On Relata I

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I HAVE had a number of occasions in the pastand the present article is but another such occasion-to contemplate the hazardous temptations besetting the composer seeking words to assist the understanding of his music. Therefore, it is less the lack of the customary professional immodesty that initially inhibits my discussion of my own music than the awareness that, when presented with such an opportunity, the composer is likely to point with pride to the singularities of his accomplishments, to the most immediate manifestations of his originality, to those of his music's properties which he deems historically unprecedented and chronologically unparalleled. For, however conscious one may be of history's tendency to honor-at most-an innovator's name rather than his works, one still is strongly inclined to stake a claim as a prophet in at least-one's own time. And, since in our time such claims to innovations in musical composition more often have been founded on nationalism and journalism than on evidence or warrant, more often have been asserted in the language of polemic and propaganda than in the considered discourse of fact and reason, one's self-restraint often is severely tested. But to direct a listener's attention to the unique aspects of a work, particularly when he probably knows the work little or not at all, and is likely to hear it in the near future little if at all, is to emphasize that which will provide least aid in initial comprehension, for-to such a listener-uniqueness is far less significantly helpful than is communality, however far removed from the immediate musical foreground such shared characteristics may be. Indications of the procedural sources, the technical traditions-even though the sources and traditions may be of recent originprovide not only a point of entry but, eventually, the bases for determining the depth, extent, and genuineness of the work's originality. The composer is further constrained by the realization that his words, as those of the creator of the work, are expected to reflect a privileged access to knowledge about the work, when-in truththe most he possesses of this sort is the memory of what he thought