Webern's Sketches (I)

In tempo 91 I wrote an article on the recently discovered and published sketches of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Since that time an equally handsome volume of sketches by Anton Webern has appeared. Studying the sketchbooks of a great composer is perhaps the closest we can ever come to experiencing the act of creation. It is still—inevitably—a second-hand experience, but one which enables us to follow the process of creation with more immediacy than does the analysis of an already completed score. If we analyze a finished work we can learn a great deal about the structure of that work in particular, and about compositional techniques in general. As composition progresses, the musical ideas with which the composer started out begin to develop according to their own inner logic. Eventually the composer is no longer in the position of dictating events but of attempting to discover and follow the logical development which the music itself dictates to him.