Roger Reynolds (Ed.) Generation: The University Inter-Arts Magazine, The University of Michigan: The Board in Control of Student Publications,
An Interview With John Cage . . . Roger Reynolds
"John Cage has been for many years America's most original and controversial composer. His activities have aroused outrage and hilarity, but rarely received careful attention. Few could read the following interview with whole-hearted enthusiasm, but just as few could remain unaffected by the ideas expressed there. Mr. Cage is one of those rare men who can cause us to take a more careful look at aspects of our life which are regularly taken as matters of course.
"It is not surprising that his ideas should have proved so influential in the contemporary European musical scene. There the stake in tradition is very high and theories advocating the abandonment of expressivity and the artist's total abdication of control are almost unbearably repugnant. Of course, many of the younger European composers have found these ideas useful for their iconoclastic needs.
"In America, our polyglot and newly dawning cultural awareness has allowed a tradition of dissent, the negation of academic procedures, and forthright individualism to be more easily harbored. Partially because of this permissiveness by default, however, few persons outside of New York City have been strongly affected by Cage's developing perspective. It should be noted that those in New York represent the limited number who have had direct contact with this very remarkable man.
"The following interview was made while Mr. Cage was in Ann Arbor in early December of 1961. He and pianist David Tudor accompanied a dance program by the Merce Cunningham group presented by The Dramatic Arts Center. The questions are primarily based on material taken from Cage's new book Silence. This volume of collected essays and lectures provides an absorbing and significant picture of Mr. Cage's chronology. They are based not always on the editor's personal position with regard to Mr. Cage but on perspectives which he hopes will be representative of various significant views. The numbers in brackets which occur periodically in the text refer to relevant page numbers in the book. p. 39
An Interview with John Cage on the Occasion of the Publication of Silence. Questions by Roger Reynolds
Roger Reynolds: Would you say something about your early musical training and tastes? I was amused to read that, at one time, you had hoped to devote your life to playing the works of Grieg. [115]
John Cage: My first experience with music was through neighborhood piano teachers, and particularly my Aunt Phoebe. She said of the work of Bach and Beethoven that it couldn't possibly interest me, she herself being devoted to the music of the nineteenth century. She introduced me to Moszkowski and what you might call the piano music the whole world loves to play. In that volume, it seemed to me that the works of Grieg were more interesting than the others.
RR: You remark in 45' For A Speaker [163] that "when [you] first tossed coins [you] sometimes though: I hope such and such will turn up,' and elsewhere in the same place [170] that "an error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality." Are you still troubled by practical difficulties in implementing your philosophical positions?
JC: I find that question a little difficult to deal with.
When I first made the transition from a continuity that I was directing, as it were, to one which I wasn't directing, I still had a certain knowledge of the possibilities. And so, seeing that there were some that would be pleasing, I did, at first, wish that they would come up, rather than the ones I didn't know were pleasing. What actually happened was that when things happened that were not in line with my views as to what would be pleasing, I discovered that they altered my awareness. That is to say, I saw that things which I didn't think would be pleasing were in fact pleasing, and so my views gradually changed from particular ideas as to what would be pleasing, toward no ideas as to what would be pleasing. Therefore, when you ask at the end, do I "have difficulty in implementing" my philosophical positions: I don't try to have any of those things.
In other words, I try, rather, to keep my curiosity and my awareness to what's happening open, and I try to arrange my composing means so that I won't have any knowledge of what might happen. And that, by the way, is what you might call the technical difference between indeterminacy and chance operations. In the case of chance operations, one know more or less the elements of the universe with which one is dealing, whereas in indeterminacy, I like to think (and perhaps I fool myself and pull the wool over my eyes) that I'm outside the circle of a known universe, and dealing with things that I literally don't know anything about.
RR: What do you thing about the terms "meaning' and "symbolism" in connection with Art?
JC: Well . . .
About symbolism: I have never particularly liked it.
I'm beginning to have a different view of it. I don't like it when it is a one to one relationship. That is to say, that a particular thing is a symbol of a particular other thing. But if each thing in the world can be seen as a symbol of every other thing in the world, then I do like it.
As for meaning, I'm afraid that word means how one's experience affects a given individual with respect to his faculty of observing relationships. I think that is a rather private matter, and I often refer, in this case, to the title of Pirandello's play, Right You Are, If You Think You Are.
