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Occasional Pieces
 Occasional Pieces
Writings and Interviews, 1952–2013

Christian Wolff

w i t h a f o r e wo r d b y G e o r g e E . L e w i s

1
 1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wolff, Christian, 1934– author. | Lewis, George, 1952– writer of foreword.
Title: Occasional pieces: writings and interviews, 1952–2013/Christian Wolff;
with a foreword by George E. Lewis.
Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028230 (print) | LCCN 2016028835 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190222895 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190614706 (pbk.: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190222901 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190222918 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—United States—20th century—History and criticism. |
Music—United States—21st century—History and criticism. |
Composers—United States—20th century—Interviews.
Classification: LCC ML410.W814 A25 2017 (print) | LCC ML410.W814 (ebook) |
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 Contents

Foreword by George E. Lewisâ•…vii

Author’s Prefaceâ•…xvii

1. (One of) Four Musicians at Work (1952)â•…3

2. On Webern (1955)â•…7
3. New and Electronic Music (1958)â•…11
4. On Form (1960)â•…19
5. Questions (1964)â•…27
6. Electricity and Music (1968)â•…31
7. Interview with Victor Schonfield (1969)â•…37
8. Fragments to Make Up an Interview (1970–71)â•…43
9. For Merce (1975)â•…49
10. Conversation with Walter Zimmermann (1976)â•…51
11. Frederic Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated
(1978)â•…67
12. On Political Texts and New Music (1980)â•…71
13. On the Death of Cornelius Cardew (1981)â•…83
14. On Notation (1984)â•…85
15. Open to Whom and to What (1987)â•…87
16. Morton Feldman Memorial Text (1987)â•…97
17. On Morton Feldman’s Piano Piece 1952 (1988, 1995)â•…99
18. On Morton Feldman’s Music (1990)â•…105
19. What Is Our Work? (1990)â•…107
20. On Charles Ives (1990)â•…119
21. Keith Rowe, A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality (1990)â•…123
vi Co ntents

22. On Dieter Schnebel’s Marsyas (1990)â•…125

23. Floating Rhythm and Experimental Percussion (1990)â•…131
24. Quiet Music (1991)â•…141
25. Interview with Cole Gagne (1992)â•…143
26. Interview with Markus Trunk (1992)â•…169
27. Briefly on Cornelius Cardew and John Cage (1992)â•…191
28. John Cage Memorial Text (1992)â•…193
29. Preface to John Cage, Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings I–V (1993)â•…195
30. Sketch of a Statement (1993)â•…197
31. Music—Work—Experiment—Politics (1995)â•…201
32. Letter to Suzanne Josek (1996)â•…211
33. Thinking of David Tudor (1997)â•…213
34. Most Material: Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost (1997)â•…217
35. Frederic Rzewski and His Piano Music (2001)â•…219
36. Merce Cunningham and CW Music (2001)â•…227
37. Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (2002)â•…229
38. Earle Brown—Chamber Music (2004)â•…235
39. Some Notes on Charles Ives and Politics (2004)â•…241
40. On Day-to-Day Composing Work (2004)â•…247
41. Remembering Grete Sultan (2005)â•…249
42. On Music with Cunningham Events (2008)â•…251
43. Some Recollections of Arthur Russell (2009)â•…253
44. On Verbal Notation (2009)â•…257
45. Experimental Music around 1950 and Some Consequences and
Causes (2009)â•…259
46. Interview with James Saunders (2009)â•…275
47. Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy (2010)â•…287
48. About Merce (2010)â•…309
49. What Can I Still Say about John Cage? (2012)â•…313
50. Thinking Yet Again about John Cage (2012)â•…315
51. The First Performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (2012)â•…319
52. Robyn Schulkowsky’s Worlds of Percussion (2013)â•…321
53. Selected Program Notesâ•…327

Indexâ•…339
 Fo r e wo r d
George E. Lewis

Christian Wolff has lived more lifetimes in music than even his date of birth
would suggest. Imagine being able to say that Theodor Adorno came to your
performance and talked about it with you after, even if David Tudor felt com-
pelled to tell him, “You haven’t understood a thing.” (p. 214) Wolff has con-
tributed trenchant discourses to two seemingly distant disciplines—classics and
music. However, Wolff ’s writing about both, as presented in these pages, evinces
a certain modest lack of ease with his own historicity—the establishment of
which (unlike, say, Karlheinz Stockhausen) he seems content to leave to others,
while the ambivalence is further heightened by the very act of collecting and
republishing these writings.
With regard to this aspect of Wolff ’s music, I want to take into account Nicolas
Bourriaud’s declaration that “The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as
its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context,
rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points
to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced
by modern art.”1 Bourriaud presents the notion of a “relational” artwork that
proposes “moments of sociability” and creates “objects producing sociability.”
Membership in the relational world is centered upon this primary criterion:
“Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the
space it defines?”2
Among Wolff ’s pieces, the most obvious candidates for inclusion under a
rubric of relationality would be the works that he describes as “contingent,” such
as Duo for Violinist and Pianist (1961) and For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), which in
Bourriaud’s terms, “operate like a relational device containing a certain degree
of randomness, or a machine provoking and managing individual and group

1
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 14.
2
Ibid., 109.

vii
viii Fore word

encounters.”3 These works require the performers to perform actions according

to, among other things, their perceptions of what other performers are doing,
their position in the score, and certain overarching rules. The composer provides
an environment in which real-time decision making by performers, and there-
fore responsibility for the direction of the music, is paramount.4
Moreover, Wolff uses contingency to explore the sound of sociality, intention,
and consensus:

I realized that the kind of sound made in an indeterminate situation in-

cludes what could result in no other way; for example, the sound of a player
making up his mind, or having to change it. In fact, the indeterminate no-
tation I’ve used is, as far as I know, the only possible one for the kind of
sound I should like. And don’t forget, we also like to be surprised. (p. 27)

But well before Wolff developed his interactive, indeterminate notation for the
management of group interactions,5 one could already see the pursuit of rela-
tionality in his early, fully notated works. Duo for Violins (1950) comprehen-
sively presents the possibilities of contrapuntal relations among the pitches D5,
Eb5 and E5,6 and in Trio I (1951) for flute, trumpet, and cello, Wolff ’s interest,
as he later recalled, was “in the internal variables of the sonority, the large variety
of possible combinations when one thinks of all the possible simultaneities and
kinds of overlaps of four pitches on three instruments.” (p. 327)
The result becomes an orientation for which “the playing is not so much an
expression of the player (or composer) as a way of connecting, making a com-
munity.” (p. 85) Even so, Wolff remembered at one point that

You never think of yourself as part of tradition or a member of a group.

