When they just send you music, it’s not so bad, I know that from my own experience. You can glance through a score rather quickly, particularly if you see straight away that it’s hopeless. Of course, if you want to experience the music fully, you must sightread it in the amount of time that it would take to perform, that’s the only way to derive real satisfaction from reading it. But that’s a method to be used only with good music. It’s torture to ‘listen’ with your eyes to bad music. You just glance through it. But what do you do when a talentless composer comes and plays his music from beginning to end? / The very worst is when the composer is neither a charlatan nor a scoundrel, but a diligent person with little talent. In those cases you listen and think, what can I possibly say to him? The music is written conscientiously, the composer did everything that he could, it’s just that he can do very little. You might say he can do almost nothing. He was taught to write notes grammatically at the Conservatoire, and that is all he can do. Yet such composers are often quite nice and often quite needy. << less