Feeling music
Sir: Michael Kimins (Letters, 4 November) writes to refute my contention (Arts, 14 October) that music is intrinsically power- less to express anything at all, forwarding his own fanciful and unsubstantiated theory that emotion (or the embodiment of it) is somehow 'held' in the written music and `released' when it is performed. His main argument, as I understand it, is that because a composer writes music in order to communicate something, then that something must be transmitted to the lis- tener by the music itself. What a composer is thinking he is doing or trying to do when he is composing is totally irrelevant here. The question is: does music express feelings from within itself, or does the listener man- ufacture his own feelings in response to it? Since feelings are a human attribute and since Mr Kimins himself admits that listen- ing to music is a 'subjective experience', there can only be one possible answer to that question.
Alexander Waugh
Souldern Road, Hammersmith, London W6
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