text: A Nazi and a Buddhist each write a symphony. The Nazi forces out the full potential of the orchestra, utilizing all of its colors and dynamics in a long, grandiloquent development of themes and textures that culminate in a glorious climax of sound and emotion. The Buddhist creates a short, spare piece that utilizes a reduced orchestra and foregoes concepts such as development and variation in order to facilitate an eternal moment of pure experience. Each composer is inspired by his philosophy: it is almost as if Nazism created the Nazi’s piece and Buddhism created the Buddhist’s. Years later, a young composer discovers the symphonies of the Nazi and the Buddhist. She does not know of the composers’ convictions; she merely ran into these pieces by scrolling through YouTube. She is entranced by both of these pieces for separate reasons. She particularly enjoys how each composer masterfully utilizes the orchestra: the Nazi’s kaleidoscopic stretching and twisting of the ensemble’s dynamic, range, and color; the Buddhist’s ethereal and subtle contemplation of sonic concepts. These two pieces begin to mix within the young composer, and soon she begins work on her own symphony, directly inspired by her contact with the Nazi’s and the Buddhist’s products. What eventually results in an intriguing combination of the two pieces, a sort of medium-length work that, despite its virtuosity, seems to simmer on the subject of the orchestra itself, that expands and contracts and swirls, yet never seems to leave a certain space. Decades pass, and some well-established music historians and theoreticians take it upon themselves to trace the development of the young composer’s piece, as it formed itself in her psyche. Their work culminates in a shocking thesis: due to its direct influences, the young composer’s symphony represents the first Nazi-Buddhist music in existence. This unleashes a flood of political strife within music academia. Should the work--and the composer herself--continued to be used as an example of refined orchestration, now that its ideological bases have been revealed to be some sort of grotesque chimera between two opposing philosophies (including Nazism)? Some professors stop mentioning the composer in their courses; others go farther and blatantly denounce her work, caricaturing the flaws of the symphony and attributing these flaws to the composer’s miscegenous philosophy. Musicology courses take an opposite tack by highlighting her as a point of interest within the history of Western composition, glancing at her as though at a curious artifact, but no longer do they dwell on her musical contributions. Despite this, the new generation of composers, particularly those sufficiently distanced from academia, continue to listen and study the composer and her symphony. They know neither her history, her ideologies, nor her influences, and those who do know--forget. They only know the music. A collective of some of the more philosophically-minded among this generation posit their own thesis on her symphony: because she did not know of the philosophy and ideology behind her influences, the young composer had not allowed these philosophies to write the piece for her, but rather the orchestra itself had written this piece through her. These composers hope that the spirit of the orchestra will also influence them in such a way.