Hey, some lovely thoughts, cheers. I think what's going on with Mozart is play. Far from being frivolous play can be a very serious exploration of form, but of

Hey, some lovely thoughts, cheers. I think what's going on with Mozart is play. Far from being frivolous play can be a very serious exploration of form, but often unstructured and, from the outside, incomprehensible. Robin Williams comes to mind as someone in that "play zone" with words. Maybe Moxart didn't want/need to, or never found a way to incorporate psychological life into his music. Indeed, maybe it was a distraction from it. For me, Beethoven is better explained by struggle. Sometimes the beauty of an artist is in the fact that they're not technically that brilliant, or they face an impediment. Overcoming is a primary intrinsic motive, and they go on not merely to overcompensate but achieve a level of unique brilliance. Django Reinhardt's unique guitar, incorporating two missing fingers, comes to mind. Perhaps both can be understood as states of flow that feel right for that particular artist. Not sure how much Mihály C14i's "flow" concept is applied to whole life experiences, but some people clearly find their sweet-spot in the struggle zone - overcoming themselves - for example as a mountaineer. Perhaps tangentially, absence is an amazing device. I wrote about it in designing sound, because an implied, missing thing is actually a very common device for sound designers, who often need to work like magicians, carefully (mis)directing the listener. If done well it can lead to assumption, where the audience fully believe the missing thing to be literally there. A revealed assumption can then be used, which may be shocking or funny, for example via the crafty cinematography of Tak Fujimoto in Shyamalan's Sixth Sense, we assume by implied interactions that Bruce Willis is in the same world as everyone else, until the sting. Mozart putting in that last bar of explicit melody is playfully rubbing our noses in our assumption