Grace Notes: Composers on Music
As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer so rightfully noted, "The composer reveals the innermost being of the world and expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his own reason does not understand; like a sleepwalker, who tells things of which he has no clear knowledge when he is awake."
How does a composer view the world around him? Is it heredity or environment that propels the music within? What is it about the creative musical process that causes one to become a composer? Josiah Fisk presents the ideas and words of the composers themselves in a newly revised and expanded edition of Sam Morgenstern's 1956 work Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings. This new edition which includes composers who were active throughout the twentieth century, is drawn from primary sources and highlights each composer's ideas, observations and opinions on life and society.
Robert Schumann faced a career dilemma since his family wanted him to become a lawyer. His quandry was quite clearly delineated in a July 30, 1830 letter written to his mother:
"My life has been for twenty years one long struggle between poetry and prose, or let us say, music and law...My own instinct points to art...I quite see your excellent motherly reasons...A man can know no greater torment than to look forward to an unhappy, empty, and lifeless future of his own planning; but neither is it easy for hiim to choose a profession directly opposed to that for which he was destined from his youth."
Although Richard Wagner had accepted a conducting engagement in London, he expressed his dubious thoughts about it in a letter to Franz Liszt dated May 16, 1855:
"I live here like one of the lost souls in hell. I never thought that I could sink again so low. The misery I feel in having to live in these disgusting surroundings is beyond description, and I now realize that it was a sin, a crime, to accept this invitation to London."
The esteemed Elliott Carter who celebrates his 100th birthday on December 11, 2008 expressed his frustrations and concerns about the modern symphony orchestra in a 1991 interview in Andrew Ford's Composer to Composer:
"I feel that the orchestra is a lost cause: it's too expensive and too much trouble. If you write very original music, nowadays the orchestras in America haven't time to rehearse it. They try sometimes, and with a good deal of good will they can raise the thousands of dollars it takes to have the extra rehearsals. And then the public doesn't see why they should have bothered to do it when they hear the music."
Here are composer, conductor and teacher Gunther Schuller's thoughts from a 1983 lecture at New York University called "Democracy in Music":
"Democracy" in music doesn't work. The concept of majority rule is basically anti-creative, by definition anti-individualistic. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, or Stravinsky did not create by common consent or committee vote...In the absence of absolutes and in the knowledge that unequivocal, perfected standards of decision and revaluation cannot be achieved, I would rather take my chances with some form of benign dictatorship. You can always argue against it, oppose it, and try to dislodge it. But at least it is something to depose. And it is often enlightened."
