Morton Feldman quote

"At this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying." And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, "I don’t know how I made it."

The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn’t that marvelous. Isn’t that wonderful. It’s so beautiful, and he doesn’t know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts."

pg 4-5 Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman edited by Bernard Harper Friedman Exact Change,U.S.; illustrated edition edition (9 Mar 2001)

I'm used to people looking at me as if I am insane when I try to tell them about my ideas or when I am trying to express what I want to achieve. I am pretty sure that when I originally told the first person that I wanted to produce a sound/animation triptych that they had no better idea of what I was doing after I told them my ideas than they did before the conversation.

Could it be that I don't really know what I am doing or how I am going to do it? It's there in my head and cannot be communicated to anyone else in any way other than in its intended form.

People who can just accept that something just 'is' are hard to come by or maybe the education system has made it hard to come by this kind of freedom. If I asked a student how they had made something and they replied that they didn't know their marks would probably suffer. It's hard to get out of this way of thinking. I guess there is a need to be an established artist with a proven track record before you can just admit that maybe you don't know how you have created something, that it just came out?

Sometimes when I look at my life drawing I can't remember drawing it, I just remember finishing, standing back and thinking "Where the hell did that come from?"