ABSTRACT
The composer is sometimes thought of as a person who writes music. But in the historical scheme of things, writing music is the last in a series of activities, which begin with making, pass to remembering and therefore repeating music, and thence to writing music down, and only then, when notation has developed, to the art of composing straight onto the page. At all stages in that process music is composed – that is to say, created through the ordering of sound along melodic, rhythmic or harmonic dimensions. The development of notation enables composers to dispense with the feats of memory that once were needed, just as the writing down of Greek verse put the Homeric rhapsodes out of business. And musical notation makes it possible to build structures – such as the permutational structures of Schoenberg and Stockhausen – which could not be achieved if the only way of moving around the piece was by remembering and anticipating.