RR: Would you comment on your statement in Silence: "when we separate music from life, what we get is art."
JC: I cite in [Silence] the hexagram on grace in the Chinese book, the I Ching. That is generally held to be the hexagram on Art, and Art is viewed there as a light shining on top of a mountain, illuminating, to a certain extent, the surrounding darkness. That would place Art in a position where it penetrated, to a certain extent, life. Now if you separate the two, let us say, if you deal with this light - this thing that is better than the darkness or lighter than the darkness - and call that Art . . . then all you have is that lightness. Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness [45 - 46], because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place; in the darkness, or as they said in Christianity, "the dark night of the soul." It is into those situations that Art must penetrate, and then it won't be just Art, but will be useful to our lives.
RR: In Lecture on Something [139] you write that "when we remove the world from our shoulders, we notice it doesn't drop. Where is the responsibility? Responsibility is to oneself which is to say the calm acceptance of whatever responsibility to others and things comes along." Has not man traditionally operated on the assumption that his responsibility was to force Nature or life to conform to his needs?
JC: Not man in general, but man as European. Man as Asiatic had a different view, which I refer to several times in the book. and in particular to that lecture by Fuller in which he points out that, just as if setting out from Asia to Europe you have to go against the wind, but setting out from Asia to America you go with the wind, so the philosophies that grow up in Europe are in opposition to Nature, and toward the control of Nature. Whereas, the philosophies that grow up in Asia and increasingly so toward the Far East, are concerned with the acceptance of Nature, not its control. These two things meet in America, and so it is possible for us, I think, as Americans, more than it is possible for Europeans, to see the possibility of what you might call irresponsibility.
RR: I notice that, at one time [30], you found the sounds of Beethoven, Italian bel canto, jazz, and the vibraphone distasteful, but that you had come to terms with all excepting the vibraphone. What is the present state of your relation to the vibraphone?
JC: I can see perfectly well that, if I like the vibraphone, the world would be more open to me.
In the same way that if I liked Muzak, which I also don't like, the world would be more open to me.
I intend to work on it.
The simplest thing for me to do in order to come to terms with both those things would be to use them in my work, and this was, I believe, how so-called primitive people dealt with animals which frightened them.
RR: In spite of some of the charges which have hurled at you, it seems that your activities could be interpreted as a battle against the superficial: a reaction against society which seems bent on increasing its insulation from direct experience and involvement in life.
JC: I don't hear that as a question.
RR: Well, it's perhaps a proposal . . . for comment . . .
JC: On what aspect?
RR: The fact of lessening involvement in the part of people with life.
JC: Yes, maybe that will act as an answer. Nowadays more and more people are beginning to protest against society. Is that what you're talking about?
RR: No, not exactly . . .
JC: Or an objection to what you call the superficiality of so much of our society . . .
Well, I have decided that it is frequently difficult to know how to steer one's course in social situations; and I've decided to use this as a kind of compass. To make affirmative actions and not to make what I call negative, or, you might say, critical or polemical action, even when the thing being criticized or fought against is patently evil. In other words, I shall not attack the evil, but rather promote what seems to me to be what I call affirmative.
RR: What I had in mind with this question was to get at what seems to me to be true of your work. That is, although there are many uninformed and unthinking criticisms and comments about what people think your work does - not what you intend it to do - it could be viewed as a positive attempt to get at the rejection of experience.
JC: Now I understand a little better. Let me put it this way, and it's in direct relation to the book [Silence]. I've had more response from the book than I've ever had from the publication of a record, the publication of music, the giving of a concert, the giving of a lecture or anything. Many, many people write or telephone to say that they have responded to a particular part of the book. It puzzled me at first - why they should respond more to a book than to any other action - and then it occurred to me that they are, in a sense, performers when they read. That is to say, they engage in an activity of their own, and so have a direct experience.
Most people mistakenly think that when they hear a piece of music, that they're not doing anything, but that something is being done to them. Now this is not true, and we must arrange our music, we must arrange our Art, we must arrange everything, I believe, so that people realize that they themselves are doing it, and not that something is being done to them.
RR: I notice, in that connection, that you refer somewhere to your compositions as "occasions for experience" involving the eyes as well as the ears.
