1985
1985 89 7 january 1985 Dear George, Finally, the peaceful hour to respond to your marvellous letters from Dec. 7th and 8th … Where to begin? Perhaps with the question: how did the performances of the Oboe Concerto go? And the recording session ? Please tell me about these in some detail in the next letter. We, of course, got the card with the impressive list of performances. Which orchestra will do the Fourth Symphony? (Come to think of this: I don’t think that you have written to me about that work yet. It might have been ‘born’ at the time when our correspondence was in a state of hibernation … True? In any case, there is a lacuna in my mind about this that has to be filled. Is the work published? Recorded? I must catch up …)1 Is the Cello Quintet a fairly recent piece?2 (Yet another blank spot!) And now of course your shiny new [Symphony] #5! I am so delighted that you have it. Triumph echoed from your lines … the wrestling was over … and the work stands … to be seen and heard … Your description of its form is fascinating: a beautiful, quasi-classical, conception. Of course, how can one begin to hope to mirror the information-rich tissue of a full score with linear sentences that tend to channel the mind of the receiver into modes of imagining that are doubly misleading: 1) with regard to the work, and 2) with regard to the composer and his working methods? I guess, the issue is that between a manageable description and the natural history (if not anatomy, or even better the biochemistry) of the creative process. I could make a good case for the usefulness of everyone of these descriptive levels, depending on the objective to be served by the| 151 account, the time available, etc. In a word: your description (composer to composer) was at the right level: it triggered a long chain of thought reaction that fed on what you wrote. You are marvellously productive and I am looking at my own productivity , priorities, accepted obligations, etc. over the decades, not to speak about more basic layers. Then I say to myself: turn away from that moldy mirror, and look at your friend … Yes! So, here I am rejoicing with you at yet another major achievement. I’d love to see the score, and of course hear the work played. Again: keep me posted about Solti’s decision regarding the premiere. I sense that you cannot be swayed from doing what you are doing by anyone’s applying buzz words, such as “romantic” to your handiwork. What does a label, such as this, really mean? At the close (last page) of the enclosed lecture-text3 I am asking the question: what is old? In fact this is the question that got me on to writing the lecture that I am to read in about 2 weeks’ time in Calgary and Edmonton, and possibly also in Vancouver . (At U[niversity of] B[ritish] C[olumbia] they want me to read— as a “premiere”—‘What Tack to Take.’4 They might schedule a 2nd public lecture, while I am there.) Having completed Alternative Voices I became curious about the degree of applicability of its methodology to “old” musics. In fact this was not a new idea, basically, as I have been teaching a “basic” course (undergrad) in Analysis that followed, somewhat, the path taken in “Pst … Pst …”. I sense that there is an area where our respective ways [of] looking at things differ considerably, but I have some difficulty in finding the words that would locate it in our respective approaches. This has unmistakably appeared in the diverging (or so it seemed) paths our compositional orientation followed from the mid-’60s onward. It also shows in the kind of books we came to publish about the same time. I am pretty certain that what I shall say here can be (and ought to be) shot full of holes, by either one, or both, of us, as soon as the ink dries, but I try something anyway. It might have to do (that is our difference) with the way you sense life in which we all swim. Now, quite a bit has been written about fishes that are not supposed to be aware of the water in which they live. But we are the kind of fishes who feel it to be their business to sample, test, gobble-in...
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