Composition by Rules vs. Cleverness

One of my CompuServe correspondents of over two years responded to my posting
about how composers work with music intellectually as well as emotionally. She
found it difficult to think of the great composers composing music by rules and
formulas.

I responded pointing out that there's a very important difference between
composing by rules and formulas and composing by cleverness and intellect.
Rules and formulas are unemotional of course, but they're also unintellectual.
They're just statements of reality. For something to be intellectual, it must
be open to interpretation. If it were not, then there would be no clever or
uninspired usage of it, because there would be only one possible way to use it!


Truly great music carries both emotional poignancy and intellectual intrigue.
Music that goes only by the rules is boring, because it has no source of
inspiration. Music that carries only emotionalism is unintelligible. Music
that carries only intellectual intrigue has great meaningfulness but quickly
loses it over time, because it never finds a home in your heart.


Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl
with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 8 Dec 1995 04:33 +0100
Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI)
for id TAA27985; Thu, 7 Dec 1995 19:33:36 -0800
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 19:33:36 -0800
Message-Id: <951208032815_71670.2576_HHB62-10@CompuServe.COM>
Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu
Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu
Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu