The natural creation of music by the classical composer

JOURNALIST: But let’s take this opportunity to get back to the question of compositional studies – how do you see future prospects for this central subject at the academy?

PETER HÜBNER: can only say that the curriculum misses the essential matter, as it does not really concern the core or nature of musical creation – the musical conscience.

For the few composers who pursue musical creation with the described seriousness, it is surely a certain achievement when they receive a professorship as financial support, until, at some point, they are able to make a living off their work as a freelancer.

But the overwhelming majority of professors of composition doesn’t manage to do anything creative, and is only a financial burden for the country.

And the worst is that these people mislead the public and the students with regard to the composing profession. The same, however, applies to all the other artistic music subjects.

In principle, they can get rid of the subject composition at the academy – whereby those few talented composers among the professors should be supported in their freedom of creating – without conditions and being told what to do.

Anybody getting upset now, belongs to those who are incapable.

JOURNALIST: I have read your books “Naturally Creating Music” and “Naturally Listening To Music”.

In your opinion, what is the significance of these books, and perhaps beyond that, of an unconventional study course of music which you describe in your study catalogue of music.

PETER HÜBNER: I have contemplated for a very long time, how it could be possible for me to familiarise other people with classical music by means of the spoken word. When I went to a library and had a look at a book on this music, then it was either an opera or concert guide, or a very limited book on musical theory, or biographies about famous composers.

But I never found a book which spoke about the things I thought music enthusiasts should know about.

In my opinion, in existing music literature, people have always beat about the bush on the subject of classical music in an ice-cold way, and they still do. Particularly music critics distinguished and/or distinguish themselves in general by describing their own sort of emotional rubbish and never get round to talking about the actual music.

That is why, for a long time, the music enthusiast was not at all informed about what classical music is and how it originates in the tone creator’s consciousness, before being made audible by some interpreters at a much later point in time.

The absurdity of this situation is demonstrated by the fact that it is normal and obligatory in today’s compositional lessons to play the piano.

Music experts are totally convinced that a composer ideally experiments by playing his music to himself on the piano and then, from outwardly listening to it, decides to write down the part he has played to then instrument it somewhere else for the chorus and soloists.

I once witnessed, how someone from a small Rohne village had a letter read out loud to him which he had received from home, as he could not read himself. He put his hands over the ears of the person who was reading to him, so that he couldn’t hear what was in the letter and what he was reading to him.

As he had not learned to read himself he naturally thought the person reading had to read the letter out loud and listen carefully to understand the contents.

All of us who can read, laugh about this, but the same lack of understanding applies to the entire musical world of experts which believes that the classical tone creator needs to play the piece he is composing on the piano first and listen to it, in order to be able to write it down. And the curriculum in the subject composition at the academy with the piano as an obligatory subject only demonstrates this inner musical ignorance.

And at night, full of mediumistic pride at the end of T.V. broadcasting, we keep seeing the picture of a piano or harpsichord in a little narrow room, with those words of musical ignorance: “On this instrument Haydn created the song of the Germans.”

That phenomenon of inner musical hearing – completely detached from the instrument – is described in my book “Natural Music Hearing”.

And that critical description of authentic music creation like I have such mentioned, has been very profoundly presented in my book “Natural Music Creation”.

Only on the basis of this practical insight into the field of classical tone creating as well as the creative listening to music lies the sense in reshaping the study of music.

Someone opening my study catalogue on a future music faculty without knowing these two books, is faced with hieroglyphics. The person who has studied them very carefully, however, – whereby it does not matter at all whether this person is a music expert or not - is able to decipher the curriculum and appraise the sense of this education.

These books on music should shake the music experts, and people not being shaken by their contents are either asleep or musically already dead.

And I am telling you this with all due modesty, as I am only describing here what is natural, and how our great classical music creators worked.

©   A A R   E D I T I O N   I N T E R N A T I O N A L   2001