The Charm of Impossibilities

I am sitting here trying to write microtonal polytempo music on Sibelius. I have found the most aggravating, patience-requiring method of composing in the history of music. I have spent the last two hours trying to fill three measures of music – largely because Sibelius will not allow a pitch bend command to be pasted onto a note in a tuplet. If Schoenberg really was trying to make it impossible for his students to compose, as Cage claimed he said, he would have made them do it this way. Future generations of composers will look at my music and say, “I’m sure glad he did it, because I certainly wouldn’t have tried.”