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The essay entitled Keller's causes by Robin Holloway includes the following paragraph.

 

The trouble lies in Keller’s poor view of what the listener can take out from music, as well as what the composer can put in. High-calibre composing in any idiom is achieved by an artist’s intensive concentration, however subconscious, on his own procedure, even when the Schubert, Rossini, Wolf in question is habitually in a burning hurry. A specified clot of material is in play, much of it stereotyped and formulaic. Naturally it will be germane to itself, and throw up contrasts (if contrasts are needed—they aren’t obligatory) that are pertinent, not arbitrary. ‘Unity’ can be laid on with a trowel, but is more often supple and organic, and sometimes evasive, even fugitive. Its appreciation is a matter of intuition as much as knowledge—one feels ‘this is right, here; that’s a good twist; that’s really neat’ (etc., etc.—gormless phrases for complex processes of pleasure and perception). It can be interesting to have such delicate apprehensions explored and confirmed by sensitive analysis; though if they are not already nascently perceived, the music is not being fully heard. But of these intimate relations between composer and listener, Functional Analysis shows not a trace. A very few elementary connections are underlined with crashing obviousness, while the subtle truths escape. In all cases the original work flings its contrasts around more freely and integrates them with greater audacity, disdaining pun and paradox except where they, too, have aesthetic and expressive value.

 

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