ABSTRACT
What was your first music like? It was mathematical. I tried to find a new way of putting sounds together.
Unfortunately, I don’t have either the sketches or any clearer idea about the music than that. The results were so unmusical, from my then point of view, that I threw them away. Later, when I got to California, I began an entirely different way of composing, which was through improvisation, and improvisation in relation to texts: Greek, experimental writing from transition magazine, Gertrude Stein, and Aeschylus. Then, becoming, through Richard Buhlig and others, aware of my disconnection with musical technique or theory, I began studying the books of Ebenezer Prout. I went through them as though I had a teacher, and did all the exercises-in harmony, primarily. I don’t think I did counterpoint. It was later, with Schoenberg, that I studied that.—William Duckworth (1985)
Have you ever worked with serial composition methods? Yes, in my very earliest works. That was why I studied with Schoenberg.