While noting the influence that Zen has had on you, in the foreword to Silence, you absolve it of responsibility for your activities. This was interesting, and brought to mind the disparities between the concept of Art in societies influenced by Zen, and your views. Would you comment on which aspects of Zen you find stimulating and acceptable, and which are not useful?
I notice, for example, that several times in the book you mention that the I Ching expresses a certain view with which you cannot agree.
JC: That is rather difficult for me to answer because it's a process that I'm involved in continually. What I do, and what I have done since about 1947 when I got involved with Oriental philosophy is this: I try to see how something I read or something I experience works outside of its context (in, say, the context of music) and then, again, in the context of daily life. If I can see that it works, then a kind of thing you might call acceptance goes on. But if it doesn't work somewhere . . . it seems to me that there must have crept in some bug. Then I will lay it aside, become skeptical about it, and try to examine it further.
One can't do this all the time but it's a useful process. For instance, if, in our dealings with our composition of music, we find that it distorts our daily life, then there must be something wrong with the way we're composing, it seems to me. Whereas, if the way we compose is applicable to our daily life, and changes it, then it seems to me that there is something useful in the way we're composing music.
RR: Which is the most important element of music?
JC: The element of time.
RR: I was hoping that you would talk a little about your provocative ideas on this subject.
JC: My reasons [for believing that time is the most important], I have often given; namely, that if you take what the Europeans call the various parameters of sound, you find that only one of them exists in what we call silence and that is time. Nevertheless, our views of time are suffering alteration, so that it is almost becoming less tangible than it was.
RR: Would you elaborate?
JC: Well as I say somewhere in the book [38 - 40] we not only can go forward in time but we are able to go backwards in time. We must find some way to be able to go in all directions. Or in the work, for instance, of Christian Wolff, a thing which is difficult to rationally conceive takes place, namely, zero time.
You see, if music is conceived as an object, then it has a beginning, middle, and end, and one can feel rather confident when he makes measurements of the time. But when it [music] is process, those measurements become less meaningful, and the process itself, involving if if happened to, the idea of Zero Time (that is to say no time at all), becomes mysterious and therefore eminently useful.
RR: You have said that [62] "normally the choice of sounds is determined by what is pleasing and attractive to the ear: delight in the giving or receiving of pain being an indication of sickness." You also mention that "when the war came along, [you] decided to use only quiet sounds," because, "there seemed to [you] to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society." Do you still hold these views, and, if so, what about the subjective and purposeful nature of such choice?
JC: Both of those views were preliminary to my present point of view, which brings it about that I use, frequently, very loud sounds now. Even the view expressed about the giving of pain and pleasure . . . I don't agree with that any longer. We do give and receive pain and we might as well recognize the fact.
RR: A question that has often been asked of you, and one to which you give interesting answers is: What is the purpose of writing music?
JC: -
RR: Perhaps it should be phrased, what is your purpose in writing music now?
JC: I frequently say that I don't have any purposes, and that I'm dealing with sounds, but that's obviously not the case.
On the other hand it is.
That is to say, that I believe that by eliminating purpose, what I call awareness increases. Therefore my purpose is to remove purpose.
It's very simple to show, and we've already talked about it. If I have a particular purpose, and then a series of actions come about, and all I get is an approximation of my purpose, then nothing but a sort of compromise or disappointment can take place. And perhaps, that still takes place when my purpose is to remove purpose, namely, I see that I haven't really done it. But at least I'm going along in that general direction.
RR: What is an experimental act, and how does it relate to so called experimental music?
JC: Experimental music can have many definitions [17& 13], but I use word experimental to mean making an action the outcome of which is not foreseen.
RR: In your lecture Experimental Music [15] you answer a question concerning the impracticability of performing your music by saying: "Composing's one thing, performing's another, and listening's a third. What can they have to do with one another?" It would seem that they are very intimately connected.
JC: We normally think that the composer makes something, the performer is faithful to it, and that the business of the listener is to understand it. Yet the act of listening is clearly not the same as the act of performing, nor is either one of them the same as the act of composing. I have found that by saying that they have nothing to do with one another, that each one of those activities can become more centered in itself, and so more open to its natural experience. Referring to what we said earlier, about people generally thinking that something is being done to them, well, when they listen, they think that the composer, through the performer, has done something to them, forgetting that they are doing it themselves.
