He made this discovery in two ways. The first was via the use of memory, memory that is, of his own earlier music. Memory, sometimes called hindsight, is a collective of past experiences and is far easier to be conscious-about than of something that has not yet happened. The second method was about letting-go of memory and allowing the mind to engage with the future. Past music makes new future music possible. But in a Darwinian sense, only the fittest music survives and one key aspect of that fitness is its capacity for evolution and change. Can I put this in a still more mystical way? Composing isn’t about a process of realisation of sound but rather of something far more incorporeal- it is about the architecture of time, space and matter. Had we actually been able to ask Beethoven or Mozart how they composed, the answers would have been different of course. Beethoven might have answered by means of a lot of very hard work whilst Mozart might have burped, giggled and said, I don’t have the faintest idea!
What is creation but the movement of pre-manifestation to one of realisation. A metaphorical sense of composing might suggest that new and uncomposed music lies buried deep in
the unconscious. If this is true then finding the music means either diving into the unconscious or peeling-back some of the layers between the unconscious and the now. Here we might find materials that lie outside or beyond time. I might as well have written about consciousness and time in fact. But the more I have written on composing consciousness, the more I realise that it is a Pandora’s Box that, when opened, reveals both music and consciousness as infinitely varied, ephemeral, layered, faceted, and mercurial. Twice during writing this short piece, musical ideas popped into my brain as well as notions of needing to eat some breakfast. But I have to return to the possibility that none of these things popped into my brain. If there is truly a cosmic music (physics has always suggested that there is), the human brain is a cosmic instrument (not a consciousness instrument) capable of receiving cosmic music and by thinking and imagining- capable of realising that universal song is always there and waiting still to release new possibilities!
The 5th symphony is based on a tiny musical cell of two different sounds- the first being repeated 3 times and the second being held at an indefinite length at the opening (twice!). 1