<html><body><div><br><br>On Jul 11, 2014, at 06:05 PM, Stephen Jablonsky <jablonsky@optimum.net> wrote:<br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div class="msg-quote" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><p class="MsoNormal">There are very few original games; most are extensions or variations of previous games. The composer begins his composition by deciding which elements from previous games he will reuse and which he will invent. Composing begins with a multiplicity of decisions about what to use and what to discard. The biggest decision is whether to adhere to the aesthetic of his predecessors or contemporaries, choose a parallel path, or to take an entirely new road. We call that style. It may be original to some degree or other, or conformist. Those decisions are often influenced by the purpose of the piece and who is paying for it.</p></div></blockquote><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="line-height: 24px;" data-mce-style="line-height: 24px;">Stephen Jablonsky,</span></span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 24px;" data-mce-style="line-height: 24px;">Your post reminded me of something I wrote as part of <a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200155900/default.html"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" data-mce-style="color: #000000;">a tribute to Elliott Carter</span></a> on his 100th birthday</span><span style="line-height: 24px;" data-mce-style="line-height: 24px;">:</span></span></div><div><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">___________________</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal," Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors."</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">How often do we set sail into uncharted seas, only to arrive at an island already inhabited. We fear that Borges was right -- invention is no more than composing glass-bead variations on a "handful" of eternal themes. There are new variations, but no new themes.</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">But Borges himself could not accept this fate. In his 1967 Norton Lectures at Harvard, he added, " ... it may also be given to us to invent metaphors that do not belong, or that do not yet belong, to accepted patterns." It may be that Borges had come to realize consciously (outside his art, if that is possible) that the twentieth century had possibly invented a new metaphor -- one that has become so ingrained in our present and future that we forget just how strange and difficult it must have seemed at first, just a short century ago.</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">In the twentieth century, time itself became the subject of a multitude of intonations working through a world of increasing complexity. Beginning with his <em>Piano Sonata</em> of 1946, Elliott Carter was possibly the first modern composer to explore the new meanings of time in musical space.</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">. . . .</span></p><p style="padding: 7px 15px 7px 10px; margin: 0px; font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Elliott Carter's final break with the popular conservative styles of the age came when, in 1950, he decided to move to a place in the lower Sonora Desert near Tucson, Arizona for nearly a year. As one of his students, David Schiff, wrote: "By going to the desert, Carter left his routine patterns of living in order to discover a new kind of time." Carter himself recalls:</span></p><blockquote style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 15px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-left: 40px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><em>I decided for once to write a work very interesting to myself, and so say to hell with the public and with the performers too. I wanted to write a work that carried out completely the various ideas I had at that time about the form of music, about texture and harmony -- about everything.</em></span></blockquote></div><div><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>_________________</em></span></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;">Best,</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;">Steve Soderberg</span></div><div><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif;">Keswick, VA</span></div></body></html>