Every day the atist is faced with the question "why explain your work?" and
"Why work at all?"

Both of these questions have answers.  As to the first question, "Why write
words about notes?" The answer is relatively simple.  In order for most
classical compositions to be heard, they have to be played.  Fundemental
to Western Classical music is the idea that the notes imply a grammar and
syntax.  Thus to perform a work - any work - it requires the performers
know that grammar, so that they can play the contento of the work, and
express within that content.  The same is true of actors in a play, they
have to know what the playwrights diction and prosody are, so that they can
produce the words and play the part.  A person following a reciepe written
in some foreign country must often puzzle over the ingrediencts, and learn
what the cooking directions assume in order to be able to make the dish.

Some composers are content to extend or polish existing musical language.
You would be hard pressed to find on innovation in Johann Strauss Jr.  You
would also be hard pressed to find a more fluent composer.

Other composers, myself included, try and extend or recreate various
elements of musical language.  In order for a musician to understand the
content of that musical language, they basics of it must be outlined to
them.  Not all new musical ideas work out.  Composers have very often spent
time to try and explain the architectural and methodolgical aspects of
their music.  Fux wrote on counterpoint, as much his as Palestrinas,
Rameau wrote his harmony treatise, Chopin worked on a piano method and
taught, Wagner wrote "On Conducting", Berg wrote an article on symphonic
structure in Wozzeck and on the innovations in rhythm and melody that he
used, Taniev wrote on his counterpoint - and so on.  Other composers have
had intermediaries write for them - Bach had Marpurg, Beethoven's cause was
taken up by Czerny.  Many didactic piano pieces - ranging at the top with
etudes of Liszt and Chopin down to Czerny's hundreds of piano manuals -
have been written.

On the one hand people who are opposed to the composer and the message
will not care about the content of such writing.  For them, it will be
merely another symbol of the composer, to be atacked wherever along with
every other aspect of the composer.  But that still leaves those who are
undecided, the vast majority in many cases of listeners are undecided, and
those who are interested, but do not see an entre into the music.

It is true that the people who hate your music because they hate you,
or hate what it stands for will have to die rather than be converted by
writing.  It has always been true.  Always.  However while a working artist
often hears from these people the most, and these people act as if they
speak for the whole world, they don't speak for the whole world, nor even
for themselves, since they have never allowed their musical listening
apparatus to be engaged.  An artist writes about his work with the same
intent that he works, that his work will be found by those who are
interested.  Whether that is an audience of one, or of thousands.

- - -

The answer to the question of "what if this is insignificant?" Can be
answered by a story.  There was an obscure mathematician who wrote on
certain curves that interested him.  His book was forgotten, a few
translations of it floated around, and occasionally someone would churn
through it.  One day a lawyer bought a used book in a book store, it was a
copy of this mathematician's work on conic sections and curves.  The lawyer
read it and was inflamed by it, he charged through the work, and in the
margin noted down many ideas and theories which became quiet famous indeed.

The original mathematician was Diophantus, the lawyer was Pierre Fermat.
Diophantus had been "irrelevant to the direction of Western Mathematics"
for just shy of *Two Thousand Years* by the time Pierre Fermat picked up
his book, and yet the majority of Modern Number theory comes from the work
of Fermat, and the work of Guass, who was working with the same problems of
curves and surfaces.

the question of what is relevant is something that must be taken as part
of the long view.  Most people, even most classical listeners, would be
hard pressed to name even a few Renaissance composers, and yet so many
other composers - from Fux forward - have gone back to them.  The question
of composing and making art is, in general, one of interest.  A composer
composes, a writer writes for those who are or may become interested.  If
someone is not interested, then they don't matter to the artist, as much
as the artist does not matter to them.

- - -

The artist who says that he only writes for himself is quite probably
deluding himself in some way.  After all, if he writes only for himself,
then we would not know of him, since the time taken to tell us would time
waste.  But perhaps this is a necessary delusion.  One must do the work for
its own sake, for the happiness it brings you, or you are not absorbed in
it.  Often the artist is alone in appreciating what he is doing for a long
time to come.  Often the first people to understand an artists work are
those who are threatened by it.  Every artist works for an audience beyond
his reach, and sometimes, he must give them some insights into what he is
doing, because by the time the din has settled, he may well not be there to
explain for them.

- - -

The reason behind all of this is that musical works that do not exist on
two levels are inevitably shallow.  A composer who tries to make explicit
everything to the last detail will fail, Bartok and Carter have tried, and
the project was beyond their grasp.  In the end there must be unstated
ideas, unstated onventions, becuase it is in the implications that
superposition lies.

Let me take an example.  Suppose a composer wrote a crescendo and a
descresendo over the same passage.  It would be taken as a mistake,
someone would edit it out, or the composer would bequesitoned at the first
rehearsal.  "What are you thinking?" However it is very easy to write a
passage which *implies* that it should get louder from one part of its
context, and *implies* it should get louder from another.  Consider that
most classical works have a section with a repeat with two different
endings.  ||:  1_ 2_ is so common we forget about it.  Now consider the
measures just before the alternate measure.  They must be able to be played
two ways.  Either that or you are forced to wrench the music in a measure
- not always good for the music.

It is in the implication, in the unsiad, that the inteprreer finds his
freedom, where the interpreter must make judgements and come to
conclusions.

This is why to write on notes:  because creation of the unspoken must come
from an explanation of they way to think on music, often the process of
reducing an idea of what is implied, down to a means of finding it and
illuminating it is a very long one.  One of the reasons I have pointed out
Wagner's On Conducting and Stanislawski's works on acting, is becuase they
contain suhc methods, a means of finding hidden implication and executing
it.  In Wagner's case it is the instruction to vary the temp based on the
balance between teh rhtyhmic figure (faster) and the cantilena (slower).
In stanislawski's case it is telling hte actor to visualise what the center
of the action is, and to act in relation to it based on his distance on the
stage.

Stirling S Newberry
Mp3s: http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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