RR: Since it would seem that human beings have uniquely developed capacities for expressiveness (no matter how crude they may sometimes seem to us to be), how can you advocate abandoning expressivity in music?
JC: Coming back to what we said about symbolism, everything is expressive. But what it expresses grows up in each person who has the experience. If the person performs in such a way that the events he brings into existence are free, completely around them, to be viewed in any way, then the optimum of a desirable situation seems to me to have arisen. Whereas, if in his expressivity, he forces the viewer to respond in a particular way, then he has cramped and narrowed the situation of possibilities.
RR: Then the sounds the performer makes should be free of intention in order to allow them . . .
JC: . . . to be fully expressive!
RR: A key term which appears in many of your writings is "Theater." What does "theater" imply to you?
JC: It simply means the use of all one's senses. But the senses we use primarily are seeing and hearing. Theater is distinct from music in that it calls seeing strongly into play with hearing.
RR: In other words, physical actions in space take on a significance equal to that of sounds in the air.
JC: Yes.
RR: Do you think that lack of theater may be partially responsible for some of the negative responses to electronic music?
JC: Definitely: I think that the most important thing to do with electronic music now is to somehow make it theatrical, and not through such means as turning the lights out, but rather through introducing live performance elements.
That is to say, people actually doing things.
RR: Do you think perhaps a degree of encroachment on the traditionally ritualistic atmosphere of public concerts would help? That is, should listeners not be artificially separated from sound sources by stereotyped seating arrangements, stages, formal clothing, and so on?
JC: That too. But I also mean the actual, visible manipulation of the machines, to begin with; the distinct giving to the audience of the impression that something is happening then which is unique to that particular experience. If the audience, if any of us, feel that what is being played at that time can be played at any other time, and result in the same experience, then a kind of deadliness falls over everyone.
RR: This strikes me as being the case in traditional concert programs such as those given by the Choral Union Series here in Ann Arbor. When you can hear Beethoven'sFifth Symphony on any one of forty different recordings, how strong is the need to listen carefully at a concert? Urgency is missing because the sound of a familiar piece of music is such a relatively common experience.
JC: In this connection, David Tudor and I were discussing on our way from New York, the possibility of his resolving not to make any records in the future, unless they result in actions which could not possibly be made otherwise. I don't think that this would be a full answer to the problem, but at least it would be an answer to the problem as it confronts him, in his musical life; namely, he is frequently asked to make records, and now he could refuse to make them.
RR: Yes, though such a resolve could be hard on those of us who do not live in New York.
JC: But you see through the kind of activity that you are making here in Ann Arbor, the deficit of music that records have seemed to supply is being made live here, through the concerts that you give;* and if this will spring up over the whole country or even just what you're doing here - then there will be inevitably an exchange of live music, in the places where it is produced. The more people see the liveliness of this, the more it will crop up in other places. This is, again, what I refer to as affirmative action.
*[Ed. Note: Mr. Cage refers here to the ONCE festival of contemporary music, sponsored by the Dramatic Arts Center and given each winter in Ann Arbor.]
RR: In a lecture in 1937 [5], you said, "the principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past." You went on to identify this connection as "the principle of organization, or man's common ability to think." Later [35] you associate form with the "morphology of a continuity" and "expressive content." Would you trace your developing view of form?
JC: I'm now more involved in disorganization and a state of mind which in Zen is called no-mindedness.
Those statements, given in 1937, are given as a sort of land mark to let the reader know from where I set out. There are certain things to that lecture that I would agree with and some that I would not. I imagine that when I used the word form then, that I meant what I later called structure (the divisibility of a whole into parts). Later I used form in the same sense that people generally use the word content (that aspect of composition which is best able to be free, spontaneous, heartfelt, and so on).
That attitude towards form is sort of in the middle, between my present thought and my early thought. Now I don't bother to use the word form, since I am involved in making processes, the nature of which I don't foresee. How can I speak of form?
[Ed. Note: see answer to question on the nature of composition.]
RR: A chronological sampling of your work would seem to indicate that each successive composition implements a new idea. That is, instead of a fresh manipulation or reordering of accepted terms within a style, you manipulate styles or ideas within a developing philosophical view.
