Steve Schwartz:

>I find the "head-heart" split - intellect vs.  emotion or art vs.  craft
>- a bit simplistic.  I've seen very few people other than adolescents or
>monomaniacs actually exhibit this behavior.  It's part of the Romantic
>inheritance: Reason bad; Feeling good.  In its present form, it's one of
>the worst notions we currently hold, mostly because it's not even true.

Agree with Steve.  There's even another myth, that bounds "craft" with
"reason".  Is the composition of a fugue (the most obvious example of
musical "craft") a pure rational or mental process?.  I am tempted to say
that it's not:  it seems to be less the resolution of an equation than an
"intuitive" process in some way.  How could Bach improvise a fugue?.  It's
true that a fugue has some standard and schematic elements that are often
regarded (or not) by the composer, but there are also, in the process of
composition, certain moments of "nirvana", in which he doesn't know exactly
what he's doing, as a painter with the nose too near to the canvas.  He
seems, then, to abandons himself "to a sort of automatic impulse" (Morton
Feldman wrote once an interesting essay about this).  There's no emotional
intention, nor rational purposes here, just the (almost physical) pleasure
of playing with sounds.  Art is not necessary emotion, feeling etc.  Those
are just fatal (and often desirable) consequences of the first.

Pablo Massa
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