Composition, Google Maps, and more!
I think it might have been Arnold Schoenberg who wrote about how even though a piece of music is perceived temporally from beginning to end it exists for the composer in an instant. This is how music exists on paper, beginning to end and middle are all there in one place, perceivable at one time. Static, complete. It’s like taking a scene from a film and putting the celluloid on the wall so everything can be seen at once.
In Simple Composition, Charles Wuorinen gives the sage advice that a draft of a piece should contain roughly the same detail throughout. This is sort of like planning a trip using Google Maps. We might start zoomed out somewhat to give a nice overview, and then set our start and end points. Where we are and where we want to be. We might then zoom in a little bit and start tweaking points along the journey, a stop at a restaurant here or a little jog over to visit friends there, etc. As we keep zooming in to make the route more exact more and more details become apparent, side streets and houses and so on.
When we make the journey everything passes by in sequence, but the map shows everything at once. If we are stopped at that aforementioned restaurant we can look ahead and see how far away and just where our friends’ house is. Even though we perceive the trip moving through time we can understand it as a whole unit.
So with a draft of a piece of music we have a beginning and middle and end, and we can slowly zoom in and add details throughout until it is finished. And even though we perceive the music temporally when performed we can understand it as a whole unit also.
