Re: OT: Composing (jara: My girlfriend is a conlanger!)

Jan van Steenbergen scripsit:

> > For example, Beethoven didn't actually know polyphony (at least in the
> > Bach sense) until he was an established composer.
>
> Hehe. Sometimes I wonder it he actually knew about polyphony even after he
> became an established composer :) .
There is a wonderful tirade by Leonard Bernstein about Beethoven's
absolute incompetence as a technical composer: he never could write a
decent fugue; he was a master of misorchestration, especially in later
years, with trumpet parts sticking out like sore thumbs; his melodies
were beer-hall tunes.

But what he had was a mastery of musical *design* unmatched before
or since.  The words of Strunk & White apply to B's music with a
vengeance: "A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph
no unnecessary sentences, an essay no unnecessary paragraphs.  This does
not require that the writer treat his subject only in outline, or that
he avoid all detail, but that every word tell."  In Beethoven's music,
every note tells.

> What does "stuck in limbo" mean, BTW?
In a state of neither reward nor punishment; in Catholic theology,
the eternal place of "virtuous pagans", those who committed no individual
sins but were not redeemed, technically a part of Hell, but there is no
punishment except for the absence of God.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_