What happens is that there are a number [of] ideas around, some of
which you have in common with others. All that we had in common
was a desire to do something different, so as to be clear of styles which
were not ours to borrow, or which seem to have gone dead. (p. 38)

The demographic contours of that community have come down to us histori-

cally, and it is fair to say that its self-awareness included a strong European/

Ibid., 30.
3

Christian Wolff, For 1, 2, or 3 People, (New York, London, Frankfurt, Leipzig: C.F. Peters, 1964).
4

5
See David Behrman, “What Indeterminate Notation Determines,” Perspectives of New Music 3,
no. 2 (1965): 58–73.
6
Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, Christian Wolff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2012), 12. Also see Michael Hicks, “â•›‘Our Webern’: Cage and Feldman’s Devotion to Christian Wolff,”
in Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, eds. Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, 3–22
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 15–16.
 Fore word ix

American axis of orientation, and was largely white and male. Wolff invokes the
names we know:

So there are writings about John Cage, my one and only teacher (for
only a brief time), then lifelong friend and supporter, Morton Feldman,
Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, and Cornelius Cardew,
also about Keith Rowe, Dieter Schnebel, Eddie Prévost, Arthur Russell,
Pauline Oliveros, Luigi Nono, David Behrman, and Robyn Schulkowsky.
And there is the dancer Merce Cunningham, whom I met in 1950
shortly after meeting Cage. (p. xviii)

In his groundbreaking book, Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut asks,

“How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they
can now be the subject of a description?” Going further, Piekut notes that the
question is “the proper starting place for an investigation into what experimental
music was in the last century. Experimentalism is a grouping, not a group, and
any account of it must be able, in the words of Michel Foucault, ‘to recognize the
events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable
defeats.’â•›”7
These writings by Wolff take up Foucault’s challenge, but they also point
out the role of the artists themselves in constituting the grouping. Like the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an assemblage of
�experimentalists whose work, for an earlier generation of music historians,
seemed somehow too distant from the community outlined above, Morton
Feldman found that “a group gives a sense of permission, a feeling that you do
have to fight against an accepted standard because others are working outside it
too.” (p. 38)
Wolff often invokes other musical forms as having affected him, but with the
clear recognition that these were somehow outside the community, either his-
torically or collegially—“Western classical music (on much of which I was raised
from an early age), going back to the medieval period, musics of other tradi-
tions—African Ba-Benzele Pygmy, for instance, and some jazz (for example,
Ornette Coleman).”(p. 108) The Coleman reference caused me to speculate on
the political and social contours of an American experimental scene in which
Christian Wolff and Ornette Coleman couldn’t easily come together—as
Coleman and Jacques Derrida did, onstage and in print, in 1997.8

7
Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), 6.
8
See Timothy S. Murphy, trans., “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette
Coleman, 23 June 1997,” Genre 36 (2004): 319–28.
x Fore word

Nonetheless, Wolff continually sought ways to widen the reach and deepen
the political engagement of the communities of ideas and affect of which he was
part. Thus, in the late 1960s, Wolff began making pieces for nonprofessional
Â�musicians. Even though, as Wolff put it, these pieces “contain no overt political
statement” (MS 63), implications of class, and even race, can be seen as embed-
ded in the training in the interpretation of European art music notation. Thus,
the move by Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, Gavin
Bryars, and others to create scores that could be performed by musicians who
did not undergo such training not only enacted a form of social engagement, but
implicitly and sometimes explicitly, embedded a politics of culture.
And then there was what Terry Riley once called “the big politics in the sky,”
a phrase Riley used in response to a question about whether his music had been
used for political or social ends.9 While the contingent works, for Wolff, repre-
sent “an image and attitude which allow for the possibility of change (for the
better),” (p. 277) by the late 1960s, contemporary music was increasingly
viewed as lacking the tools to foster the kind of change Wolff and many others in
US society were seeking. “A persisting issue for me,” Wolff writes, “became the
relation of political, and social, questions with musical practices that were re-
garded as ‘experimental.’” (p. ix)

I thought about the connections between my emerging political concerns

and my musical work.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›My previous work now seemed to me too eso-
teric.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›W hat I was doing musically seemed mostly inaccessible to people
(including good friends) who were generally speaking music-lovers.â•›.â•›.â•›.â•›I
tried to make my work less introverted, less sparse, more of a response to
what a larger number of people might recognize as music. (p. 114)

An analogous ambivalence was eloquently expressed in Amiri Baraka’s influen-

tial 1966 essay, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).” As Baraka
notes, “The form content of much of what is called New Thing or Avant-Garde
or New Music differs (or seems to differ) from Rhythm and Blues, R&B oriented
jazz, or what the cat on the block digs.”10 (Baraka 133) This kind of wrestling
with the classic twentieth-century modernist problem of the separation between
art music and popular music was occurring across racial and cultural divides that
were never as separated as earlier histories represented them, even as American
new music was trapped in binary systems of cultural signification—jazz/classical,

9
Quoted in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973, eds. Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 216.
10
Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music
(New York: William Morrow), 133.
 Fore word xi

black/white, and the rest—demonstrated the deep politicization of the period.

Change was on the horizon, musical identities were at stake, and the desire for
change among many composers was ardent and pressing.
Making matters worse was the widespread impression that American experi-
mental music had made little or no impact upon the perceived, increasingly
media-dominated mainstream. Then as now, few Americans had heard the most
radical music that had issued from their native soil, and that very soil was perceived
as being stony ground, supporting a mere handful of what German composer
Walter Zimmermann called, in his collection of interviews with composers,
“desert plants.”11
Frederic Rzewski, a major presence in these pages, was already moving
toward a sharper engagement with these issues, with pieces such as his 1975
classic, The People United Will Never Be Defeated.12 Wolff began his engagement
with the political by working with texts that were political in content or charac-
ter. His early support for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which he later had to
essentially renounce in the light of the many revelations of brutality associated
with the era, resulted in the solo piano work Accompaniments, written for Rzewski
in 1972 with a text taken from Chinese speakers describing their work under the
Revolution.

