Time and Music: A Composer's View
Barney Childs · Perspectives of New Music · 1977
The composer is of course peculiarly concerned with time; as the poet, dramatist, film-maker, and choreographer, he is in the business of making structures which require real to be fulfilled. He is working, however, with material the of which is very loosely bound by communicative strictures, if at all, and these are subject to a variety of interpretation: questions of what music means and how, even if it can mean at all, are still topics of thorough debate. As all other artists, the composer is involved with his development and growth as an artist, with his continual re-attacking the same evasive problems. One's achievement in his art may be seen as a steady and ongoing search for, exploration of, and affirmation of his personal mythos. How we deal with our lives is thus affective of our art; each's aggregated personal experience over the years clearly shapes his responses, stances, the very flavor of perception and affirmation. Our concern is thus not only with arrangement in time in working out the music we write but also the pervasive immediacy of, and uses of, the past, our own as well as historical, and with immediate response to the present. Much of this has been accultured into us: the models of how we live and react, of how we work, of how we postulate future choices and actions, and those models that we live by and move with, all shape, sometimes indirectly, our responses in and out of art.