'The important thing is that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of experience - that there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake; secondly that a genuine problem develop within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth that he have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity."
'The new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct, more
immediate, more physical than anything that had existed heretofore,
said Feldman about the musical ideas to which he was inspired by his
first meeting with the new work of artists like Robert Rauschenberg,
Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston around 1950. The utopian ideal not to "compose" but to project sounds into time led Feldman - even before Cage and Earle Brown - to experiment with graphic notation.'
- Peter Niklas Wilson, excerpt In Search of Plasticity of Sound
'Projection II for flute, trumpet, violin and cello - one of the first graph pieces - was my first experience with this new thought. My desire here was not to 'compose,' but to project sounds into time, free from a compositional rhetoric that had no place here. In order not to involve the performer (i.e. myself) in memory (relationships), and because the sounds no longer had an inherent symbolic shape, I allowed for indeterminacies in regard to the pitch.'
- Morton Feldman, excerpt Give My Regards To Eighth Street