Elie Siegmeister, Alvin Lucier, Mindy Lee Source: the Musical Quarterly, Vol

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Three Points of View Author(s): Elie Siegmeister, Alvin Lucier, Mindy Lee Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Apr., 1979), pp. 281-295 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741709 Accessed: 07/05/2009 02:40

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http://www.jstor.org Three Points of View

In music - as in everything else - nothing is more permanent than change. Before the twentieth century dramatic changes of style came at hundred-year or still longer intervals; after 1900, however, the pace speeded up to once every twenty or thirty years. Yet despite the constancy of change, theorists, critics, and even composers (who should know better) persist in laying down aesthetic rules and im- peratives, hoping thereby to perpetuate their kind of music into the limitless future. And sometimes it works: the rules regarding paral- lel fifths, the resolution of dissonances, and the answer of a fugue sub- ject in the dominant prevailed for many hundreds of years. Not too long after these rules were overthrown, a new set was foisted on the unsuspecting composer. Tonality, he now learned, was dead, likewise diatonic melody, recurring themes, sonata-allegro and all other traditional forms. "Let's destroy the past!" one pundit proclaimed, and another, "Anyone who has not felt . . . the neces- sity of the dodecaphonic language is USELESS." In place of the old conservative establishment a new "radical"- that is, acceptably radical - establishment took over to dictate the do's and don't's of music for more than twenty years, leading the writers of reputable text- books on modern music to fill their final chapters with glowing pre- dictions of the postserial, avant-gardist, aleatoric, electronic, com- puterized future. And then the bottom dropped out. Just two or three years ago prestigious critics began to complain that serial music now sounded tired and repetitious. The bloom fell off the avant rose; neo-Dadaism sounded boring rather than shocking; and electronics slipped out of Ivy League professors'hands into those of rock and TV arrangers.Worst of all, certain glamorous leaders of

281 282 The Musical Quarterly the avant-gardist battalions announced dramatically, "Back to tonality!" and came up with tuneful, communicable, even Romantic pieces that aroused wide excitement. What's happening? Where is it all going? Let's pause a moment and take a look back a bit. It was in the early thirties that "modern music" burst over Amer- ica. Monteux, Koussevitzky, and Stokowski had brought Stravin- sky's Le sacre du printemps, Prokofiev's They Are Seven, and Berg's Wozzeck to these shores, and a native band of Young Turks - Edgard Varese, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, Nicolas Slo- nimsky, and the Aaron Copland of the Piano Variations - had in- troduced such daring devices as tone clusters, polychords, quarter tones, polytonality, tone rows, and percussion music. (Charles Ives, of course, had been there before.) Modernism galvanized the young composers, but was royally rejected by major orchestras and the broad musical public, and survived in those tiny concerts attended by 100 - always the same 100 - people. Things might well have continued this way for some time were it not for three major nonmusical events. During the period 1930-45 a series of hammer blows, the Great Depression, Nazism, and World War II, descended on humanity and the artist was not immune. With the shattering crises of the time, composers - who usually live in a world of their own - could not help recognizing the limited impact of their modern experiments on people as a whole and their isolation from the dramatic events happening "out there." Meanwhile, Pi- casso's Guernica, Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, and Eugene O'Neill's great plays seemed to solve the problem of creating powerful art that reached out to a wide spectrum of humanity. Was there a kind of modern music that might do the same? During the early thirties, this thought began to stir composers throughout the Western world. Within a few years a new direction appeared in music: away from complex experimentation, toward the broad musical audience. In 1933 Prokofiev, setting aside his radical language of Pas d'acier and The Angel of Fire, produced the exqui- site Lieutenant Kije music, and in 1935 his lyrical Second Violin Concerto. The latter year also saw the appearance of George Gersh- win's Porgy and Bess and Dmitri Shostakovitch's populist Fifth Sym- phony. The new movement spread quickly: During the next decade Bela Bart6k, Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Benjamin Britten, Three Points of View 283

Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, Aaron Copland, and other composers created a series of clear, communicative, sometimes powerful works that led modern music out of its isolation ward and into the mainstream of musical - and human - life. Stravinsky had already contributed the Symphony of Psalms and even Schoenberg turned back to tonality, momentarily at least, in two works, the Suite for Strings and the Theme and Variations for orchestra - both in the key of G major. True to the mercurial nature of twentieth-century art, this exuber- ant, humanist phase did not last very long. With the end of World War II, new disasters soon appeared: the cold war, the threat of nuclear annihilation, McCarthyism, renewed Stalinism, the cult of technology (as distinct from science itself) - all led to the age of alienation, anxiety, dehumanization. A hermetic, superintellectual outlook spread into music, mirroring the computer worship of the period. Theoretical and quasimathematical calculations permeated the dodecaphony, total serialization, and avant-gardism that became the established new styles. Even chance music - ostensibly a release for unconscious impulses - arose out of metaphysical speculation. The outstanding figures of the 1950-75 period - Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Car- ter, and John Cage - shared an aversion to traditional form, melody, counterpoint, flowing lines, and straightforward communication. If the new music produced by these men or others under their influence seemed cold, theoretical, and uncommunicative to the sophisticated listeners who by now loved the Bartok quartets, Wozzeck and Ives, so much the worse for them. "Who cares if you listen?" was a common attitude in the leading circles. Whatever the lasting contributions to music of the postserial, avant-gardist period may prove to be (and beyond certain fascinating new colors, textures, and rhythms it is too soon to assess them) one result of its recent hegemony is clear. Of the thousands of works written, scarcely a handful has entered the repertory - in contrast to the dozens of compositions from the preceding period. The char- acter of the pieces has brought modern music back to the isolation ward of the tiny 100-listener concerts, as it did in the 1920s. Having acquired broad foundation and critical support for two decades now, the avant-gardist movement should be able to antici- pate a secure and brilliant future. Yet, strangely enough, it has not 284 The Musical Quarterly worked out that way. Recently, certain of its most prestigious leaders have begun to feel a sense of isolation and to yearn for acceptance by the wide musical public outside the halls of ivy and the tiny concerts. A number have turned to conducting to find this broader con- nection, among them Boulez, Krzysztof Penderecki, Lukas Foss, and Gunther Schuller. Who are the rebels against the music that was considered the most advanced of all time? Strangely enough, some of its most stal- wart supporters of yesteryear. Penderecki startled the New York critics recently with a right- about-face: his new Violin Concerto written for Isaac Stern. Not only was it flatly tonal but also melodic, thematic, and in sonata- allegro form; it even contained traditional Romantic violinistic flour- ishes. Gyorgy Ligeti's Woodwind Quintet represented an even more dramatic switch, with major triads, imitations, and other traditional - contrapuntal devices all over the place the whole being witty, fresh, and brilliantly scored for the conventional instrumental group- ing. Among the Americans, George Rochberg's return from his twenty- year dedication to serialism resulted in two beautifully crafted if eclectic tonal works: the Third String Quartet and a Violin Concerto also written for Isaac Stern. (Is Stern somehow at the bottom of all this?) Lukas Foss's American Cantata brought this mercurially talented experimenter full circle, or rather full spiral around again to his early The Prairie roots - obviously on a different level. Combin- ing rock sounds, Webernesque pointillism, and intricate rhythmic counterpoint with straightforward major melodies, American folk songs, and aleatoric-fugal passages in a highly personal manner, the composer received the warm accolade of a New York Philharmonic audience. It is not only well-known avant-garde leaders who have turned in the new direction. Young Stephen Albert had been writing for some years in a recondite idiom characteristic of the time. Last year he composed Voices Within, featuring a neo-Ivesian "pit band" play- ing brash, down-to-earth tonal tunes within the framework of a large orchestra giving forth intricate waves of rhythm and color. A dis- tinguished Tanglewood audience responded with enthusiasm. David Del Tredici, another youthful toiler in the "advanced" vineyard, aroused smiles and warm demonstrations when his Final Alice with Three Points of View 285 its singable tunes and warmly orchestrated somewhat Straussian traditional harmonies was presented in Chicago and New York. Equally impressive is the case of Gerald Humel, an American who has made his career in Germany. This richly gifted composer had been working for years in a twelve-tone idiom of Mitteleuropa. His recent Lepini, commissioned and given its premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra under Maazel, was a new stylistic synthesis. Extremely complex in figurations and textures, it scored a stunning success by its return to motivic and thematic development, its human drama, and an architecture deeply rooted in tradition. Seven swallows do not make a summer nor seven composers a new stage in musical history. It must be noted, nonetheless, that I am a sporadic concertgoer at best. If I have chanced upon works of "advanced" composers who have joined the "tonal-melodic revival," there must be seventeen others that have been performed elsewhere and seventy more waiting in the wings. But there is more to it than this. Apart from the "advanced" brethren who are now moving toward the mainstream, we find a number of composers until now labeled "traditionalist-tonal" who have begun to incorporate new techniques and colors into their palette. They are approaching a mainstream language from the other direction, joining or possibly eventually becoming indistinguishable from their avant-gardist colleagues on the new turn of the spiral. John Corigliano, who until a short time ago worked in a free tonal idiom, received standing ovations for his Clarinet Concerto recently given its premiere by Leonard Bernstein. In this work he mingled wild orchestral tone clusters, sliding pitches, aleatoric and "spatial" passages, percussion cannonades with a rich vein of expressive melody, the whole sounding much "farther out" than the above- mentioned pieces by Penderecki and Ligeti. Morton Gould's new Symphony of Spirituals for orchestra, described by the composer as an attempt to recapture the spirit of his widely performed Spirituals for orchestra written in 1940, proved the falsity of the old adage "You can't go home again." Gould, who had flirted briefly with serialism in the 1950s, did go home and found himself happy to be there. His new work proved to be brilliant, freshly shaped, and even, in the "Blues" movement, deeply moying. William Mayer, considered a fairly traditional composer, has recently incorporated new devices most successfully into his work. In 286 The Musical Quarterly

