Instruction Manual Addendum

A spirited debate has erupted in the comments section of the Matthew Guerrieri post that was the subject of this Sounds & Fury post. As an addendum to that S&F post, we post here our response to a criticism of that post in the above referenced comments thread put forward by blogger Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight who wrote in part:

[Y]ou've got a view of how composers work that I find odd — as far as I can tell, the process Matthew describes is no different from what Beethoven can be seen doing in his sketchbooks — taking ideas and working them out.

To which we replied:

That’s NOT what Matthew described. What Matthew described was sitting down to a blank page of ms, and messing about with process in order to spark a musical idea. That’s a tail-wagging-the-dog method of composition that NO composer whose music we now recognize as good or great ever employed. Beethoven’s sketchbooks (and the little notepad he habitually carried about with him wherever he might be) were chock full [with] musical ideas. That was their (the sketchbooks and notepads) very raison d'être.

Process is [or ought to be] but a mere tool put to work in the service of the spinning out of musical ideas to create a seamlessly coherent musical narrative, as I put it in my post, not the thing itself. As I wrote to Matthew privately, if a piece of music "smells of the lamp," it's music that, as music, is not worth the paper it's written on. If, on listening, one can immediately discern or sense a process at work in the piece's creation, the piece is a failure as music. With all genuine music, and certainly with all great music, the gestalt of the finished work always transcends and makes transparent the process of its creation which process is revealed only on assiduously studied inspection of the score, and perhaps not even then. With much of so-called New Music, one can not only discern a process at work, but recognize within a very short span of time that the process itself IS the work. I don't know what word one should use to designate such a work, but music is not among the candidates.