Now, the politics of Accompaniments has been totally discredited; to

that extent, the piece is finished and I should withdraw it. The things
that were actually going on in those years we’re finally finding out about,
and they were horrendous. I think there are certain principles I found in
the text that I used, which I still believe in, so that part is okay; I will
defend the piece to that extent. (p. 164)

“Accompaniments was a problematical piece, for all my good intentions, and it

raised these issues for me very clearly,” Wolff says now. Even as the composer
realized that “the interesting thing about political music is that its political char-
acter comes and goes” (p. 164), Accompaniments shows that cultural mispri-
sion can nonetheless result in important music.
Wolff ’s continued engagement with the political turned to the contempora-
neous situation in the United States. What we find in his work Rosas (1989–90)
is an epigraphic dedication: “The music is intended also as a tribute to two Rosas,

11
Walter Zimmermann, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians. (Vancouver:
Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, 1976). The text of Zimmermann’s interviews is available here:
http://home.snafu.de/walterz/bibliographie.html
12
Hear Frederic Rzewski, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” in Piano Works, 1975–
1999 (Nonesuch 79623–2, 2002). Compact disc.
xii Fore word

Rosa Luxemburg, and Mrs. Rosa Parks.”13 Wolff ’s politics here are intersection-
ally sensitive to gender as well as race, and the epigraph also features a quote
from Mrs. Parks on her famous 1955 refusal to accede to an Alabama bus driver’s
demand that she give up her seat in favor of a white person, an act that sparked
the US civil rights movement. Her remarks on the matter, as has been noted
before, were a model of gracious understatement, but as quoted by Wolff, seem
also to address notions of agency in experimental music: “I just didn’t feel like
obeying his demand.”14
But what makes Rosas a “political” work? The way in which its musical materi-
als are deployed offers little in the way of direct sonic articulation of a political
text. The politics of these works are emergent from the sound, and there are no
easy prescriptions to be taken away from an encounter with these pieces. Unlike
Rzewski’s piano variations, no ringing manifestoes appear. The Rosas never seem
to exhort, but to persuade, and the main thing being persuaded is not that things
must proceed in such-and-such a way, but a more powerful message—that
things could be different than they are, and that it is up to both musicians and
listeners to create the conditions for change. I found it striking in this context
that Wolff quotes the radical historian George Lipsitz, whose analyses so
often center on music: “Lipsitz, while fully appreciating the view of advanced
capitalism as a monster of cultural cooption and hegemonic control, neverthe-
less comes to the conclusion “that the same global networks of commerce
and communication that constrain us offer opportunities for cross-cultural
resistance.”15 (p. 204)
“I don’t function very theoretically,” Wolff has observed. “I respond pragmat-
ically to situations.” (p. 150) Theorist Austin Clarkson connects the philo-
sophical tradition of American pragmatism—William James, Charles Sanders
Peirce, John Dewey—with Cage’s compositional practices, and Michael Parsons
directly connects Wolff to that same tradition.16 As I see it, however, it is the
practice of the composer-performer that most directly connects American ex-
perimentalism to American pragmatism. “Our circle also gave us the impetus to
have our pieces performed,” Wolff recalled, “mainly due to Cage, who was always
a performer.” Wolff ’s stories remind us that he, along with Cage, Rzewski, Tudor,

Christian Wolff, Rosas (New York: C.F. Peters, 1990), music score.
13

Ibid.
14

15
See George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place
(London: Verso, 1994), 181.
16
See Austin Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” in
Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, eds. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch,
62–112 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Also see Michael Parsons,
“Foreword,” in Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, eds. Stephen Chase and Philip
Thomas, xiii-xx (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
 Fore word xiii

and many others, was part of an international community of composer-performers.

One reads frequently in these pages about how Wolff or his colleagues were
obliged to put a performance together at a moment’s notice, or write a piece with
only a day or two to spare—as in 1957 when Wolff and Rzewski, faced with an
upcoming performance, “didn’t have time to write a fully notated piece,” and so
a pragmatic solution was found:

I just stumbled on this idea. And it worked and we really liked doing it.
Each of us would prepare our parts, but then when we started playing
together, because we had these variable spaces within which to work,
you would respond, almost inevitably, instinctively. And then also con-
sciously you’d be responding to the other player, and in a way other
than normal ensemble playing because you’d hear some thing and you
could either play immediately after it, try to play with it, or wait a little
bit before you play. So there’s a whole range of possibilities there, which
form a kind of improvisatory situation. (p. 148)

Christopher Hookway summarizes Dewey’s method of inquiry in ways that res-

onate with Cageian indeterminacy: “Dewey sees inquiry as beginning with a
problem; we are involved in ‘an indeterminate situation.’” And inquiry aims for
‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one
that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert
the elements of the original situation into a unified whole.’”17 However, this tele-
ology, this resolution, is where Cage, Wolff, and other pragmatic indeterminists
depart from Dewey. While experimental music certainly involves inquiry, expe-
rience itself is the only result, and it is distributed, shared, and recursively trans-
formed. Ideally, we remain in the indeterminate state, and inquiry is never-ending.
Perhaps it was this quality of being, if not right in the moment, as close to the
moment as composers might dare to be, that was more salient than the imagined
differences in understandings of form that have been said to differentiate
“American experimentalism” from “European new music.” “Indeterminacy was a
way of producing sounds I could see no other way of producing,” Wolff tells us.
“In that sense it was purely a practical idea.” (p. 46)
Finally, in response to an interviewer’s query into whether teaching classics
fed something into his work as a composer,” Wolff responded, “Not directly, no.
I think the connection is that I’m interested in teaching, in pedagogy.” (p. 146)
While Wolff has tended to keep the two spheres separate throughout his long

17
Christopher Hookway, “Pragmatism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016
Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/pragmatism/,
accessed May 28, 2016.
xiv Fore word

career, a 2010 article, “Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy”

(chapter 47), partially recants that earlier separation, through an analysis of the
involvement with Greek texts and drama by Milhaud, Satie, Partch, and Xenakis.
The example of the 2010 text tempts me to compare Wolff ’s enumeration in
these pages of the important qualities John Cage represented to him with Philo
of Alexandria’s lists of the spiritual exercises of ancient Greek philosophy of the
Platonic and Stoic periods, as recounted by the philosopher Pierre Hadot. Philo’s
first list includes research (zetesis), thorough investigation (skepsis), reading (an-
agnosis), listening (akroasis), attention (prosoche), self-mastery (enkrateia), and
indifference to indifferent things. His second list points up reading, meditations
(meletai), therapies of the passions, remembrance of good things, and the ac-
complishment of duties.18
Wolff ’s register of Cage’s qualities includes:

experiment—keep trying new things, change, extend your invention;

discipline—a form of letting go of the self, working systematically and
hard; attentiveness—regard everything alertly, use your intelligence;
make music as your life in the world, which also entails thinking about
and (in ways you find possible) acting socially and politically in a prin-
cipled way (he’d say, act with conscience);
comedy, not tragedy. (p. 313)

And finally, Cage and Wolff exhort us to “listen to everything—in his music the
wonderful empty spaces, and the extreme quantities of sound and activity layers;
elegance.” (p. 313)

Works Cited
Austin, Larry and Douglas Kahn, ed. Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011.
Behrman, David. “What Indeterminate Notation Determines.” Perspectives of New Music 3, no. 2
(1965): 58–73
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.
Clarkson, Austin. “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal.” In Writings
Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher
Hatch, 62–112. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Hadot, Pierre. “Spiritual Exercises.” In Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates
to Foucault, edited by Arnold I. Davidson, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, 81–125.
Hicks, Michael and Christian Asplund. Christian Wolff. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual Exercises,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from
18

Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 84.

