Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Job Title

I like my job title: a composer is simply someone who puts things together, an assembly worker, if you will. German, in addition to Komponist, also has Tonsetzer, tone-setter, like typesetter, perhaps an even more concrete and craftsperson-like term. But Hungarian has Zeneszerző, literally a music catcher. This suggests that the music is already out there, and is simply captured, as one would catch butterflies. I'm not a platonist, so I can't believe that an ideal form of music exists out there which our merely real music captures, channels, or reflects, but I certainly do appreciate the sentiment.

1 comment:

Charles Shere said...

I think I do believe that the music is "out there" somehow, and that I simply find or catch it when I make those little marks on the page — but I'm no Platonist either; I don't think there's an "ideal" music. I suppose this bears further reflection.

Debussy called himself a musicien, not a compositeur, but I always assumed that was because the first syllable of compositeur is subject to an unfortunate play on words.