Les Saltimbanques

This work from last Saturday afternoon conveys, apart from a mysterious perfume—an immediate response to having read Apollinaire’s “Un fantôme de nuées” seconds before—that the specificity of a musical composition consists not in its notation but in the artist’s true clarity of intention and intensity of concentration on the feeling at hand. Of the five non-identical takes that render the same compositional idea exactly each time, this is one. With a creative approach of this certitude and directness—referred to sometimes as “jazz”—the idea of a notated score, and almost all music-making attached to it, appears a pained mockery of what music can convey when created as it is meant to be: spontaneously.

Listen to all five takes on YouTube.