Dear Ray,

As I think about your letter, for which I thank you, there comes to the 
forefront of my mind the thought how fortunate I am, finally to have 
encountered someone like yourself to whom I can address the various questions 
about music and its history that have puzzled me for a long time.

For reasons that I don't understand, I never became proficient with any musical
instrument. Despairing that I could not become a musician, I started to write.
I have been writing for 72 years, initially by hand, then with a typewriter,
and after computers became available, with an electronic keyboard. The 
writing of the first 38 years - of none except "historical" value - is 
lodged unread in numerous cardboard boxes; the writing of the last 34 years
is more accessible because of being stored in computer files. I have self-
published 6 volumes of novels - all in German - of which not a single one has 
been purchased except by myself; a seventh is ready for publication as is a
cycle of 186 sonnets, again all in German.

All this I relate not for purposes of advertising, at least not consciously,
but because my persistent writing in the absence of readers, which I interpret
as a discontinuity between my "self" and the "public", between the inside
and the outside, between the subjective and the objective, seems to me to 
point to a focal issue for the history of music about music and its history, 
where music is a fundamental exercise of the human spirit which leaves faint 
fragmentary traces in a "classical" tradition, but most which is lost - 
like the snowflakes on tree branches outside my window that melt and evaporate 
in the sunshine of a warm afternoon even before the coming of night which 
might preserve them if only for yet one other day.

In raising this fundamental question about the past preservation of but a 
fraction of music that has been composed, I seem to contradict my denunciation 
of history as insubstantial shadow of an inaccessible past. I would argue, 
however, that the contradiction is only seeming, that the "reality" of the
past is indeed irrevocably inaccessible, but that the "present" in which
we live and work encompasses the "inaccessible" past in an overtly spurious
manner. In order to make the present (Gegenwart) meaningful we cannot avoid
wrestling with the admittedly fragmentary traces of the past; and if in
wrestling with "the past" our efforts are doomed to failure, so ultimately
is everything else we try to accomplish.

"Wie ist das klein, womit wir ringen,
was mit uns ringt, wie ist das groß;
ließen wir, ähnlicher den Dingen,
uns so vom großen Sturm bezwingen, -
wir würden weit und namenlos.

"Was wir besiegen, ist das Kleine,
und der Erfolg selbst macht uns klein.
Das Ewige und Ungemeine
will nicht von uns gebogen sein.
Das ist der Engel, der den Ringern
des Alten Testaments erschien:
wenn seiner Widersacher Sehnen
im Kampfe sich metallen dehnen,
fühlt er sie unter seinen Fingern
wie Saiten tiefer Melodien.

"Wen dieser Engel überwand,
welcher so oft auf Kampf verzichtet,
der geht gerecht und aufgerichtet
und groß aus jener harten Hand,
die sich, wie formend, an ihn schmiegte.
Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein.
Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte
von immer Größerem zu sein.
  (Rilke, Der Schauende, Buch der Bilder)

Please forgive my insolent presumption to resuscitate the language of your 
childhood. If you like, I can try to skip Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Heine, Kleist, 
Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Lessing ... but it's difficult for me to do so.

To return to my question: my very tentative conclusion is that the 
historical preservation of musical compositions, indeed, the preservation of
all species of art, my own trivial efforts not excluded, is but a matter of
chance; of a randomness no different from the randomness of the encounter of 
the disparate gametes that serves as the only explanation of the individality
of each of us. 

That is my question to you: as an historian of music can you identify the
qualities of a musical composition or the characteristics of its prevalent
society that accounts for its being adopted into the tradition as opposed
to its being ignored and abandoned to obscurity?

Perhaps you will find an opportunity to tell me; but even if nothing more
comes of our exchange of ideas, I am already grateful for you having given
me the opportunity to ask.

Best wishes both to yourself and Paula.

Jochen