376
PARTISAN REVIEW
Coppock:
Did you write it in chronological order?
Berger:
It's hard to know. I often forget how I've written a piece. Valery
has observed that you may start with a certain plan, but
mille
accidents
enter into the creative process, so that by the time you have
finished you're not quite sure whether those things that happened in
the course of it and diverted your direction were part of the original
plan or not. Some people are inspired by a good deal of advance
preparation and organization. I don't do that very much, even when
I write articles. I don't have a syllabus, and sometimes I suffer as a
result, because it means holding things in the head. But it has
advantages. I have nothing against other ways, as long as they don't
imprison you so that you cannot make discoveries as you go, because
sometimes, you know, you find precious things
in
the creative
process that you couldn't find
out
of it.
Coppock:
So the way you've gone about writing pieces has remained
the same?
Berger:
That depends. A great deal of precomposition went into my
Chamber Concerto of 1960, and since I no longer feel comfortable
with that sort of thing, I spent a considerable part of the summer of
1978 revising it. The twelve pitch classes each have a different fixed
registral position in each section, covering a wide range and provid–
ing the equivalent of a harmonic background. The twelve pitch
classes are also used in the foreground in more normal serial order,
without fixed register. I worked out a scheme for pushing the pitches
around registrally in the background, but I was more concerned that
they move around than with
how
they moved around, so that
graphic and numerical symmetries sufficed to build in what was,
from the point of view of the "heard," an essentially random
element. The aim of the revisions was to replace those precomposi–
tionally determined sonorities that displeased me. I 'm pleased with
the revisions, but I do not regret the way I worked on the piece
originally. Despite the random elements, in my mind the approach
represented a nod to the tendencies evolving around Princeton,
which excited me at the time. By training myself to use register more
deliberately, it became, in subsequent pieces (the Septet, the Five
Pieces for Piano), more "intuitive"-an epithet I use with the
understanding that there are "logical intuitions," and that you need
not be acting blindly when you fail to spell out
to
yourself what it is
you are doing as you go along. The procedure is no different from
what it was in my so-called neoclassic music. The originally sys–
tematic planning of the sonorities in the Chamber Concerto still has
