Different Types of Composers

　　I can see three different types of composers in musical history, each of whom creates music in a somewhat different fashion.

　　The type that has fired public imagination most is that of the spontaneously inspired composer - the Franz Schubert type, in other words. All composers are inspired, of course, but this type is more spontaneously inspired. Music simply wells out of him. He can't get it down on paper fast enough. You can almost tell this type of composer by his fruitful output. In certain months, Schubert wrote a song a day. Hugo Wolf did the same.

　　In a sense, men of this kind begin not so much with a musical theme as with a completed composition. They invariably work best in the shorter forms. It is much easier to improvise a song than it is to improvise a symphony. It isn't easy to be inspired in that spontaneous way for long periods at a stretch. Even Schubert was more successful in handling the shorter forms of music. The spontaneously inspired man is only one type of composer, with this own limitations.

　　Beethoven belongs to the second type - the constructive type, one might call it. This type serves as an example of my theory of the creative process in music better than any other, because in this case the composer really does begin with a musical theme. In Beethoven's case there is no doubt about it, for we have the notebooks in which he put the themes down. We can see from his notebooks how he worked over his themes - how he would not let them be until they were as perfect as he could make them. Beethoven was not a spontaneously inspired composer in the

　　Schubert sense at all. He was the type that begins with a theme; makes it a preliminary idea; and upon that composes a musical work, day after day, in painstaking fashion. Most composers since Beethoven's day belong to this second type.

　　The third type of composer I can only call, for lack of a better name, the traditionalist type. Men like Palestrina and Bach belong in this category.

　　They both are characteristic of the kind of composer who is born in a particular period of musical history, when a certain musical style is about to reach its fullest development. It is a question at such a time of creating music in a well-known and accepted style and doing it in a way that is better than anyone has done it before you.

　　The traditionalist type of composer begins with a pattern rather than with a theme. The creative act with Palestrina is not the thematic conception so much as the personal treatment of a well-established pattern. And even Bach, who composed forty-eight of the most various and inspired themes in his Well Tempered Clavichord, knew in advance the general formal mold that they were to fill. It goes without saying that we are not living in a traditionalist period nowadays.

　　One might add, for the sake of completeness, a fourth type of composer - the pioneer type: men like Gesualdo in the seventeenth century,

　　Moussorgsky and Berlioz in the nineteenth, Debussy and Edgar Varese in the twentieth. It is difficult to summarize the composing methods of so diversified a group. One can safely say that their approach to composition is the opposite of the traditionalist type.

　　They clearly oppose conventional solutions of musical problems. In many ways, their attitude is experimental - they seek to add new harmonies, new sonorities, new formal principles. The pioneer type was the characteristic one at the turn of the seventeenth century and also at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is much less evident today.

　　不同類型的音樂家

　　我發現音樂史上有三種不同類型的作曲家，他們各自創作的方式有不同。最能激發公眾想象力的是自發式靈感型即弗朗茲·舒伯特型。當然所有的作曲家都需要靈感，但這一類型的更具自發的靈感，音樂簡直就是噴涌而出，多得來不及記錄，通過他們多產的作品你幾乎可以一下就認出他們。有幾個月舒伯特幾乎譜成一曲，伍爾夫·雨果也是如此。

　　從一定意義上說，這類作曲家不是從一個主題開始而是從一部完整的作品一氣呵成。他們總是擅長短形式的作品。即興創作一支歌曲比即興創作一部交響曲要簡單得多。要長時間連續不斷的獲得自發的靈感不容易，就是舒伯特也是短形式的音樂方面更為成功。自發式靈感型人只是作曲家的一種，他有他自己的局限。

　　貝多芬屬于第二類--可以稱之為建設型。和其他類型相比，這類作曲家更適合我的音樂創作過程理論的例證，因為對這類作曲家來說，他們的確是從音樂主題開始創作的。以貝多芬為例這一點毋庸質疑，因為我們有他記下音樂主題的筆記本。我們可以從他的筆記本看出他是如何在主題上下功夫的--曲不完美誓不休。從舒伯特的意義上說，貝多芬絕對不是靈感自發型的作曲家。他是那類從主題開始、形成初步的構思再日復一日辛勤地創作一部作品的作曲家。從貝多芬開始，許多的作曲家都屬于這第二類。

　　由于找不到更合適的稱呼，第三類作曲家姑且稱他們為傳統類。帕勒斯提那的創作活動與其說是主題概念不如說是對既定模式的個性化處理。即使創作了 48首主題各異充滿靈感的《平均律鋼琴曲集》的巴赫也知道他們將遵循的一般模式。不用說今天我們不是生活在一個傳統時期。

　　為完整起見也許還應加上第四種作曲家--先鋒型，諸如17世紀的杰蘇爾多、19世紀的穆索爾斯基和柏遼茲，以及20世紀的德彪西和瓦雷茲。這樣一類作曲家如此多樣化的創作手法難以概括，但可以肯定的一點是他們的作曲方法與傳統型針鋒相對。

　　他們鮮明地反對音樂問題的通行解決辦法。許多方面他們的態度是試驗的--尋求添加新的融合、新的音效、新的創作形式。先鋒型在17世紀末和20世紀初期很具代表性，但是如今其特征已不太明顯。