some people take the step of asking people not to applaud. it becomes so much a reflex action that it tends to be essentialy meaningless. I went to a performance of beethoven 5 earlier in the week; the conductor/orchestra's interpretation of the symphony was extraordinarily violent and aggressive, and quite radical, I felt, but the polite applause gave you no sense of this. I more appropriate reaction I would think would have been stunned silence. Appreciation, letting the musicians know you liked what they played, is the rationale for applause, I guess, but that becomes a little meaningless when people clap, cheer, whoop and whistle seemingly whether they liked the music or not. What would the alternatives be though? Silence?

 Moondog reported this in a 1998 interview (www.furious. com/perfect/ moondog.htm, no longer on the Web):

"Overtone Tree [is] one of my symphonies that I've been working on for twenty years. I finally got it finished now. I've been doing a lot of other work, but this is a major work. I don't expect that it'll be ever played. It'll probably be buried with me. It's written for four conductors, one main conductor and three assistants, because at one time there may be as many as sixty or seventy parts going, and one conductor can't handle that. It's all counterpointal. So each conductor would have his own score and be in charge of a certain section of the orchestra. It's based on the first nine overtones, and I tried that as a theme in '73 on the northwest corner of 55th Street and Sixth Avenue. That's where I got the idea to use overtones as a theme. After I worked on it, I went to Europe. I was in Hamburg in '75 and I was working on the overtones, and I finally realized that I had something interesting here. It was a code. I didn't know it was a code, but I cracked the code and found out how to develop it. Ten years later, I found out what it was. I wasn't looking for a code. That code proves that not only whoever created the universe does exist, but he, I call him the mega-mind, wants us to know he exists. Within this code, it also proves that contraction must come before expansion. It also proves that a cause can become an effect and an effect can become a cause. It proves the two-directionality of time. It proves that the past is the future and the future is the past. All this flies in the face of what Hubble did, saying that there was a big bang and an expansion of the universe. His is a theory but mine is a fact. A fact incontrovertable, as I call it. They talked about these theories of mine on National Public Radio."