We all … experience moments when we want to get outside the limitations of ordinary life, when we see dimly a vision of something beyond. …Now it is not enough to feel these things; the artist wants to communicate … these things into … ordered sound, clear and intelligible; and to do this he must make a synthesis between the thing to be expressed and the means of expression. Thus there has arisen the technical side of music. …And first of all the composer has … to devise a series of dots and dashes which well explain … in a very inadequate manner, the pitch, the duration, the intensity, and to a certain extent, the quality of sounds he wishes the performer to produce. The composer starts with a vision and ends with a series of black dots. The performer’s process is exactly the reverse; he starts with the black dots and from these has to work back to the composer’s vision. First he must find out the sounds that these black dots represent and the quicker he can get over this process the sooner he will be able to get on to something more important. Therefore though a good sight reader is not necessarily a good musician, it is very useful for a musician to be a good sight reader. The performer has to learn how best to make these sounds. …then he must learn to view any series of these black dots both as a whole and in detail and to discover the relation of the parts to the whole, and it is under this heading that I would place such things as phrasing, sense of form, and climax – what we generically call musicianship. When he has mastered these he is ready to start and reproduce the composer’s vision. Then, and then only, is he in a position to find out whether there is any vision to reproduce. …Thus we come round full circle: the origin of inspiration and its final fruition should be one and the same thing.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music and Other Essays, 13-15
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