Composers, including the great Tchaikovsky, produce music.
So do music boxes. When we look inside such a device, we find a drum with a pattern of bumps scattered about its surface. We also find a set of metal prongs lined up side-by-side, perfectly aligned, each prong positioned less than one bump away from the surface of the drum. As the drum turns, bumps hit prongs, prongs resonate, and music is made. The ``bump-and-prong engineer," let us assume, is able to design and build some remarkable music boxes.
Many would also say that brains produce music. (``What unprecedented forces conspired to produce, in Mozart's case, that greatest of all musical brains?" -- this is a query most find perfectly meaningful.) If we had explored Tchaikovsky's brain as he formed his sixth symphony, we would have found a wondrous webwork of neurons, spewing chemicals across synapses and pulsing with electricity. Let's suppose that the ``brain engineer," who proudly weaves together networks a good deal more ``wet" than the materials molded by his bump-and-prong friend, is able to design and build some remarkable music-making brains.
Now let's imagine a little contest between the bump-and-prong engineer, the brain engineer, and Tchaikovsky himself. After each searches in solitude for the musical muse, our trio is reunited and brought before a learned audience assembled to judge their creations (the two engineers to be judged by the output of their artifacts). In a stunning coincidence, the box, the brain, and the composer present the very same work: Tchaikovsky's sixth. And in each case, the reaction is the same: the audience jeers -- just as it did when this symphony debuted in St. Petersburg on October 28, 1893.
The two engineers are utterly deflated, and have no answer for those hard-nosed critics who snidely ask how it could be that all their ``inspired" sequestration could have been for naught. Not so Tchaikovsky. He replies:
The idea came to me for a new symphony, this time with a program, but a program that must remain secret. Let those who can, guess it. The work is entitled `A Program Symphony - No. 6'. I have shed tears while composing it in my mindI have put my entire soul into this work
No. 6 is replayed. ``What is the secret!?" comes the collective cry. Tchaikovsky relents: ``In my sixth are hid all the raw emotions of life and death. Listen!" Tchaikovsky retitles his work The Pathétique; the music is played yet again. And this time audiences exult and weep, overwhelmed by the beauty of the secret now grasped.