(This letter to Leonard Bernstein was written in October, 1973 by a Harvard University sophomore in response to the second of the Norton Lectures. )
Mr. Bernstein,
The second Norton Lecture left me uneasy about a few of your linguistical/musical analogues. Some clarification, I think, is necessary.
First, you seem to have a strange notion of linguistic embedding. ...The structure which you demonstrated in the Mozart Symphony ［no. 40］ really has no parallel in human speech since, unfortunately, we can handle only one voice at a time. For those bars to have truly been embedding, the strings would have stopped to let the woodwinds have their say, and then would have completed their material. It is a small point, I know, but I think you probably could find real embedding if you looked for it; and you could then have described the Mozart as a distinctly musical extension of human embedding.
And you also used the word "creativity" without making clear the distinction between linguistic creativity and artistic creativity. This was probably not intentional, but you should be more careful when making these analogies. If I were to recast the "Eroica" ［Beethoven's Third Symphony in E-flat Major］ in, say, D Major, I would certainly not have been creative in an artistic sense, although I would have been creative "linguistically." I have never heard a D Major "Eroica" before, but I could fabricate one with my own competence and with the score in front of me. To slip this by to an unsuspecting audience is not even quasi-scientific; it could be construed as downright tricky. Keep on your toes, Leonard. That Harvard community with which you dare to go one step further is also keenly aware of the shortcomings of your arguments.
Just one more thing. Your fugue on the Hanon exercises was fun, but as I was sitting there I asked myself why you didn't mention the point in the 3rd movement of Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto where the pianist actually does play the exercises for several bars. You must know about it; you play the concerto excellently. Even if it was intended as a joke between Dmitri ［Shostakovich］ and Maksim ［Shostakovich's son and for whom the Concerto was written］, the important thing to remember is that the aesthetic quality of the music is not lost for a second.
Enough of my ravings. Until Tuesday night.
