Mozart as Trash

• Divergence in Gestalt therapy? by Timothy C. McNamara, 3/8/97
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    • Myths of Time by J. Richard White, 3/21/97
      
      

I was struck with the use of Mozart to illustrate these thoughts on time. Perhaps you could follow up on this some and in response to the questions it raises for me.

Whether or not someone identified portions of Mozart to be, in his opinion, trash, many others have benefitted from those portions. There was value in them; afterall, Mozart was regarded a genius. His trash was far beyond the most careful life's work of others. I recall a phrase I heard once, source forgotten, "One man's trash is another man's prune danish!"

Then, you said, "the 'trash' of Mozart is that part of his work that does not happen to be inspired by immediate experience or that part that did not benefit from due consideration." This seems a weird juxtaposition, and I'm wanting more comment. Do you conceive of inspiration from immediate experience to be a sudden, unrehearsed kind of thing? It seems to me to be more related to the quick response than to what you allude to next, the thoughtful consideration. If so, the statement seems to imply that the trash in Mozart is what did not come by means of sudden arrival or patient concentration, which in turn seems expansive enough to cover a polarity. So, I'm left wondering about it. If this is so, what is left in Mozart's work? If we apply the metaphor to people's dialogue, what remains if we excuse the spontaneous and the deliberate?

Personally, I return to the sense that these things are relative. One man may take weeks to contemplate something, and his contemplations, in every permutation, may well be molded by his spontaneity. Are we talking about some kind of goal, some kind of "ought" if we imply that only finished thinking should be shared with others? One man's trash...Another may choose to share his current thinking, in process, which, though apparently, and relatively spontaneous, is still contemplative in the sense that he's given it some thought rather than merely responding from his viscera. Who is to say where the value resides in these two approaches? I suspect there is a little prune danish in it all.

• Misspeak by Er Riemann, 3/22/97