 Fore word xv

Hicks, Michael. “‘Our Webern’: Cage and Feldman’s Devotion to Christian Wolff.” In Changing the
System: The Music of Christian Wolff, edited by Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, 3–22.
Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.
Hookway, Christopher. “Pragmatism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016
Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/
pragmatism/, accessed May 28, 2016.
Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka). “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” 180–211. Black
Music. New York: William Morrow.
Lipsitz, George. Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place.
London: Verso, 1994.
Murphy, Timothy S., trans. “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman,
23 June 1997.” Genre 36 (2004): 319–28.
Parsons, Michael. “Foreword.” In Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, edited by
Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, xiii–xx. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.
Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011.
Rzewski, Frederic. “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!” Piano Works, 1975–1999,
Nonesuch 79623–2, 2002. Compact disc.
Wolff, Christian. For 1, 2, or 3 People. New York, London, Frankfurt, Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1964.
Music score.
Wolff, Christian. Rosas. New York: C. F. Peters, 1990. Music score.
Zimmermann, Walter. Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians. Vancouver:
Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, 1976. Text available at http://home.snafu.de/walterz/
bibliographie.html.

George E. Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur
Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s creative work has been
presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-
Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others, and he has per-
formed as electronic musician and trombonist with many of the figures discussed in these writings,
including David Behrman, Frederic Rzewski, Merce Cunningham, Pauline Oliveros, and Wolff
himself. His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American
Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and
the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis and Benjamin
Piekut are the co-editors of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016).
 A u t h o r’ s P r e f a c e

The writings that follow are “occasional” because all were written in response to
requests. Of course they also represent what I was thinking about music—my
own and others—at various times. I’ve been writing for a long time, so quite a lot
of ground is covered and there are changes.
Of the earliest pieces, the first was part of a gathering of statements solicited
by John Cage back in 1951, from the composers whom he saw, along with him-
self, as breaking new ground: Pierre Boulez, Morton Feldman, and myself. This
appeared in an ephemeral publication, trans/formation (three issues only) sur-
veying new thinking in the arts and sciences. Characteristically, our music pre-
sented itself in a wider cultural context. Other early pieces appeared in the
Cologne-based organ of the European avant-garde at the time (mid 1950s on),
Die Reihe, in an Italian arts journal and in a literary journal in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The first piece to appear in a standard musical publication, the
English journal Music and Musicians, was an interview, in 1969.
These writings and interviews have appeared in a variety of often alternative
publications, and they present musical ideas that have alternative directions,
which is why they came to be written: to attempt to explain and account for new
ways of making and thinking about music. I became involved in this at an early
age, partly by luck, meeting John Cage, and by circumstance, living in New York,
which made available much of the world of modern art, though not at the time
much in the way of new music, except as performances might occasionally be
organized by Cage, along with dance performances by Merce Cunningham with
Cage’s music.
The driving force of the music of Cage, Feldman, and myself at the time was
an effort to reconstitute what one might think of as music. Why? Well, because
we just wanted to. But also because we experienced the musical/compositional
landscape around us as bleak, lacking in adventure, and tired, recycling neoclas-
sicism (Stravinsky) and the older serialism (Schoenberg). We felt the need to do
xvii
xviii Author ’s P refac e

something else. For Cage, this meant introducing chance procedures into the
way he composed; for Feldman, developing a refined poetic sensibility that drew
on the early music of Webern, and inventing new techniques of indeterminacy;
for me, working with extreme forms of minimalism and recasting how one
thought of a musical texture. Earle Brown, who came to New York in 1952, de-
veloped the first graphic ways of scoring a kind of purely open composition, to
be realized improvisationally. I think it was Cage who first called what we were
doing “experimental.” This term was not used by such European composers as
Boulez and Stockhausen, who did not like its tentative sound; they were making
“new music.”
The earlier pieces in this collection mostly report on what was going on and
offer some analytical account of the music, both my own and others’. While
I have always thought of my compositional work as distinctively my own—
why else would I do it?—I have also seen it in connection with a community of
the work of others. So there are writings about John Cage, my one and only
teacher (for only a brief time), then lifelong friend and supporter, Morton
Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, and Cornelius Cardew,
also about Keith Rowe, Dieter Schnebel, Eddie Prevost, Arthur Russell, Pauline
Oliveros, Luigi Nono, and Robyn Schulkowsky. And there is the dancer Merce
Cunningham, whom I met in 1950 shortly after meeting Cage. I first saw his
work that year and ever since it has captivated me and affected my own.
Apart from my immediate musical associates and friends, I have always been
aware of, and in some cases very close to, a great deal of other music, old and new.
In these writings there are also some accounts of Webern, Ives, Satie, and Xenakis.
This book consists partly of selections from an earlier book, Cues: Writings and
Conversations, published in 1998 by MusikTexte in an English-German edition.
Most of what I have written since, and one subsequent interview, have now been
added. Unlike Cues, the present collection is chronological. Since everything that
I have written or said was for a particular occasion or request, and not produced
with a book in mind, there are inevitably some repetitions; but the chronological
order may help chart some shifts and changes in my thinking over time.
For many years, apart from working as a composer, I have had academic em-
ployment, at first teaching classics, later teaching comparative literature and
music as well. My writings relating to classics, mostly on Euripides, are of course
not included here, except for one piece about connections between experimen-
tal music and Greek tragedy (I took particular pleasure in being able to write
something about Satie and about Xenakis).
In the late 1960s the landscape of new music changed. The minimalism of
Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich appeared in strong, and for me wel-
come, contrast to a prevailing hyper-complex music. Shortly after, political
issues began to engage a number of composers, myself included. Both these
 A uthor ’s P re fac e xix

�
developments affected my own music and thinking about music. (There is an
overview in chapter 12, “On Political Texts and New Music.”) Questions about
the “politics” of what I, and others, were doing musically, are taken up in a
number of pieces starting in the later 1970s. A persisting issue for me became the
relation of political and social questions with musical practices that were
Â�regarded as “experimental.” And what did it mean, after the first energetically
Â�exploratory 1950s and 1960s, to do “experimental music”?
More specific subjects come up: in two responses to questions about musical
notation—I have since the later 1950s devised various alternative notations for
representing indeterminate musical actions. And, though exposed to John Cage’s
percussion music since the 1950s, I did not become much involved with the use
of percussion until the 1990s. Thinking about this musical resource, which only
begins to be important in the twentieth century, appears in the text of a talk
given at a meeting of the Percussive Arts Society, in the piece about Greek trag-
edy and experimental music, and the liner notes for Robyn Schulkowsky’s com-
position Armadillo.
Over the years, musical friends and associates have died; there are five memo-
rial texts.
My notion now of what music is about has to do primarily with its realization,
that is, performance. Music is about social interaction. It begins with the com-
poser imagining and devising something for performers to engage with, then
present to listeners. As a composer I regard my primary responsibility to be
making material that is useful and interesting for the performers to work on. Of
course I would like listeners to be moved by a performance, but I don’t want to
force that process. I believe, for the music to really come alive, and to be sociable,
the listeners need to take part too, to listen actively, be more than passive recipi-
ents. Overall, these writings chart my way, both practically (musical procedures)
and through ideas, to these conclusions.
My musical life, and so this book, could not have happened without the sup-
port, example, and instruction of all of my family, fellow musicians, and friends.
There are too many to name here (quite a few turn up in the following texts): for
all, my heartfelt appreciation and thanks. I want also to thank Gisela Gronemeyer,
who, with her late partner, Reinhard Oelschlägel, conceived and devotedly put
together this book’s predecessor. And now, warm thanks to Suzanne Ryan of
Oxford University Press for taking up so readily and generously my proposal for
this successor.
Acknowledgments
Chapters 1–31, 33–34 previously appeared in Cues/Hinweise, © Edition MusicTexte, 1998. Used
by permission.
xx Author ’s P refac e

