Found Poem II

(after Milton Babbit, Words About Music p. 122-3)

I’m given to making jokes,

but my gratitude to what has gone on in music theory is profound.
I was asked to write in a magazine called High Fidelity

(why do I ever do it?)

about the future of music. They asked, on their anniversary,
that various people suggest what was going to happen to music
in the next thousand years. I was the only composer asked
because I’m supposed to know about the future.

(I have a Ouija board!)

No, they asked me because
they thought I was going to talk about technology.

I refused to talk about technology.

I said whatever the new technology was, it wasn’t going to be
in the hands of the people anyhow; if we wouldn’t have access to it,
why talk about it? But I talked about the fact that what I most regretted
was that the people who demonstrated that they were concerned
to look at a piece of music and say intelligible things about it, from which

(if one wished to)

one could at least devolve reasonable and defensible evaluatives,
were never consulted. Instead you would still have the ubiquitous journalism
and still have the irresponsibles

(often performers)

determining what could be performed.
Asking a performer what should be performed is like
asking a printer what book should be published.

This is a serious question,

and I think that the trouble with music theorists at the moment
is they haven’t asserted their authority, which is also true
in so many other fields.

I mean that very seriously.