"Spring Came On Forever," lovely choral glissandos suggest the sounds of a seashell held close to the ear. "Messages" had magical woodblock sounds coming from all around the hall. Where, then, does modern music now stand? Perhaps on a new level of the musical spiral in which the pedantic aesthetics and nar- row restrictions of the recent period have been swept away, and in which composition may once more be a pluralistic and highly expressive art. In this period, perhaps, no stylistic trends or combinations will be taboo. Tonal melodies may blend with pointillism, rock phrases with atonal textures, C major with electronic tone clusters, or fugal counterpoint with the blues, or with tone rows. A broad musical panorama seems to be opening for the composer. Will all of this not, however, result in a faceless eclecticism, the most confusing tasteless mishmash of all time? Perhaps it will in the hands of the ungifted composer. But the talented creator will, as always in the past, select those elements con- sonant with his own vision and mold them into an individual synthesis. Bart6k, one of the most distinctive of twentieth-century composers, developed his unique idiom from the most disparate sources, commingling Hungarian folk songs, Bulgarian rhythms, Arabic modes, Debussyan chord formations, Bach's fugal techniques, the quartet writing of Beethoven and Henry Cowell's tone clusters into an art of commanding unity. The mark of the great artist is his power to assimilate such a wide diversity of materials and from all of them forge his own distinctive craft and style. "Great art," Walt Whitman said, "needs great audiences." It may be that 1979 and the eighties will bring the composer and audience together again, in a new synthesis of past and present that will refresh the music of our own time. ELIE SIEGMEISTER(b. 1909)

