Do you compose, or are you composed?

Do you compose, or are you composed?

Daily Comfort Zone

norman lebrecht

January 29, 2023

Bruce Adolphe has been working on an age-old problem:

My new book, Visions and Decisions, is now available online (free for two weeks) from Cambridge University Press. The paperback comes out in February.

This Element investigates the balance and interaction of imagination (visions) and technique (decisions) in the composition of music and includes current scientific research on dreams, the hypnagogic state, emotions, and feelings. It also includes thoughts of composers past and present, and examines how works start from visions in a range of music, comparing musical ideas and techniques to models in other creative disciplines. The Element elucidates aspects of musical discourse by imagining how Haydn, Mozart, and other composers would order falafel for takeout. This unorthodox approach emphasizes parallels between music and theater that are central to this Element.

Just a few of the composers quoted or referenced are: Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Babbitt, Berio, Boulez, Carter, Chou Wen-chung, Reena Esmail, Sofia Gubaidulina, Anthony Davis, Kala Ramnath, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Takemitsu, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Zhou Long, and Wynton Marsalis (there are many more).

Plus, neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio and Jean-Pierre Changeux; Harvard sleep researcher Robert Stickgold; playwrights Harold Pinter and Ariel Dorfman; poets Stanley Kunitz and Yeats; comedian/directors Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Alfred Hitchcock; I also discuss some of my own music, as well as my piano puzzlers, and Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Janacek, Ravel, Gesualdo, and many of the standard-rep old guard are well represented.

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