"The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it"
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Creativity, Lukas Foss insists, isn’t lightning. It’s correspondence. By likening “the creative act” to writing a letter, he drags art down from the altar and back onto a desk where intention, audience, and delivery matter. A letter is personal, directed, time-bound; it presumes a recipient and therefore a responsibility. Foss’s analogy quietly rejects the romantic myth of the composer as a mystical conduit “taking dictation” from the muse. Instead, it frames composition as an act of choice: you decide what you’re trying to communicate, and you decide who you’re talking to, even if the “to whom” is an imagined listener, a future performer, a community, or a tradition you’re answering.
The subtext is almost managerial, and that’s the point. Calling a letter “a project” turns inspiration into labor: planning, revision, clarity. Foss isn’t saying art must be literal or programmatic; he’s saying it must be intentional. The “unless you know” clause is a provocation aimed at vagueness dressed up as profundity. If you can’t name the target, you’re not composing so much as generating sound.
Contextually, Foss lived through modernism’s big ideological swings: serial rigor, postwar experimentation, the rise of chance procedures, and later, pluralism. His music moved among these worlds rather than swearing allegiance to one. The letter metaphor reads as a self-defense of craft amid avant-garde fashions that sometimes celebrated process over message. Foss argues for communication without pandering: art can be complex, but it shouldn’t be indifferent to being received.
The subtext is almost managerial, and that’s the point. Calling a letter “a project” turns inspiration into labor: planning, revision, clarity. Foss isn’t saying art must be literal or programmatic; he’s saying it must be intentional. The “unless you know” clause is a provocation aimed at vagueness dressed up as profundity. If you can’t name the target, you’re not composing so much as generating sound.
Contextually, Foss lived through modernism’s big ideological swings: serial rigor, postwar experimentation, the rise of chance procedures, and later, pluralism. His music moved among these worlds rather than swearing allegiance to one. The letter metaphor reads as a self-defense of craft amid avant-garde fashions that sometimes celebrated process over message. Foss argues for communication without pandering: art can be complex, but it shouldn’t be indifferent to being received.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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