Alan asks some questions, and I hope he will consider some alternatives to
the possibilities he lists.

There is an option between feeling and faking - recalling.  When a composer
writes a passage which is genuinely sorrowful, it will often recall sorrow
to mind, and cause the welling up of a tear where there was none.  After
all, the purpose of composing is to organise, and organise the mind and
emotions of those who will touch that music above all else.  The composer
is not writing a letter in most cases, instead there is the moment of
feeling, and only later does the means to cast that feeling in music become
possible.  The composer knows that he has suceded if the music recalls the
moment that gave rise to it.

This same process is true of the actor: he need not be in the character's
emotional state, but if he has experienced it, then all that is needed is
to conjure it from before.  And in doing so transport himself to that
moment.  He does nto feel as he did before, because in recalling, he may
inflect it, as we might wish to change a nightmare as we are having it.
The actor is the waking man altering what in morning light seems a dream.
Thus Shakespeare tells us the stage is life - life as it would be lived if
we could treat reality as we do our night time lives.

- - -

Speak memory, though your voice is fading.

When a composer works, he concentrates on the crafting, or on the
transference of idea to craft.  In the wake of creation he often finds he
has churned up moments which he had lost contact with, though they were
within him.

When composing the aurora from what would become a String Quartet in Ab,
tears found themselves streaking down my cheeks - so clearly had it called
to mind a sunrise some years before where someone exited my life never to
reenter.

Was I sad at the time? Not in the same sense.

This role of memory in music, where a moment is in search of music to be
interlocked with, has not been lost on composers - especially in the 19th
century.  If language is what we remember with - it is music that is the
language of recalling it to mind.  It is capable of doing so without the
clumsy devices of invoking, or recitation of details, it needs no frame to
flash back, nor other turning, instantaneously the past flowers into the
present.

The actor and the composer create a montage of recall, each mercurially
leading into the next.  And so assemble a story which is as it was lived,
but in a way that is to living as waking is to dreaming.

Stirling Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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