For several hundred years Western music has been based on composition and performance. Most attention has been focused on the conception and generation of sound, very little on its propagation. Written notes are two-dimensional symbols of a three-dimensional phenomenon. No matter how complex a system of notation or how Three Points of View 287 real the illusion of depth, written music is trapped on a flat plane. Even musics from oral traditions are rooted in performance rotes and instrumental topologies or rely on texts, stories, or social hier- archies. We have been so concerned with language that we have for- gotten how sound flows through space and occupies it. Sounds have specific spatial characteristics. Those of short wave- length (high frequencies) are directional; longer ones (lows) spread out. Sound waves flow away from their sources roughly in three- dimensional concentric spheres, the nodes and antinodes of which, under certain circumstances, can be perceived in a room as clearly as those of a vibrating string on a violin. Each space, furthermore, has its own personality that tends to modify, position, and move sounds by means of absorptions, reflections, attenuations, and other struc- turally related phenomena. Conventional acoustic engineering prac- tice has historically defied these phenomena in an attempt to deliver the same product to everybody in the same space. Accepted as natural occurrences to be enjoyed and used, however, they open up a whole new field of musical composition. For the past several years I have conceived a series of works that explore the natural properties of sound and the acoustic characteristics of architectural spaces as musical objectives. I was not composing music in 1965 and I had lost confidence in the musics of my education. Post-Webern serialism, particularly as I had witnessed it earlier in Darmstadt, seemed florid and complex enough to be obsolete, and the tape music of that period seemed to be only an extension of that language. I felt the need for a new conception. When the physicist Edmond Dewan offered his brain-wave equipment with which to explore the possibility of making music, I had a ready and open mind. As I started learning to generate alpha to make sound, I began experiencing a sensibility to sound and its production different from that of other musics based on ideas of tension, contrast, conflict, and other notions of drama. To release alpha, one has to attain a quasimeditative state while at the same time monitoring its flow. One has to give up control to get it. In making Music for Solo Performer (1965), I had to learn to give up performing to make the performance happen. By allowing alpha to flow naturally from mind to space without intermediate processing, it was possible to create a music without compositional manipulation or purposeful performance. 288 The Musical Quarterly

