Noboru Inoue wrote:

>I think...  Music is not composed by "composers", but discovered by them
>from space.  As a sculptor finds a statue of Budda hidden in a tree.

When I first read this I thought "whoa", too mystical for me!  But after
thinking about it, there's something to it.  I remember reading that
neuroscientists think that the brain sends the impulse to, say, move our
arm even before it formulates the thought, "I am moving (will now move) my
arm." I have a bit of empirical evidence for this--at what point can you
say you will yourself to get out of bed in the morning? If you think very
carefully about this when you do it, you will observe that the idea that
you have the thought "I will now get up" followed by actually heaving your
carcass off the rack is illusory.  SOMETHING pushes you out of the bed, but
it's not the thought.  To bring this back to music:  from whence cometh the
creative impulse? As a composer you don't say, "I am going to think of a
melody, or a chord progression," and then think of it and write it down.
These things spring unbidden from the brain, and another part of the brain
says "I ought to write that down, it's pretty good." And it goes from
there.  Even in revision, what is the hand that guides the editor? Good
questions...

Chris Bonds