dynamic range, the upshot of which is that it became possible to listen to more radically quiet music. One could listen to recordings of works by Morton Feldman and not have the troubling suspicion that there were sounds buried in an LP's grooves that the needle failed to uncover, faint attacks obscured by a brush fire of surface noise. But as listening became a more rationalized experience through the digital time display and a more ambient experience through the longer, uninterrupted playthroughs of quieter, more abstract music, concerts began to make stronger claims on my imagination. I was ready for music in which my experience of time was more subjective and more immersive, and in which I found myself confronted with an imperative to listen deeply.'

'“Sunglasses were sort of the new wave,” Rollins said. “A lot of the new guys coming out were wearing sunglasses.”'

'Reading accumulates to what end?'

Duncan Law's notes on Being and Time

The Picturing Relation

'When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound… I don't need sound to talk to me.'

'When silence, generally speaking, is not in evidence, the will of the composer is. Inherent silence is equivalent to denial of the will…'

'… one might pay particular attention to how and when pauses are composed, how different in length and degree of silence one feels them to be…'

'Besides all this, you will notice in this music as in no other that from time to time you hear quite long separations: a sound structure hangs in the air, one listens to it as it rings, it has a rather long echoing duration and an ending point, or two ending points, and then silence follows. One has time in which to reflect: What was that, really? How was that, then? So recalling, cognition, of the figures is required in this music, not recognition. In earlier music a figure appears, it is repeated, transposed or shortened or lengthened, elaborated. Such things don't exist in my Klavierstücke. There is no motivic or thematic work. So, there is no recounting of a story, but instead shapes are formed which are unique. It is necessary to register them innerly rather quickly, recording like a tape recorder, so that an event will not be lost, if possible. Thus one also passes experientially very rapidly through transformations.

Long durations of reverberation and silence between events provide opportunities for recalling the events, for perceiving in the course of a Klavierstück many events of various kinds, and for moving through a zone of feelings and thoughts in a no man's land.'