JC: I don't understand the question.
RR: Most composers operate within a certain style or idiom, and they have set materials which they manipulate. Their compositions, each one after the other, become no more, nor less, than a careful new ordering of the same factors. It has seemed to me in looking at your activities chronologically that your works evince a new manipulation of ideas on a level abstracted from things. Each new piece puts into effect a new manifestation of style or idea in some way, and that the continuity in your work is a developing view of desirable actions.
JC: Oh, yes. I'm devoted to the principle of originality. Not originality in the egoistic sense, but originality in the sense of doing something which is necessary to do. Now, obviously, the things that it is necessary to do are not the things that have been done, but the ones that have not yet been done. This applies not only to other people's work, but seriously to my own work; that is to say, if I have done something, then I consider it my business not to do that, but to find what must be done next.
RR: Why are you in the habit of presenting your lectures in some unusual manner? As an example, in the extremely repetitious Lecture On Nothing, you periodically say, "if anybody is sleepy let him go to sleep."
JC: If a lecture is informative, then people can easily thing that something is being done to them, and that they don't need to do anything about it except receive. Whereas, if I give a lecture in such a way that it is not clear what is being given, then people have to do something about it.
RR: In the lecture Composition As Process, you state that, around 1950, you viewed composition as "an activity integrating the opposites, the rational and the irrational, bringing about, ideally, a freely moving continuity within a strict division of parts, the sound, their combinations and succession being logically related or arbitrarily chosen." Later you refer to composition [71] as involving processes not objects. Would you comment on how your view has altered during the last few years?
JC: Yes. It is still involved with process and not with object. The difference is specifically the difference say, between an ash tray and the whole room. Ash tray can be seen as having beginning and end, and you can concentrate on it. But when you begin to experience the whole room - not object, but many things - then: where is the beginning? where is the middle? where is the end? It is clearly a question not of an object but rather of a process, and finally, that process has to be seen as subjective to each individual.
RR: It is the process of one's observation, not the physical fact . . .
JC: Yes, and that is why I want to get it so that people realize that they themselves are doing their experience, and that it's not being done to them.
Then coming back to that question on form. I thought of something else to say. When I say that, "I am not interested in form," or "how can I use the word form,I have to ask another question, namely, where do we see any formlessness? Particularly nowadays with telescopes, with microscopes, etc., as one of my painter friends, Jasper Johns, says, "the world is very busy."
Form everywhere.
RR: What relation has "cause and effect" to your work?
JC: That, again, is like the attitude toward symbol; rather than see that one thing has a given effect, we want to see that one thing has all effects.
RR: The notion of causality has been much too simple in the past, there is such a multitude of causes and effects, and their interrelationships are so complex . . .
JC: That is the real situation: that everything causes everything else. In other words, it is much more complicated than our scientists like to admit.
RR: For example, the development of relativity has put Newton's laws in an unexpected perspective. One discovers that the neat mottos which we have for dealing with life are often inaccurate.
JC: And if I feel the weight, for instance, of my responsibility, then I'm simply ignorant of the effects of my actions, because they have effects which don't happen to cause me to think about them.
RR: Some composers recently have admitted a degree of chance to their compositions but have retained generally traditional methods by and large. You have noted that this practice reveals a "carelessness with regard to the outcome." [38] Would you elaborate on that comment?
JC: If one is making an object and then proceeds in an indeterminate fashion, to let happen what will, outside of one's control, then one is simply being careless about the making of that object.
RR: You don't think, then, that it is valid for a composer to wish that a certain aspect or section of his work will have a changing face while the general language and substance remains controlled?
JC: I think I know what you're referring to and it's a very popular field of activity among composers at the present time. That is to say, to have certain aspects of a composition controlled, if I understood you, and others uncontrolled. Well, what is maintained here is the concept of pairs of opposites; having black and white, as it were, and then composing with the play of these opposites. One can then engage in all of the games that academic composition has led us to know how to play. One can balance this with that, produce climaxes, and so on. I'm afraid all I can say is that it doesn't interest me.
It doesn't seem to me to radically change the situation from the familiar convention. It simply takes these new ways of working and consolidates them with the old knowledges, so that one remains at home with one's familiar ideas of the drama - of the play of the opposites.
So, one wouldn't have to change one's mind.
