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The basic philosophic fallacy of the Schillinger
point of view is of course the assumption that the
“correspondences” between
patterns of art and patterns of the natural world can be mechanically translated
from one to the other by the use of geometry or numbers. When this conception
is carried to even greater lengths in the belief that music will stimulate
reactions if it follows the graphic projection of geometric patterns of
“mechanical and biomechanical trajectories,” one can only
feel that the
whole idea is arbitrary in the extreme. It comes from a Pythagoreanism
that is quite out of place as a primary consideration in art music. Wherever
this system has been successfully used, it has been by composers who were
already well trained enough to distinguish the musical results from the
nonmusical ones.
Elliott Carter
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