Kierkegaard's dictum, "Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards", can also be related to music, and particularly composition, in a very important way. The reason for this is that music theory is very largely an after-the-fact activity. Because the composing process is centered on finding connections to a central idea or two and chasing them down as well as possible, there isn't the time to analyze each musical moment in terms of theory. But, the more experience that a composer has, the more likely that they will be able to work backwards from an envisioned whole, and thus infuse logic and inevitability into every gesture. Mozart was this type of composer, and his String Quartet No. 19 in C Major (K. 465), an example of this type of composition. The first movement is what gave the piece its nickname (the Dissonance Quartet), and it gives, very clearly I think, evidence of this kind of very advanced thinking. Have a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7dv2-bxhE8.

Note to regular readers of this blog: Because I'll be working on some other writing projects for the next little while, I'm going to be updating weekly, rather than daily, for a bit. This applies my Shakespeare blog (Star of England, linked on the right) as well.

I wasn't surprised to learn that Gigi Gryce (short for George General Gryce), the saxophonist and bandleader who wrote the pocket-sized jazz standard masterpiece called "Minority", studied classical composition (at the Boston Conservatory during the forties), because it is a perfect example of the small compositional form known as "sentence structure". In it, a melodic idea is played, then repeated in a contrasting key and then "liquidated", which according to Arnold Schoenberg's Fundamentals of Musical Composition, consists of "gradually eliminating characteristic features, until only uncharacteristic ones remain, which have little in common with the basic motive". Here's a version, performed by an all-star lineup, in which the form is clearly audible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDR2c6k9ixk&feature=related. The theme is played twice at the beginning, the first starting at 0:14, and the second at 0:29. (By the way, you'll hear sentence structure in a great many of Mozart's works, as well, if you listen for it.)