During the eight years of collecting material for this book (1978–85), it became something of an obsession for me to seize whatever opportunity presented itself to interview composers of international standing. I forget how I learned of Morton Feldman’s impending visit to Vienna. In any case, it proved quite easy to organize an appointment and I duly turned up in the Austrian cellist’s house where the composer was staying. I drove there from Budapest with the three questions and not much else on my mind.

For I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

By 1983 when Feldman and I met in a leafy suburb of Vienna, I had had some experience with interviewing composers; my conversations with Lutosławski, Xenakis, and Berio had already been published. But in their case, I had had no difficulty following their train of thought; I was at home with the way they reacted to my questions. Feldman, on the other hand, seemed to have come from another planet (as indeed Cage had done when I first met him in Warsaw in 1972). In replying, he would let his thoughts and associations roam freely—with me always behind, doing my best to keep pace. As you will see, at one point I gave up: for try as I might, I could detect no connection at all between what he was saying and my question that he was supposed to be answering. It turned out that he had forgotten all about it. (As I was to learn later, it was not unusual for him to let the thread drop.)