A thousand hands support the buoyant child and solicitously attend its footsteps, that it may not soar aloft where there might be risk of a serious fall. But it is still so young, and is eternal; the day of its freedom will come.--When it shall cease to be "musical."
THE creator should take over no traditional law in blind belief, which would make him view his own creative endeavor, from the outset, as an exception contrasting with that law. For his individual case he should seek out and formulate a fitting individual law, which, after the first complete realization, he should annul, that he himself may not be drawn into repetitions when his next work shall be in the making.
The function of the creative artist consists in making laws, not in following laws ready made. He who follows such laws, ceases to be a creator.
Creative power may be the more readily recognized, the more it shakes itself loose from tradition. But an intentional avoidance of the rules cannot masquerade as creative power, and still less engender it.
The true creator strives, in reality, after _perfection_ only. And through bringing this into harmony with _his own_ individuality, a new law arises without premeditation.
So narrow has our tonal range become, so stereotyped its form of expression, that nowadays there is not one familiar motive that cannot be fitted with some other familiar motive so that the two may be played simultaneously. Not to lose my way in trifling,[N] I shall refrain from giving examples.
[N] With a friend I once indulged in such trifling in order to ascertain how many commonly known compositions were written according to the scheme of the second theme in the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony. In a few moments we had collected some fifteen analogues of the most different kinds, among them specimens of the lowest type of art. And Beethoven himself:--Is the theme of the Finale in the "Fifth" any other than the one wherewith the "Second" introduces its Allegro?--or than the principal theme of the Third Piano Concerto, only in minor?
That which, within our present-day music, most nearly approaches the essential nature of the art, is the Rest and the Hold (Pause). Consummate players, improvisers, know how to employ these instruments of expression in loftier and ampler measure. The tense silence between two movements--_in itself music_, in this environment--leaves wider scope for divination than the more determinate, but therefore less elastic, sound.