Chapter 43 previously appeared in Artforum, April 2009, “Figure Among Motifs,” by Rhys
Chatham and Christian Wolff. Used by permission.
Chapter 44 previously appeared in John Leley and James Saunders, Word Events: Perspecives on
Verbal Notations, Bloomsbury Continuum US, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.,
2012. Used by permission.
Chapter 45 previously appeared in American Music 27, no 4, 2009. Used by permission.
Chapter 46 previously appeared in The Ashgate Research Companion to Experimntal Music, ed.
James Saunders, Ashgate. Used by permission.
Chapter 50 previously published in Cine Qua Non #6, 2012. Used by permission.
Occasional Pieces
 1

(One of) Four Musicians at Work (1952)

Serenade for flute, clarinet, violin, mm. 91–2.

I
Making music within small areas of pitches (3, 4, 5, 8, or 9 pitches have been
used for individual pieces): The idea that simultaneous combinations of pitches,
likewise overlapping combinations of pitches result in one “sound.”
For instance, (a combination of two pitches) = a sound, (overlapping
pitches) = a sound. Sounds of greater complexity are also possible, for

example .

A piece is then made with a gamut of these sounds, both simple and complex.
Duration, timbre, and amplitude are free.

II
Making music in a structure that fixes sounds in a preconceived space without
regard for linear continuity. (The nature of the sounds: simple and complex as in pre-
vious situation; amplitude, timbre, and duration are static or fixed, however.) A struc-
ture is made with a number of measures having a square root. The structure is then

3
4 occasional pieces

planned within a square of these measures. A pattern

1 2 3 4 5
or series of patterns is superimposed on the square.
In the above, this pattern is a smaller square of 6 7 8 9 10
nine measures. Four of these patterns overlapping at
11 12 13 14 15
the edges fill up the area of this particular piece. The
�individual structures are then filled in with sounds. 16 17 18 19 20
The order in which the measures are composed
21 22 23 24 25
may vary.

III
Making music with combined gamuts of timbre, pitch, amplitude, and duration.
Structure as described in II. Pitch gamuts as described in I. Gamuts of timbre are
made with combinations of varying numbers of instruments (for instance, flute,
violin; flute, violin, cello). Gamuts of amplitude are made with varying numbers
and combinations of dynamics.

Gamuts of duration are made in the same way.

These gamuts are combined by choice and necessity. For instance, if the
choice is first made from the timbre gamut and calls for a flute, the choices of
pitch, duration, and amplitude are necessarily confined. If the duration gamut is
used and a combination of three durations is chosen, a timbre combination of
three instruments must be chosen. However, the number of pitches or amplitudes
 (O ne o f ) Four Mu s icians at Work ( 1952) 5

in a combination can vary from one to three, though the particular pitches are
confined by the ranges of the instruments chosen.

These notes were written at the request of John Cage, along with comments on their workby
Feldman, Boulez, and Cage, and published under the title, “4 musicians at work” in trans/
formation I/3, New York, 1952.
 2

On Webern (1955)

To write about Webern in 1955 seems unnecessary (let us continue to hear

him). But, while expressing my all but unbounded admiration and love for the
music of Webern, I shall indicate a certain distance in my (present and variable)
position from that music and its implications. Where admirable, the music is
wire-strong and tenuous, thin and concentrated, and very delicate. It is ex-
pressive only of itself: hence, it may extend and penetrate infinitely; it need
have no extra-musical (historical, literary, psychological, dramatic) reference,
even in the earlier works where expressiveness is more obviously active, for
there it is—before the use of contrapuntal and serial continuity—a function of
structure.
The music may involve a kind of dialectic between serial and contrapuntal
continuity (which is linear) and extra-serial configurations (which are often spa-
tial). The former is minutely controlled, the latter free, unrationalized, perhaps
not precisely conscious.
So in the second movement of the Piano Variations opus 27, the procedure of
the cycles of twelve tones in pairs describes a two-part canon, a linear continuity.
Simultaneously, a static texture of sound is made by the repetition of pitch
groupings. The notes cross-referenced by repetition originate at “irrational,” dis-
continuous points of the row sequences and of the contrapuntal logic. A nonlin-
ear, spatial configuration breaks out of, and is co-existent with, the linear conti-
nuity described by the row and canonic procedure.
For instance, the pitch group in measure 1 is re-
peated in measures 9, 13, and 19 (always piano and
staccato), a fixed point; but it also exists succes-
sively as the second pitch of Row IX and Inversion
VII, the ninth of Row II and Inversion II, the
fourth of Row VII and Inversion IX, the fifth of
Row IV and Inversion XII. And five other pitch-
groups are similarly repeated, leaving just eleven
of a total of thirty-one pitch groups unrepeated.

7
8 occasional pieces

Compare the beginning of the First Cantata opus 29, the first and seventh
measures:

Ri = Basic series form 1 Ii = Inversion form 1, et cetera

or, closer repetitions of notes (hence making less a spatial configuration than
a kind of more or less linear melody, which, unrationalized in origin, disengages
itself from the serial and contrapuntal continuities), from the first movement of
the Symphony opus 21, measures 3 to 7:

The similar dialectic between linear timbre (that is the continuity of one
timbre) and the spatial continuity (defined by serial and contrapuntal succes-
sion) of timbre (that is continually changing timbre, Klangfarbenmelodie) needs
no examples (the Symphony, for instance, is rich in them). Here, unlike the in-
stance of pitches, the control is most specifically on the spatial aspects of the
sound, the linear timbre being less precisely rationalized.
For dynamics one may note the alternation (I know of no simultaneous use) of
linear or progressive amplitude (an extension of sound generally defined by a con-
stant, increasing, or decreasing dynamic: often very close to drama, as in the Piano
Variations, part III, measures 43–55 climax—and the final pianissimo measures
following) and the continual and discrete shifts of dynamics whose essential qual-
ity is fixity in space (so, for instance, the second movement of the Piano Variations
in which only fortissimo, forte and piano appear changed for every pitch group).
Of durations, generally: they make at once a discontinuity and fluidity, a
�texture at once crystalline and moving. Rhythm, as an antiphony of sound and
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[Inhoud]

[1]

[Inhoud]

☞ Elke aflevering bevat een volledig verhaal. ☜

UITGAVE VAN DEN „ROMAN-BOEKHANDEL VOORHEEN A. EICHLER”, SINGEL
236,—AMSTERDAM.