In the spring of 1968, when Pauline Oliveros invited me to Cali- fornia, I began picking up images for a new work. The ocean sug- gested seashells, and a nearby canyon offered itself as a large resonant environment in which they could be sounded. I designed a performance of a new work, Chambers, in which several shell players, start- ing from a small circle, spread out through the La Jolla landscape, describing the outdoor space in terms of their sounding shells. Later I expanded the idea to include any small or large resonant chambers that could be made to sound. I thought of them as rooms within rooms which impinge their acoustic characteristics upon each other. I then made several works that articulated spaces in more specific ways. Vespers (1968), based on the principle of echolocation, uses pulsed sounds, such as those used in acoustic testing, to make acoustic signatures of enclosed spaces. As reverberation times are measured, the quality of the surrounding environment is described by compar- ing the timbre of the outgoing pulses with those that return as echoes. Time and space are directly related; durations are proportional to distances between sound sources and reflective surfaces. In I Am Sitting in a Room (1970), several paragraphs of human speech are used to expose sets of resonant frequencies implied by the architectural dimensions of various-sized rooms. By means of a pair of tape recorders, the sound materials are recycled through a room to amplify by repetition those frequencies common to both the original record- ing and those implied by the room. As the repetitive process con- tinues and segments accumulate, the resonant frequencies are reinforced, the others gradually eliminated. The space acts as a filter. We discover that each room has its own set of resonant frequencies in the same way that musical sounds have overtones. And in Quasimodo the Great Lover (1970) sounds sent over very long distances, by means of relays of microphone-amplifier-loudspeaker systems, if necessary, cap- ture and carry the acoustic characteristics of the spaces through which they travel. Total distance is determined by the amount of space necessary to modify the original material to a point of unrecogniza- bility. Recent works have been more concerned with the properties of sound itself rather than with how it acts in space. Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas (1973-74) is an exploration of standing waves and related phenomena. If a pure wave emanates from two sources, or one source and a reflective wall, standing waves Three Points of View 289 will form in symmetrical hyperbolic curves equidistant and on either side of an imaginary axis between the sources. If two closely tuned waves emanate from two different sources, beating patterns will cause the crests and troughs of sound to spin in elliptical patterns toward the lower-frequency source. Changes in intonation will cause changes in speed of beating and, if unison nulls are crossed, direction of movement. In this work, dancers search for and move in troughs of quiet sound, singers create three-dimensional vibratos consisting of audible beats which move out to listeners as ripples on a pond, and players of electronic and acoustic instruments spin crests of sound in polyrhythmic figures through space. In Outlines (1976) of Persons and Things, sound waves are used to create diffractive patterns around opaque objects, producing sil- houettes which may be perceived directly with one's ears, or through loudspeakers which shift, enlarge, and amplify the images. If either the object or the listener moves, slight phase changes will cause perceptible variations in the resulting fields. If the illuminating sounds consist of two or more closely tuned frequencies, temporary speedups and slowdowns of the rhythmic patterns will occur. Often it is necessary to provide visual clues as to the overall sound situation. You may be sitting in the trough of a standing wave or on the edge of a sound shadow, but since you cannot be everywhere at once, you hear only what is available at your location in space. Your focus is oblique. In Directions of Sounds from the Bridge (1978), for example, sound-sensitive lights are stationed around an oscillator- driven cello to sample the changing volume shapes caused by the directional characteristics of the instrument. Stringed instruments cast sound shadows around themselves in shapes determined by their resonant characteristics. In small spaces or in situations where ampli- fication is possible, the shapes that flow from the tops, bottoms, and sides of instruments are apparent to listeners. And in Bird and Person Dyning (1975), a work in which phantom images seem to appear in various places in space because of the apparent locative properties of acoustic heterodyning, a performer, wearing miniature microphones in his or her ears, dips, turns, and tilts his or her head, alter- ing pitches of strands of feedback created between the microphones and pairs of loudspeakers. In this work, as in several others, performing is more a matter of careful listening than of making sounds happen. 290 The Musical Quarterly

I often dream of performance spaces specially designed for works based on the three-dimensional characteristics of sound. Paraboloids, spheroids, and other similarly shaped rooms with movable walls could be constructed to position, move, and modulate sounds. Walls, floors, and ceilings could be thought of as acoustic lenses whose focal points are determined by reflective time. It is also possible to create imaginary spaces by means of computer simulation. In RMSIM 1 (1972), a digital computer drives a configuration of analog modules into which is fed a live microphone placed in an enclosed space. Changing values of resonant filters, amplifiers, and reverberation units suggest changes in the size and structure of simulated rooms. And in Clocker (1978) a galvanic skin-response detector controls the speed of a ticking clock at several separate time delays, creating re- flected sound from appropriately positioned loudspeakers so as to suggest changes in size and shape of memory-triggered rooms. Given enough delay lines and loudspeakers, any real or imagined rooms may be simulated. I am now working on a series of Solar Sound Systems for public places. Solar panels of various types, sizes, configurations, and energy- collecting capabilities are deployed at on-site locations, facing various compass directions relative to apparent daily sunrise and sunset. As sunlight falls on the panels at different intensities at different times of the day and year in various weather conditions, varying amounts of voltage are collected which drive packages of electronic music modules, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, creating a continually changing music. Nearby trees and shrubbery, corners of adjacent buildings, passing people and cars may cast shadows or absorb enough sunlight to bring about further changes in the music. Each installation will be unique. The number and size of the panels will be determined by the complexity of the sound system and size of the installation. In most cases, the basic sound source will be a pulse wave, chosen for its low power consumption -for example, it may be on duty only 10 percent of a given cycle. Filters will be used for timbre control. All systems, however, will be com- pletely solar powered. The generation, propagation, and quality of the music will be determined by the intensity of the sun's rays at any given moment in time. ALVIN LUCIER (b. 1931) Three Points of View 291

