The Case for Collective Musical Creation

Extract

The cultivated Westerner has such a strict conception of the nature and the ends of artistic creation that even the hypothesis of a collective creative act seems aberrant to him. In a word, our official music is the property of an informed milieu or an elite. It is transmitted by writing; and, if this writing becomes more and more detailed and elaborate as one approaches the present, that is because it has the task of conserving intact (one might say forever) the thought of the creator, whose “personality,” as Schumann has already remarked, is the supreme good.