This section is named after what has become a notorious metonymy of my artistic failure. The actual green notebook has been lost and recovered dozens of times, and now, it has finally resurfaced and is safe with me until my home burns down. My sincerest apologies to B--, who is not gone. See additional Green Notebook pieces.
There is an aleatory (directed by chance) aspect to most of my earlier compositions. But unlike Cage, I didn't seek to eliminate the presence of the composer in the art. Instead, the artist was present in the limitation of the aleatory design.
The following are a couple examples of compositions in which I focused my intent on the setting of a piece of music, letting the rest fall to chance.
Playful Puppies entails putting a recording device in some container that playful puppies would want to use as a toy. Now that I think of it, it seems it would be better to put a tape recorder in a paper bag, maybe with other things in it, and let a cat play with it.
In the Water compositions, the recording device is placed in some wet area. I put a recorder in a plastic bag out in the rain. It doesn't sound a thing like rain on a roof or anywhere else you might hear rain. I think it would be good to layer it against a more formal composition. I also thought of putting a recorder in a washing machine, but didn't trust the durability of any waterproof bag. (Why didn't the dryer occur to me?)
These pieces are very easy to compose and can be fun to perform. All that is required is that the notation and description for performance is vague enough to require the performers to almost recompose the work, and if multiple performers are working off the same script, the variation can be amusing.
Scavenger Hunt is just that. Various parties go out and record certain noises, after each party is given the same list. Descriptions of noises can vary in specificity, like "car honk" versus "Don't sweat the small stuff." You can add another layer of aleatority by randomly selecting phrases from other media. It might be good to include some rules, such as requiring that the noises aren't directly performed by any of the members, and that the interpretations have to be justifiable. In the end, all collections would be recorded together.
I actually performed (or had others perform) Koumiss in May of 1999, and contrary to G----- M----' doubts, it went even better than I'd hoped, without having to sabotage its integrity. This piece, like others I'm fond of, calls for the source of aleatory differentiation to be the unforeseeable consequences of intended behavior, rather than the use of aleatory instruments, like dice and the lot. It calls for hiding instructions around a stage, and giving performers instructions to find "the object", at which point the performance ends, but they must also follow the instructions of any other slips of paper they encounter. Performers are led to believe that the object is a slip of paper, but in fact, it can be anything, or nothing at all--do you think that's a clever allegory?