Walter Piston/Leon Kirchner

In his program notes for the first performance Walter Piston described this particular “adventure,” and typically it dealt with the specific ensemble for which he was writing. It is known that no two orchestras sound alike, and that the same orchestra sound. differently under different conductors. The composer of orchestral music must be aware of this, and his mental image of the sound of his written notes has to admit a certain flexibility. This image is in a sense a composite resulting from all his experience in hearing orchestral sound, whether produced by one or two instruments or by the entire orchestra in tutti. While writing my Sixth Symphony, I came to realize that this was a rather special situation in that I was writing for one designated orchestra, one that I had grown up with, and that I knew intimately. Each note set down sounded in the mind with extraordinary clarity, as though played immediately by those who were to perform the work. On several occasions it seemed as though the melodies were being written by the instruments themselves as I followed along. I refrained from playing even a single note of this symphony on the piano. Leon Kirchner wrote in a 1963 Boston Symphony program note: “I have attested it as true in my deepest soul and I contemplate its beauty with incredible and ravishing delight.” So Kepler greeted the harmonious system of the universe as portrayed by Copernicus. If, in this sense, the quasi-arithmeticians, the new aesthetic engineers of music, were to greet the creative act, what wonderful aesthetic pleasure we could realize in the imaginative invention of their scores. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is my feeling that many of us, dominated by the fear of self-expression, seek the superficial security of current style and fad-worship and make a fetish of complexity, or with puerile grace denude simplicity; Idea, the precious ore of art, is lost in the jungle of graphs, prepared tapes, feedbacks, and cold stylistic minutiae. "An artist must create a personal cosmos, a verdant world in continuity with tradition, further fulfilling man’s “awareness,” his “degree of consciousness,” and bringing new subtilization, vision, and beauty to the elements of experience. It is in this way that Idea, powered by conviction and necessity, creates its own style and the singular, momentous structure capable of realizing its intent."