Joseph Sowa replies in part to me:

>In my opinion, there are two ways composers can write music: from their
>heads and from their hearts.

This is what's known as the law of the excluded middle.  I suggest that
many composers write from both their heads *and* their hearts.  After all,
there's an awful lot of stuff to keep straight when you're composing, much
of it rather dull, but all of it important.

>Now regarding John Cage and all the other experimental composers (ie.
>12 tone, microtonal, etc).  Their language is still in their works, so
>in effect, they're still speaking jibberish.

If you didn't know Chinese, would you think that someone speaking Chinese
were speaking gibberish? How could you tell?

>You can call it music, but if someone were to write a 200 page book
>entirely of non- sense words with mixed puntuation etc would you call
>it fine literature? I don't think so.  The same holds true with these
>composers.

Hardly.  Language hangs together by stricter rules than music (ie, a
grammar and a denotative/connotative meaning).  Your analogy doesn't really
work.  Let me put it this way:  You yourself may not perceive anything
holding these composers' works together.  I've got no quarrel with that.
However, some listeners do.  Therefore, your judgments about gibberish are
by no means universal.

>You can't base an entire song on one ostinato, it mesmerises and forces
>the musical idea on the listener.

That would qualify as news to both Beethoven and Schubert, both of whom did
exactly what you describe.

>Likewise there can't be so much change the listener is lost.

The problem is that this doesn't help a composer compose, since listeners
vary widely in their ability to follow.  It's not simply a matter of
complexity either.  Some extremely lean, even "simple" music is very hard
to get.

>Call me communist.  Call me biased.

Oh, we're all biased.  The dangers of a bias are that you become so
hardened that you can't adapt to new situations and that you treat your
bias as a universal truth.

>Until the style of writing becomes mature, it will be difficult for the
>composers to write their music the way they mean it--that changes everyday.

To me, all this says is that bad music (ie, music I don't like) is bad
music.  I don't know of any absolutes in any art, either intrinsically or
historically.  This undoubtedly makes me an Evil Relativist.  And so I am,
as far as viewing my likes and dislikes in the larger context of other
people.  However, as far as I'm concerned, for myself I'm an autocrat.

Steve Schwartz