Composing

From the Observer Music Monthly article by Paul Morley on studying composing:

"I waited to see what difference it would make to me as a writer, as a listener, as I got used to the idea of bars, and how you fill bars with the notes and, indeed, lack of notes that you definitely desired, and let the bars dissolve, and how you structured a piece so that it didn't seem like an arbitrary collection of sounds but a considered piece that accurately reflected not understanding of technique but the mystery of thought and the strange fluctuations of feeling. A change did start to happen. I began hearing music in a new way; it was as though the music expanded into and beyond itself, and with my favourite music, my listening to the music as pure abstract sensation formed in distant, unknown ways merged with appreciating how it existed as the result of a calculated but uninhibited series of spontaneous, experienced and surprising decisions that both accepted the limitations of arbitrarily arranged rules and strived to stretch outside them."