Whereas, I thing we are in a more urgent situation, where it is absolutely essential for us to change our minds fundamentally. And in this sense, I could be likened to a fundamentalist Protestant preacher.
Stockhausen has recently employed a system of composition which involves the selection of one technique at a time from a number of different ways of working, and an attempt to let any one of them move into play. This gives the impression of a rich reservoir of contemporary techniques, indeterminacy would play the part of one, and you could call on it, as it were, when you had some use for it. But, that doesn't require a change of mind from what one previously had, and so nothing fundamentally different is taking place. I think one could see it very clearly in terms of painting. You could have certain parts of canvas controlled and others quite chaotic, and so you would be able to play, as it were, in the same way in which you had played before. What we nee is a use our Art which alters our lives - is useful in our lives. We are familiar with those plays of balance, so they couldn't possibly do anything to us, no matter how novel they were than they already have done. "New wine in old bottles."
Robert Ashley: It seems to me that your influence on contemporary music, on "musicians," is such that the entire metaphor of music could change to such an extent that - time being uppermost as a definition of music - the ultimate result would be a music that wouldn't necessarily involve anything but the presence of people. That is, it seems to me that the most radical redefinition of music that I could think of would be one that defines "music" without reference to sound.
JC: Oh yes, I made some use of that in my silent piece [Ed. Note: Mr. Cage has written a piece which directs the performer to come on stage, seat himself at a piano for a specified time without engaging in any activity whatever. At the end of the designated time, the performer rises and leaves the room without having made any intentional sounds.]
RA: It doesn't strike me as being that.
JC: But that involves a number of people being together, and there are no special sounds.
RA: If our awareness of time increased to such a degree that it didn't require that we be informed of time through the medium of sound - if our awareness of sound became enlarged or changed to a really radical degree-then it's conceivable that we would do away with sound.
JC: But we can't. You see there are always sounds. [8]
RR: This has to do with the distinction that Mr. Cage has made between sound and silence: that the former consists of sounds that are intended, while the latter allows the sound which occurs unbidden in the environment to be heard.
JC: Yes.
RA: Well . . .
Let me put it this way. We might have a piece from which one participant would come, and, upon being questioned, would say that the occasion was marked by certain sounds. Another person might say that he didn't remember any sounds. There was something else. But they both would agree that a performance of music had taken place.
RR: This seems to have more to do with what we've discussed as theatre.
RA: It seems that the use of 'theater' in this connection is a sort of transitional definition, to condition people to other possibilities.
JC: And that the experience itself become markedly more subjective.
RA: Markedly more subjective and particularly involved with a sort of indefinable sense of where your time information was coming from.
JC: Exactly.
RR: This would certainly take place if one could do away with the obvious hierarchy of importances which is usually intended when you come to a musical experience. If the experience is unpurposeful, and undirected, then response becomes totally a question of the listener's individual's individual sensitivities and conditioning.
JC: La Monte Young is doing something quite different from what I am doing, and it strikes me as being very important. Through the few pieces of his I've heard, I've had, actually, utterly different experiences of listening than I've had with any other music. He is able either through the repetition of a single sound or through the continued performance of a single sound for a period like twenty minutes, to bring it about that after, say, five minutes, I discover that what I have all along been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of variety. I find his work remarkable almost in the same sense that the change in experience of seeing is when you look through a microscope. You see that there is something other than what you thought there was.
On the other hand, La Monte Young's music can be heard by Europeans as being European. for example, take the repetition of a tone cluster or a single sound at a seemingly constant amplitude over, say, a ten minute period. The European listener is able to think, "well that is what we've always had, minus all the elements of variation." So they imagine, you see, that something is being done to them, namely a simplification of what they're familiar with. My response is not that he is doing something to me, but that I am able to hear differently than I ever heard.
RR: Do you think that America has yet begun to further its most striking and characteristic resource which you summarize as [74] "its capacity to break easily with tradition, to move easily into the air, its capacity for the unforeseen, its capacity for experimentation." Are not some Europeans capitalizing on a limited exploration of what is a fundamentally American impulse?
JC: There are two questions: we are clearly gong to have to have a great deal of lively activity in America, and already are having it. And I also agree that Europeans will be capitalizing on it.
What I hope is that the Europeans will become more American."