Pablo Massa wrote:

>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.  ...

What can you point to in the finished product that could be considered
evidence of a "moment of nirvana"? Would it be how you yourself felt upon
hearing some unexpected feature of the work? That cannot be used as
evidence that the composer was feeling the same thing.

In any creative work the creator is going to hit on an idea as if
by accident.  Later on, a different faculty--the critical faculty--is
brought into play to decide whether to leave it alone, revise it, or delete
it.  This critical faculty has a large component of previous experience.
I don't think the process is so mystical as to deserve the "nirvana"
appellation.  To say a composer like Bach didn't know what he was doing at
times sounds a bit like he was in a trance state, doing some automatic
writing.  I doubt that.  There could have been many times where he was
simply writing down from the stream of inspiration flowing through his
mind.  I would call that exercising his craft on the fly.  After all,
that's what you do when you improvise.

I think we may need to get away from the notion of art as mystical
inspiration.  I am provisionally reserving the term to refer to the
esthetic response we have to created works.  If we have an esthetic
response as opposed to a utilitarian one, it's art.  It's a waste of time
to speculate on whether or not the creator was in a "raptus" when he or
she created it, stories of Handel writing Messiah and seeing God aside.

You know, musicians and composers are actually very practical people when
it comes to music (though they may be totally incapable of getting the rest
of their lives together).  They live in a world of strings that go false,
rosin dust, reeds that wear out, physical problems related to performance,
the labor of constant practice, ink-stained fingers (at least before
computers), arranging, part copying, rehearsing, etc.  They do it because
it's what they love most.  And the quest for perfection implies adhherence
to a standard.  In performance, you play in tune and you play in time.
There's more to it than that of course, but you do those things first,
presumably.  In composition, every composer must decide consciously or
unconsciously the extent to which a work is going to "stretch" the ears of
its listeners.  In Bach's time certain conventions guaranteed that a work
would be perceived as a fugue.  But that's not the extent of the craft,
beyond which all is inspiration or lack thereof.  Is not knowing how to
modulate smoothly and convincingly a craft? Compare the work of lesser
composers to Bach, Haydn and Mozart in that respect and a certain
superiority of CRAFT is immediately noted in the latter.  It makes sense
to say that a melodic line by Sammartini is clumsy or ugly, in precisely
the same sense that a crudely made chair is clumsy or ugly.

Do I think there is no such thing as a "stroke of genius" in music?
Certainly I think there are such things.  Precisely because there are
makes it possible to distinguish them from craft.  I would put certain
Aspects of Berlioz' orchestration in that category simply because they
were unprecedented, and they work.  Sometimes the overall conception of
a work seems to betray genius--e.g., Beethoven's C# Minor Quartet.

Maybe another way of looking at the difference between craft and genius
(is this not what we are really talking about?) is to suggest that
genius involves the new becoming necessary.  A DIFFERENT prof of mine
(mis-?)quoted Picasso as saying a genius aims at a target that no one
else can see--and gets a bulls-eye.  Or something like that.

Chris Bonds