Without writing, words as such have no visual presence, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might “call” them back—“recall” them. But there is nowhere to “look” for them. They have no focus and no trace .... They are occurrences, events. 

This quote from Walter Jackson Ong, philosopher and cultural anthropologist, could, for the purposes of composition, be applied to the musical fabric with all its internal organisation and grammar. The acts of (re)calling a sonic event will take place in the piece both within it and within what we might call our musical past, in the same way that we are able to tap into both individual and collective memory. 

Mateusz Śmigasiewicz