I distrust anything that you don't hear.
From Leo Ornstein
There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.
I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.
But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.
When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.
Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express.
You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.
A person improvising is sometimes very fortunate that just at that second things coincide.
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