A nonlist friend of mine and I have been having an interchange about
music. I thought some of the ideas might be worth mentioning here.

Until Beethoven's time or shortly after, music was generally regarded as
a craft much like furniture making or even masonry although that may be
pushing it.  But the notion of "art" as being a means of expressing the
ineffable is Romantic.  Brahms would appeal to you more than the other
Romantics because he was always the craftsman.  He had perhaps more
affinity for Bach in this respect than even for Beethoven.  I think he
got that way more as he got older.  He was a bit more swashbuckling in
his youth.

The question remains, is there such a thing as inspiration, or is
inspiration just the high end of craft? Mussorgsky is a case in point.
Rimsky-Korsakov thought Mussorgsky had a lot of highly original ideas but
lacked the conservatory-style training (craft) to express them effectively.
So he took it upon himself to revise many of Mussorgsky's works--in some
cases adding his own music to them (the ending of "Night on Bald Mountain"
in the most familiar version--the church bell tolling and the clarinet
solo--(in Disney's Fantasia this is where the devil-mountain-top folds up
his wings and becomes just a mountain again)--is straight R-K:
Mussorgsky's ending is much different!  It changes the "meaning" of the
whole piece.)

And who's to say that Mussorgsky lacked "craft" as evidenced in his music?
You could also say that he was striking out on new paths that the more
tradition-bound R-K (was he a first-born perhaps?) couldn't see, like
Agassiz couldn't understand Darwin.

Maybe appreciating craft requires first of all an understanding of the
stylistic parameters in force when the composer was writing.

In music history yesterday I was presenting the slow movement of Haydn's
"Oxford" symphony (No.  92).  It is a wonderful piece in a large ABA form.
The B section has some elements of Haydn's earlier "Sturm und Drang"
style--it is in minor and forceful.  The real interest in the movement
comes in the way the return of A differs from the opening statement.  The
movement ends with an extended passage for woodwinds only, which comes
after some "unexpected" pauses.  It's an example of the way Haydn liked
to throw audiences off guard.  There's a lot of talk about structure and
symmetry in classic-period music.  But what makes Haydn a great composer
is the way he makes symmetry fry in its own grease, so to speak.  There is
no way to predict from the A section itself that we will later hear this
woodwind passage.  He could have been content to write a simple da capo
with maybe some minor variations and additions, and in fact this is what
it sounds like he's doing at first.  But right away he makes the ensemble
woodwinds (1 fl., 2 obs., 2 bassoons, 2 horns) more prominent than they
were in the first A section, which maybe sets us up a bit for what is to
come.

Maybe "craft" is a profound understanding of the constraints of style
under which a composer operates, and "art" is knowing how to break out of
those constraints (or at least stretch them very thin) and make it work.
It is by doing this that we come to understand both the possibilities of
expression within a style and the necessity of constantly testing the
limits.  It seems that is the only way of understanding why styles exist
in the first place.  We need the aesthetic tension that exists between
"structure" and "content."

-cb