Here’s an anecdote to herald in 2011:
‘At one time Karlheinz [Stockhausen] and I would talk and exchange ideas. You know the story about the talk about singing? Well, he was writing a song for Cathy Berberian, who I later also wrote for, and he said, “if you were writing for a singer, would you write music, or would you write for the singer?” And I said, “I would write for the singer”, and he said, “well that’s the difference between us, because I would write music.” So then he wrote this song for Cathy, and he asked her to whistle. And she can’t whistle. So that’s the difference between us. Hmhmhmhm!’
— John Cage
FROM: Steve Sweeney Turner and John Cage, ‘John Cage’s Practical Utopias: John Cage in Conversation with Steve Sweeney Turner’, The Musical Times, cxxxi/1771 (September, 1990), p. 469.