[Inhoud]
DE BANKDIRECTEUR.
EERSTE HOOFDSTUK.
 EEN OUDE KENNIS.

Op een avond in Februari zat John Raffles met zijn vriend Charly
Brand in een der loges van het Garrick-Theater in Londen om de
voorstelling bij te wonen.

De groote onbekende was pas sinds een paar dagen weer in

Engeland terug. Hij had de maand Januari en de eerste helft van
Februari met zijn secretaris in Parijs doorgebracht en ook daar zijn
gewone sport uitgeoefend.

„Het begint vervelend te worden,” sprak hij tot zijn vriend, „de
theaterstukken worden van jaar tot jaar slechter, hoewel de acteurs
beter zijn dan vroeger en met mijn sport gaat het evenzoo.

„De menschen hebben steeds minder geld, maar niettegenstaande

dat zijn de inbrekers meer geoefend dan vroeger.

„Ik koester sinds eenigen tijd het plan om Londen vaarwel te zeggen
en naar Berlijn te verhuizen; ik heb namelijk vernomen, dat de politie
daar veel slimmer moet zijn dan de onze hier in Londen. Ik zou het
prettig vinden om mij met die lieden te meten.”

Charly Brand glimlachte en sprak:

„Je prijst een Berlijnsche instelling ten koste van je eigen vaderland
en toch geloof ik, dat zich op het gebied van strafzaken de politie
nergens ter wereld zoo belachelijk heeft gemaakt als juist die. Ik denk
hierbij aan een bijzonder geval.”

„Aan welk?” vroeg Raffles.

„Aan de geschiedenis van den hoofdman van Köpenick.”

„Je vergist je,” antwoordde John Raffles, „het verwijt, dat jij de politie
maakt, is niet op zijn plaats. Want nergens ter wereld heeft men het
nog zoover gebracht, dat men een misdaad, waarvan men niet het
flauwste vermoeden heeft, kan verhinderen. Ik geloof echter, dat in
Duitschland een sportman als ik nog groote dingen tot stand zou
kunnen brengen en heb werkelijk het plan—” hij zweeg plotseling en
fixeerde door zijn monocle een zwaargebouwd heer, die met eenige
opzichtig gekleede dames der demi-monde in een zijloge plaats nam.

Charly Brand volgde de blikken van zijn meester en fluisterde:

„Ken je dien heer?”

„Jawel,” sprak John Raffles zacht, „ik ken dien man helaas maar al te
goed. Hij is een van de menschen, dien ik een stevigen strik om zijn
hals toewensch.”

„Wie is hij?” vroeg Charly Brand. [2]

Op dit oogenblik stond Lord Lister op en verliet de loge. Juist werd

het gordijn opgehaald en het stuk nam een aanvang. Charly volgde
hem op den voet.

Zij gingen in den foyer, namen daar in gemakkelijke stoelen plaats,

bestelden whisky met soda en rookten sigaretten.

„Ik wil niet,” sprak de groote onbekende, „dat die man mij in den
schouwburg ziet, maar ik zal hem hier buiten ontmoeten.”

„Aha,” antwoordde Charly Brand, „dus je kent hem persoonlijk.”

„Ja,” knikte zijn vriend, „aan dien mensch heb ik mijn loopbaan te
danken. Eigenlijk moest ik hem hoogst dankbaar zijn. Door hem ben
ik een meesterdief geworden, waardoor ik een even amusant als
merkwaardig en winstgevend leventje leid.”
„Wat is dat dan voor een man?” vroeg Charly Brand ongeduldig.

„Wel, ik zal je de geschiedenis vertellen,” luidde het antwoord.

Lord Lister blies dikke rookwolken uit en begon:

„Het is ongeveer tien jaar geleden, toen ik, mijn vader leefde nog,
mijn moederlijk erfdeel, bij mijn meerderjarigheidsverklaring,
uitbetaald kreeg. Ik was toen lid van de Hamilton-Club; de andere
medeleden waren allen Afrikanen, d.w.z. lieden, die in Afrika in onze
koloniën geleefd en gestreden hebben.

„Er waren niet alleen oud-soldaten, maar ook kooplieden bij.

„In deze club leerde ik een zekeren Mr. Geis kennen. Hij kwam uit
Pretoria en vertelde, eigenaar te zijn van meerdere goudmijnen en
van een diamantveld.

„Na verscheiden weken raakte ik nader met hem bekend, en hij

noodigde mij uit om in zijn huis in Westend te komen dineeren.

„Het was een vorstelijk, met verfijnde weelde ingericht huis, dat ik
betrad. Toen ik in een gemakkelijken zetel had plaats genomen, wist
ik niet, dat ik als een geheel ander mensch die woning weer zou
verlaten. Ik maakte daar kennis met een jonge dame, die
buitengewoon mooi was en mijn jeugdig hart in vuur en vlam zette. Zij
kwam uit Johannesburg en beweerde, een nicht van Mr. Geis te zijn.
Ik schatte haar op ongeveer achttien jaar.

„Reeds den eersten avond bemerkte ik, dat zij mijn gevoelens
beantwoordde, die ik haar onverholen te kennen gaf. Toen ik laat in
den avond met den heer des huizes een cigarette zat te rooken,
klopte hij mij joviaal lachend op den schouder en sprak:
„„Jonge vriend, gij hebt een goeden indruk gemaakt op mijn nicht,
zooals ik heb gemerkt. Gij zijt de eerste man, die blijkbaar kans heeft,
haar hand en haar vermogen te verwerven.

„„Ik maak er u op attent, dat de jonge dame een wees is en dat ik

haar voogd ben. Ik verzoek u daarom vriendelijk, ingeval gij geen
ernstige bedoelingen hebt, het meisje niet het hoofd op hol te
brengen.”

„Jonge ezel die ik was, voelde ik, hoe ik bij die woorden bloosde. De
verklaring, dat ik indruk op het jonge meisje had gemaakt, maakte mij
verlegen. Ik stamelde een paar onbeduidende woorden, nam
afscheid en ging met een verhit hoofd naar huis. Ik trachtte mijzelf
door koude stortbaden en andere middelen te kalmeeren en besloot
het huis van Mr. Geis en diens gezelschap te mijden. Ik wilde mij op
zoo jeugdigen leeftijd nog niet binden.

