Take a risk.
Take at least one risk every day.
Otherwise your work will be ordinary; correct.
When you take a risk, you risk doing something very special.

Watch your thoughts. Pay attention to the ones that surprise you.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, women wore tight corsets to make them pretty. They started training the tiny waists by 11 or 12. Young women of wealth could have their lower ribs surgically removed for an even tinier middle. The liver and spleen were pushed up. The compressed lungs could scarcely function. What could a a lady do but faint?

I once read an article on women's fashions at the turn of the century. In the 1890s women wore long skirts that touched the ground on all sides and trailed in the back. The left hand was kept busy holding them up out of the dirt and managing them stepping up onto the streetcar. The shorter skirts that followed gave women a freer use of their legs. At the same time, they set free the left hand.

Now this is the question I would ask: What did they do with the left hand then?

How do we get an idea? People are always asking me how I got started as a publisher. How did I get the idea. These past months, packing up materials for my archives, I have thought about this question a lot. Where did the idea come from?

When we look at the way the history of ideas is organized, it follows a kind of ''evolution" model. Ideas develop out of other ideas. When they lose their support, they change or die out.

Sometimes ideas happen that way. We get ideas from other ideas. We might add to them, develop them, or apply them in a new way.

But sometimes we can't explain how we got them, or where they came from. They just appear in our minds as if they were waiting out there in the air somewhere. You might call this the "spontaneous generation" model.

We no longer believe, as they did in the days before Darwin, that frogs are born from pond water, or that mice spring to life from dirt or old rags. But in the world of ideas it can happen like thatÑsuddenly an idea is in us, and it surprises us.

How do we get an idea? This is still an unanswerable question.

I can tell you where I got the idea to start a publishing house for contemporary music. I got the idea in the bathtub.

It happens this way a lot. Good ideas come from the tub. And other times of deep relaxation. When we are undisturbed, and open. We are relaxed, daydreaming perhaps, and in pops an idea. Thinking harder seldom helps.

If a decision is a good one, there comes a time when a line is crossed, where the causes give way to necessity. The causes retreat into history, while necessity goes forward into commitment and purpose.

Again:

If a decision is a good one, there comes a time when a line is crossed, where the causes give way to necessity. The causes retreat into history, while necessity goes forward into commitment and purpose.

The causes retreat into history. The money, dies with time. Fashions fade away. What you do and what you make, remain.

I opened Smith Publications in 1974. In my first year of publishing I came to a kind of crossroads Ña little moment that put me to the test.

I received a request for a catalog. I discovered I had only one left, and the 1975's were not yet printed. I debated with myself whether to mail it out or save this last copy.

I mailed it out.

I am never bored. There is always something to hear; something to think about. My favorite sounds are the little unplanned sounds of the environment. I enjoy especially the little sounds of the night. At night the world gets larger. Sounds come from farther awayÑclear and fullbodied. At night I can hear train whistles across town. I can't hear them during the day even though I listen for them. I know from the schedule they go by. And so, in the world of the senses, trains come out at night, and rest during the day.

I have little interest in electronically processed sounds that stand for musical instruments. These planned sounds blot out the sounds I like. They are everywhere Ñin cars, in stores and shopping malls, office buildings and waiting rooms, the medical clinic, every eating spot. There's hardly a place you can go where you don't have to hear them. At convention centers and plush theaters, they follow you into the bathroom. You can't even P in peace.

I prefer the sounds of acoustic instruments. I want room for them. I have often wondered what it would be like to live, as our ancestors did, in a world without compulsory music Ñwhere music is when someone picks up an instrument and plays it. There would be less music And music would be loaded with intention and complexity.

I trust the materials in my archives will be preserved and protected. Even more, I want them to be used. In ways I could not have thought of. In ways that surprise me. It is my hope that these materials inspire new ideas and new compositions.

Take a bath.
Take a risk.
Liberate the left hand.
Ideas will come.