III

My family immigrated to the United States in May, 1972. For each one of us, this marked a turning point whence new life styles, customs, language, faces, and outlook on life had to be adopted. One can categorize this as a typical story of an immigrant family, but what truly defines me as Mindy Min Kyung Lee is the fifteen years that I have experienced during which the world has graciously allowed me to be accepted and to grow within it. I was born on February 24, 1963, in Seoul, Korea, the first of the three children born to Mr. and Mrs. Koo Sun Lee. I do not recall many early childhood experiences, but my mother has repeatedly re- minded me that when I was an infant my father always used to sing me a lullaby before I went to sleep. Maybe this is when my musical interest first began to germinate. After a while, I would not even pretend to appear drowsy without his singing. A few years later, I tried to imitate him by singing myself. I re- member the Christmas concert at our church in which I successfully made my singing "debut" at the age of three (four?) after sitting through a two-hour sermon. I was born into a Christian family, and the Christian community not only has been an integral part of my life, but it also has further enhanced my musical appetite by adding a special dimension to my knowledge of music. It has provided me with innumerable opportunities to gain valuable concert experi- ence. It has broadened my understanding of others by surrounding me with people of all professions, temperaments, interests, dreams, and hopes, with a common bond of Christianity. It has supported and guided me through those frightening times of inse- curity and uncertainty, especially through a painfully tragic period which I quite unwillingly faced later. My parents formally initiated me into the world of music when they took me to my first piano lesson. I was five years old, and the flow of music has not once ceased within me since that day. I must credit my parents with most of the efforts behind all of my accom- plishments, with the exception of my instructors. I cannot thank them enough for their continuous concern for my musical advance- ment, even at those times when their vigorous enthusiasm was rather unwelcomely received. 292 The Musical Quarterly

I participated in musical activities and events during my kinder- garten year, including my first piano recital and some radio programs. The following year I was admitted to the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Seoul, Korea. In my three years there, this school taught me the jubilance and the excitement of winning my first piano com- petition, which occurred during the first year. It taught me the end- less devotion, determination, and time that one must sacrifice in order to make this winning possible and worthwhile; it taught me the joy of growing up together with the people dear to me, while gradually unveiling the secret behind this maturing by broadening my vision of the world around me through intellectual enrichment. Finally, this school furnished me with an invaluable opportunity to orient myself with the people of other nations who were attending the International School located on the same campus. Although I did not speak English or any other foreign language at the time, I nevertheless learned of the equality of all human races despite their appearance, nationality, or beliefs, and learned to respect the integrity of a human being and the difference between personal integrity and conceit. My parents did not inform me of their plan to emigrate until practically the last minute. I assume it was partly because our family was plagued by cancer and everyone's mind was preoccupied with surviving the present rather than anticipating the future. The disease penetrated my father's bloodstream shortly before our scheduled departure for the States. But he miraculously recovered, or so we thought, and the whole family safely flew over to the other side of the globe. The new environment, atmosphere, and acquaintances expedited the restoration of our moral state. With the exception of my father, the whole family confronted the major task of learning a new language, in addition to familiarizing ourselves with new ways of living. A refreshing change of pace was what everyone desperately yearned for and that is precisely what we found.

