“Dear dedicated (to the cause) Mr. Varga”—Lukas Foss wrote me on an aerogram, on June 1, 1979 (see fig. 5). “And thank you for your persistence.” Yes, I was persistent, otherwise the three-questions book would never have come into being. And with Lukas Foss I needed to be stubborn, for he was so busy conducting that while at home, he never had any time to write. He continued to send me aerograms, scribbled onboard planes that were taking him to yet another concert, or in hotel rooms. On June 1, 1979, he was en route to South Korea; in 1982 when he did eventually reply to my questions, he happened to be in the Embassy Hotel in Kansas City. “I came across your letter of September 30,” he wrote me on November 22, “just as I left for a tour. Not wishing to keep you waiting for an answer, allow me to jot down a few sentences in reply.”

Here are his “loose, improvised jottings”:

I.

No—I have never had Lutosławski’s experience—or, to put it another way—that is the experience I have whenever I hear other music. If it is music I love, it gives me ideas: how to apply some of my own ideas to what I have just heard. It is like a love-relationship. You immerse yourself in a love and you find yourself.

In my Baroque Variations—notably No. 2, the Scarlatti one (Nonesuch record)—I turn other music into dreams of mine.

When I listen to music I do not care for (sometimes my colleagues’) I say to myself: “wait a moment—why didn’t he do it this way, or that way, it could have been wonderful”—then I feel that I have discovered something like a scientist who thinks of a “better way” (to solve a problem).

II.

Sounds, noises (such as “white noise” that has no “human” associations) mean nothing to me. Music is sound + noises, but it is not born out of sounds and noises, it is born out of silence. It is sounds and noises that have meaning. Would meaningless chatter suggest a poem to a poet? No. Sounds with meaning don’t come from sounds void of meaning.