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Generally and traditionally
“inspiration” is
held in great respect as the most distinguished source of the creative
process in art. It should be remembered that inspiration by definition
is closely related to chance, for it is the very thing that cannot be controlled,
manufactured, or premeditated in any way. It is what falls into the mind
(according to the German term Einfall), unsolicited, unprepared,
unrehearsed, coming from nowhere. This obviously answers the definition
of chance as “the absence of any known reason why an event should turn
out one way rather than another.”
[The American College Dictionary].
Actually the composer has come to distrust his inspiration because it is
not really as innocent as it was supposed to be, but rather conditioned
by a tremendous body of recollection, tradition, training, and experience.
In order to avoid the dictations of such ghosts, he prefers to set up
an impersonal mechanism which will furnish, according to premeditated patterns,
unpredictable situations. Ligeti characterizes this state of affairs very
well: “We stand in front of a row of slot machines
[“Automaten”]
and we can choose freely into which one we want to drop our coin, but at
the same time we are forced to choose one of them. One constructs his own
prison according to his wishes and is afterwards equally freely active
within those walls—that is: not entirely free, but not totally
constrained
either. Thus automation does not function as the opposite of free decision:
rather free selection and mechanization are united in the process of selecting
the mechanism.” In other words, the creative act takes place in an area
in which it has so far been entirely unsuspected, namely in setting up
the serial statements (selecting the slot machines). What happens afterwards
is predetermined by the selection of the mechanism, but not premeditated
except as an unconscious result of the predetermined operations. The unexpected
happens by necessity. The surprise is built in.
Ernst Krenek
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