„Maar reeds drie dagen later zat ik, dwaas die ik was, met een
prachtigen ruiker orchideeën in het salon van Mr. Geis en wachtte
met kloppend hart op het binnentreden van zijn nicht.

„Volgens het gewone programma verliep toen verder alles. Ik was

zoo blind, dat ik niet zag, hoe de kerel alle deuren van zijn huis voor
mij openzette en hoe hij mij met zijn vriendelijkheid overweldigde.

„Wel vier weken verkeerde ik in de familie, toen ik op zekeren dag

van Mr. Geis de uitnoodiging tot een gewichtig, vertrouwelijk
onderhoud kreeg.

„Onmiddellijk begaf ik mij tot hem, denkende, dat hij een verklaring
van mij eischte betreffende mijn verhouding tot zijn pupil, en ik was
bereid, gevolg te geven aan al zijn wenschen: de jonge dame mijn
Lordstitel, mijn hand en mijn vermogen aan te bieden.

„Maar het pakte anders uit.

„Mr. Geis verklaarde mij, dat hij op het punt was, in Londen een
nieuwe, op groote schaal werkende Bank op te richten en dat hij mij
een eervolle betrekking bij deze onderneming had toegedacht,
namelijk als voornaamsten chef te fungeeren en met mijn naam als
bankdirecteur te teekenen.

„Hij noemde mij een vorstelijk inkomen, dat ik zou krijgen, en

schilderde mij mijn werkzaamheden in zulke verleidelijke kleuren, dat
ik onmiddellijk toehapte en nog dienzelfden middag, waarop onze
conferentie plaats had, teekende bij een notaris het contract.

„En nu begon het bedrog op reusachtige manier.

„Terwijl ik met de mooie nicht in de parken reed of wandelde en

uitstapjes maakte in de omstreken van Londen, maakte Mr. Geis
misbruik van mijn naam en gelukte het hem, dozijnen groote
kapitalisten en duizenden [3]lieden te vinden, die hem vol vertrouwen
hun bezittingen in bewaring gaven.

„Ik, verliefde gek, zag of hoorde niets.

„Mr. Geis had mij meegedeeld, dat ik eerst over een jaar om de hand
van zijn pupil mocht vragen. Wij moesten elkaar eerst voldoende
leeren kennen, voordat wij ons voor het leven verbonden.

„Daar stierf op zekeren dag geheel onverwacht mijn vader. Een

hartverlamming had een einde gemaakt aan zijn leven. Ik had veel
van hem gehouden, maar gevoelde geen oprechte droefheid, omdat
mijn gedachten bij de geliefde verwijlden.

„Ik was blij, toen de noodige formaliteiten achter den rug waren. Het
vermogen, dat mijn vader mij naliet, bedroeg bijna 4,000,000 pond
sterling, dus was ik een zeer goede partij. Gelukkig behoorde ik niet
tot de verarmde Engelsche aristocraten, die, om hun wapen te laten
opfrisschen, de dochters van Amerikaansche varkensslagers of
fabrikanten van geconserveerde vleeschwaren moeten trouwen.”

Raffles zweeg eenige seconden, stak een nieuwe cigarette aan en

keek nadenkend naar de verdwijnende rookwolkjes. Ook Charly
Brand was stil geworden.

„Om kort te gaan, lieve Charly,” vervolgde Raffles, „vier maanden na

den dood van mijn vader trad op zekeren morgen een commissaris
van politie mijn woning binnen en verklaarde mij als gevangene.—Ik
dacht, niet goed verstaan te hebben en vroeg, waarvan men mij
beschuldigde.

„En nu werd mij het volgende medegedeeld door dezen bejaarden

beambte, die met mijn vader bevriend was geweest.

„„Ik geloof graag, Lord Lister, dat gij niets weet van al die knoeierijen.
En daarom laat ik u niet gevangen nemen, maar geef u toestemming,
om in uw woning te blijven, als gij mij uw eerewoord geeft, uwe
vertrekken niet te zullen verlaten. De aanklacht, tegen u ingediend,
luidt: dat gij als directeur der nieuw opgerichte Bank het vernomen
van uw crediteuren, ten bedrage van vijf millioen pond sterling, hebt
verduisterd.”

„„Ik?!” riep ik vol ontzetting uit „Ik?!” In mijn geheele leven heb ik nog
niemand een cent te kort gedaan, ik heb dat trouwens ook niet
noodig, daar ik gefortuneerd ben. Gij weet dit, mijnheer. Ik begrijp uw
aanklacht niet. Mr. Geis, de plaatsvervangende directeur, vertelde mij
nog gisteren, dat hij nog nimmer zulke uitstekende zaken had
gemaakt als met onze Bank.”

„De commissaris glimlachte.

„„Dat geloof ik graag. Deze man heeft werkelijk prachtige zaken

gemaakt. Hij heeft minstens vier millioen sterling verdiend en is
daarmede gisteravond op reis gegaan.”

„Ik had een gevoel, alsof ik door een bliksemstraal was getroffen, ik
meende te droomen, te fantaseeren. Dat kon immers onmogelijk
waar zijn.

„Maar het was bittere waarheid. Met behulp van mijn advocaat
gelukte het mij nog dienzelfden avond, mijn vermogen in handen te
krijgen en met dit kapitaal den schuldeischers hun gedeponeerde
gelden terug te betalen. Binnen een week was alles in orde. Zoodra
de laatste geldstukken uit mijn zak waren verdwenen, sloot ik de
kantoorlokalen en moest blij zijn, dat ik mij, dank zij mijn uitstekende
relaties en mijn goeden naam, zonder onteerende straf uit deze vuile
zaak had kunnen redden.

„Een proces tegen den grooten oplichter, Mr. Geis, was onmogelijk,
daar alle crediteuren het hunne hadden teruggekregen en ook ik kon
niets tegen hem doen, daar ik zijn medeplichtige was.

„Nu ben ik nieuwsgierig, hoe die kerel, dien ik in tien jaar niet heb
gezien, zich tegenover mij zal gedragen. Het zal hem verbazen, mij
hier terug te zien.”

De theaterbel kondigde de groote pauze aan. Dadelijk stroomde het

publiek de foyers binnen.

Midden in het gewoel naderde Mr. Geis met zijn beide dames de
wachtende heeren en Raffles, die met Charly Brand was opgestaan,
zorgde er voor, dat hij plotseling tegenover Mr. Geis stond.

Het dikke, opgezette gelaat van den schurk verbleekte, toen opeens
Lord Lister, bijgenaamd Raffles, voor hem stond.

