Ulvi replies to me: >>I find amazing that some people have to believe that great art is created >>in hot blood. ... > >... But we can add that any creative activity is an emotional experience, >and when the creation has as much intrinsic greatness as we find in great >music, the experience must have been that much more emotinally intense. >The emotions felt by the composer, though, probably had nothing to do with >the emotions stirred by the piece in most listeners. ... Consider someone who's just finished writing the first movement to a substantial piece. As far as anyone can tell, the movement is a downer, but the composer felt really good once he finished. The composer begins the next movement (a scherzo) depressed as hell because the ideas aren't coming very quickly. Nevertheless, I suspect that when the composer's done, he'll be happy again until, of course, he begins the next movement. Anyway, I don't find it beyond possibility that a composer's emotions writing have to do mainly with how well the writing is going, although a composer may have (though not necessarily has) undergone some emotion that pricked the writing in the first place. In short, Ulvi's Brahms example seems reasonable to me. A sustained piece of music differs from, say, a short lyric poem or a song. One cannot get through the process in one go. That is, inspiration or emotion alone doesn't carry you through. In any one measure, a composer has to think of many things. A friend of mine - I think a very good composer indeed - recently completed the draft of a concerto. I asked him what he thought about it. He didn't tell me about big emotions, but of ways he was going to revise part of this measure or that, whether to extend a passage, revise three movements into two, or ideas impossible for his soloist. That is, his mind was mainly on his craft and his emotions related to issues of craft, separate from whatever emotional character he wanted the music to have. 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. Each informs the other. We can feel strongly about ideas and powerfully analyze feeling, both to constructive result. Besides, if I hear a work that moves me deeply, I have no way of knowing for sure how the composer feels about it. He may have wrenched it out of his gut or simply tossed it off. I'm interested primarilly in the result. If I get the result, if the music stirs me (emotionally, intellectually, or both), it seems a bit ungrateful to demand the composer's biographical catharsis as well. I agree with Ulvi. Steve Schwartz