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossedto me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Emma Lazarus, "The New Colossus" Three Points of View 293

This poem perfectly described our arrival into this magnificent "melting pot," the place where I formulated new goals and where they materialized. As I gaze back over the six and a half years that I have lived here, I can only say that I was fortunate to have met such beautiful people and, astonishingly, so many of them. Mrs. Frances Barnes was the first, a tremendous lady with a seemingly perpetual source of energy, and a widow of a once wonderful minister. She devoted much of her time to us and later provided immeasurable strength and support, especially to my mother, when my father passed away a year after our arrival. The one person that opened up many doors for me both in musical and academic studies is Mrs. Margaret Freudenberger, form- er principal of Beechfield Elementary School. She displayed great interest in my musical ability and arranged an audition for me at the Preparatory Department of the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore. In the fall of 1972, the year we arrived in America, I was accepted and admitted to the Peabody Institute. Later, when I fin- ished at the Beechfield Elementary School, she benevolently brought me to the Trinity Middle School in Inchester, Maryland, which I attended before entering the Notre Dame Preparatory School in Baltimore. During my six years at Peabody, my musical language has become increasingly fluent and has begun to shape its own style of expression through different forms. I became exposed to a number of prominent musicians who have guided me until this day. They have comforted me during times of hardship and laughed with me in great exulta- tion; and most of all, they have helped me discover who I am, where I stand, and what I can contribute to this world, not only through music, but through my whole spiritual, intellectual, and physical being. Of course, the search has not ended yet - it has merely seen its beginning -but these people have started laying down a strong foundation within me upon which I can sedulously construct the dream of my dreams. All my concentration was centered on the piano until about five years ago when a "new" aspect of music was revealed to me by the members of the Musicianship Department of the Peabody Prepara- tory. I desired to produce something creative and tangible that solely represented me and no one else. I had been thoroughly con- 294 The Musical Quarterly tent to re-create the moods and effects that other composers had designed for the performers to enact, yet that was not sufficient for my curious, inquisitive nature. I searched for ways to climb over to the other side of the fence not only to perform, but also to create the materials to perform with. I suppose I was longing to become self-supporting, independent. The death of my father had affected me a great deal in creating this desire to be self-expressive and to convey my emotions to others. This is how it all began for me. I felt rather uneasy at first having suddenly discovered this in- credible tool which I had unknowingly been searching for. I remem- ber my Perfect Fifths piece, which was the product of my initial attempt at composing. I created symbols, rather than notating in the conventional way, which represented certain patterns or groups of notes. My second piece, Perfect Fourths, was also encoded with signs only decipherable by me. When I began to elaborate my pieces into more complex forms, however, the use of codes and symbols proved impractical and even more time-consuming than using the conventional methods of notation. I was about ten years old then, and at the age of thirteen I won my first national prize in the Student Com- position Contest sponsored by the Music Teachers National Associ- ation with a Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, Cello, and Piano, which I had written during the previous summer. Winning injected me with a dose of courage to continue composing. I nevertheless felt very much like a neophyte, which I truly was then and most certainly am now, and was unsure of how it had occurred, where it was coming from, and where it was headed. I have gained more control over what I desire to express since that beginning. Being one of eight winners in the Broadcast Music Inc. Student Composers Contest this past spring reinforced my determination to pour my energy into it. But my ultimate goals of achiev- ing total precision and perfection are still far out of reach. Perhaps there is no such thing as perfection; I do not know. Whatever seems to be gravitating me to the field of composing I hope will never lose its power. In the meantime, the performing side of myself had somewhat sacrificed itself for the benefit of the other. If I had my way, I would try to become both a composer and a performer, in order to bring about a state of harmonious existence of the two within me. After all, composing is a way of transforming the introvert in me into an Three Points of View 295 extrovert, and performing is the means of realizing this transforma- tion. I have been a selfish person in many respects and this exempli- fies my selfishness. Perhaps it is not the selfishness but indecisiveness that is causing this division of interest. I cannot determine, for I am at present passing through a period of rapid changes and am only on the brink of seeing and experiencing the givings and misgivings of life. I wish to record my whole life through composing and performing, to share my inner thoughts and feelings of gratitude to those who will have diligently devoted their minds and hearts in producing Mindy Lee, a notable, I pray, composer and pianist. MINDY LEE (b. 1963)