Onmiddellijk herstelde hij zich echter, en, terwijl hij de twee dames liet
staan, stak hij Raffles beide handen toe en riep, schijnbaar met van
vreugde trillende stem:

„Dat is een vreugde! mijn beste Lord Lister, u eindelijk eens weer
terug te zien!”

Charly Brand was verbaasd, toen Raffles met een even beminnelijk
lachje den man tegemoet snelde, zijn handen hartelijk drukte en
antwoordde:

„Dat is een prettig toeval inderdaad! Ik ben zeer verheugd, u terug te

zien. Gij zijt weinig veranderd in al die jaren.”

„Gij ook niet, mijn lieve vriend,” antwoordde Mr. Geis met zijn vette
stem. „Ik zou u onder duizenden herkend hebben, beminnelijk,
elegant en keurig als altijd. Wat hebt gij in dien tijd gedaan?” [4]

„Daarover later”, antwoordde Raffles, „sinds wanneer zijt gij in

Londen?”

„Sinds twee dagen, beste Lord,” antwoordde Mr. Geis, „ik ben van
plan, mij blijvend hier te vestigen en wel in Brighton. Ik heb veel met u
te bespreken, Lord Lister. Ik heb voortdurend op mijn reis naar
Engeland—ik kom uit Australië—aan u gedacht, met groot verlangen
om eindelijk goed te maken, wat ik indertijd door mislukte speculaties
u heb te kort gedaan.”

Raffles maakte een lichte, afwerende handbeweging en sprak:

„Laat dat rusten, die zaak is lang vergeten. Of ik het geld aan de
speeltafel of ergens anders had verloren, het komt op hetzelfde neer.”

„Neen, neen,” sprak Mr. Geis, „dat is mij niet onverschillig en ik heb
een uitstekend idee, om alles spelenderwijs terug te krijgen. Ik was
tot heden directeur van de Lincoln-Bank, door mij opgericht in Sidney
en, zooals gij wel weet, hebben wij reeds sinds vier jaar een
bijkantoor in Londen.”

Raffles zette een ernstig gezicht. De Lincoln-Bank was in de City als

uiterst solide bekend. Hoe was het mogelijk dat deze man aan die
zaak verbonden was en zich zelfs in zijn eigen vaderland wilde
komen vestigen?

„Ik zal voortaan,” vervolgde Mr. Geis, „de zaken dier Bank in Londen
voeren. De commissie van toezicht schenkt mij, na zesjarigen arbeid,
het vertrouwen, mij tot directeur te benoemen. Bezoek mij morgen in
mijn hotel. Hier is mijn kaartje, ik wacht u tusschen 10–11 uur. Op iets
moet ik u nog opmerkzaam maken,” bij die woorden boog de
bankdirecteur zich naar Raffles toe, „ik noem mij niet meer Geis maar
Stein.”

Raffles keek hem een oogenblik strak aan en antwoordde:

„En ik heet niet meer Lord Lister, maar Raffles.”

Mr. Geis snakte naar lucht, toen hij dien naam hoorde.

Maar nog voordat hij iets kon zeggen, drukte de groote onbekende
met een vriendelijk glimlachje zijn hand en sprak:

„Tot weerziens, Mr. Stein, morgen in uw hotel.”

„Tot weerziens, Mr. Mr. — —”

„Raffles,” vulde Lord Lister aan, „maar het is beter, dat ik voor u en
ieder ander de groote onbekende blijf. Ik ben morgen stellig in uw
hotel.”

Hij nam den arm van Charly Brand en verliet den schouwburg. [5]
[Inhoud]
TWEEDE HOOFDSTUK.
 EEN SCHURKACHTIG VOORSTEL.

Zoodra Raffles afscheid had genomen, verontschuldigde Mr. Geis

zich bij de dames wegens een plotselinge ongesteldheid en, zonder
het eind der voorstelling af te wachten, begaf hij zich naar zijn hotel.

Hij woonde in het Savoye Hotel en had daar een reeks vorstelijk
ingerichte vertrekken in gebruik.

Hier wachtte zijn kamerdienaar McIntosh op hem, een Ier van

geboorte, die hem, toen hij de kamer binnentrad, zijn pels afnam.

McIntosh had een afschuwelijk uiterlijk. Hij kon ongeveer 40 jaar oud
zijn, zijn breed gelaat was ontsierd door de pokken en een groot
litteeken, waarschijnlijk afkomstig van een sabelhouw, liep dwars over
zijn voorhoofd.

Deze man was de vertrouwde van Mr. Geis. Hij had hem in Australië
leeren kennen en hij was minder zijn kamerdienaar dan wel zijn
medeplichtige.

Twintig jaar geleden wegens diefstal en moord uit Engeland naar

Australië verbannen, was hij daar uit de strafkolonie ontvlucht.

Hij zou stellig weer in handen der Engelsche politie zijn gevallen, als
hij niet zijn toevlucht had gevonden in een kleine mijnonderneming,
die beheerd werd door Mr. Geis.

Toen hij de pelsjas had aangenomen, sprak Mr. Geis tot hem:

„Kom in mijn studeerkamer, ik heb belangrijke zaken met je te

bespreken.”
Samen begaven zij zich naar het laatste der rij vertrekken, dat als
studeerkamer was ingericht.

„Ik heb,” zoo begon Mr. Geis, „hedenavond iemand weergezien, een
vroegeren Lord, van wien ik veronderstel, dat hij mij een gloeienden
haat toedraagt wegens iets, dat tien jaar geleden is gebeurd. Die
blijkbaar onbeduidende jonge man is intusschen een gevaarlijk
misdadiger geworden.”

„Dus een collega,” lachte McIntosh. „Wil de kerel jou verraden?”

„Ik ben er bang voor,” antwoordde Mr. Geis, „dat de schurk mij op de
een of andere manier zal benadeelen om zich op mij te wreken. En
dat zou, nu wij zulke groote zaken op touw willen zetten, onze
ondergang zijn.”

„De duivel hale den hond”, sprak McIntosh, zijn groote vuisten
ballende, „waar is hij? Ik zal hem opzoeken en hem zijn hersens
inslaan, opdat hem voor eeuwig de lust vergaat, om je te verraden.”

„Wij moeten zeer voorzichtig met hem zijn,” antwoordde Mr. Geis, „hij
is een der gevaarlijkste en geslepenste menschen, die er bestaan.”

„Je maakt mij nieuwsgierig,” sprak McIntosh, „hoe heet hij?”

„Het is Raffles!”

„Raffles,” herhaalde McIntosh, terwijl zijn oogen bijna uit hun kassen
traden van verbazing, „Raffles? Verduiveld! Hoe komt het, dat je dien
meesterdief kent?”

„Dat is een lange geschiedenis,” antwoordde Mr. Geis op

ontwijkenden toon, „die ik je bij een volgende gelegenheid uitvoerig
zal vertellen. Laat ons nu een plan samenstellen, hoe wij dien kerel