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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Just to be clear. . . posted by Chris from Lafayette on April 20, 2012 at 17:43:56:
I had in mind the 18th-century description, "uniformity amidst variety." In a more modern understanding, one could place that in the mathematical framework of information theory, and refer to entropy reduction; variety corresponds to entropy, or randomness, and uniformity corresponds to the patterns or symmetries that allow us to reduce the apparent randomness of a work.
Have you ever read Meyer's "Meaning in Music and Information Theory"? It's available online and I think it's one of the best essays I've ever read:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/427154?uid=3739576&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=55863967073
I also strongly recommend his earlier book, Emotion and Meaning in Music, to anyone interested in the aesthetic foundations of music.
Anyway, I'm referring to the structure of a work, not its emotionality. Sudden shifts in emotionality began to appear late in the baroque era. I don't see those as an impediment, if not too abrupt, as perhaps they were in the roccoco works of CPE Bach. The Frankensteinish piecing-togther of disparate structural elements is to me a sign of mediocre intellect and lack of taste; a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Except that the interesting thing about Tchaikovsky is that the elements are frequently inspired, the thoughts of genius; they just don't relate.
When I say that Tchaikovsky's development is perfunctory, I'm not referring to anything having to do with the heart. Much mediocre music (and I don't apply that word to Tchaikovsky, at least at his best) is heartfelt -- it emotes all over the place. It has a heart, but no brain. One hears such music in the supermarket, each syllable dripping with expression like a wet rag, yet never half so moving as the supposedly cerebral B minor Mass, or Hammerklavier. As I say, I don't put Tchaikovsky in that class -- he is one of the musical greats -- but neither do I rank him with the handful of German masters who could create such structures.
I think we just react differently to Tchaikovsky's modification of Bach's theme. It doesn't glare at me as it does at you. I often do have that type of reaction to hokey jazz rearrangements of Bach, or even the over-eager addition of ornamentation to music that, we are told by a student of Bach's, differed from other music of the time in having all of the notes written out.
By the way, I agree with you (and Tchaikovsky) about Wagner's arid stretches. As Rossini put it, "Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour." Given a choice between less-inspired passages, I'd much prefer to listen to Tchaikovsky, who's are, at least, relatively brief. That's why I added the qualifier "at his best" to my original statement.
Anyway, as interesting as I find theory, I'm not using it, or any philosophical assumption, to judge these works. I'm just using the theory to try to explain why I react the way I do. In Bach or Beethoven or Brahms, I hear a wonderful, remarkably complex structure that keeps me interested, carries me forward, touches me deeply. In those developmental passages of Tchaikovsky's, I grow bored and restless, search for the exits, because his thematic variations lack inspiration, or he throws in elements that aren't intellectually related, which is exactly the same thing, only noisier.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Just to be clear. . . - josh358 18:48:01 04/20/12 (6)
- Thanks for the link, but. . . - Chris from Lafayette 23:14:38 04/20/12 (5)
- RE: Thanks for the link, but. . . - josh358 05:23:05 04/21/12 (4)
- RE: Thanks for the link, but. . . - Chris from Lafayette 08:37:18 04/21/12 (3)
- RE: Thanks for the link, but. . . - josh358 08:52:44 04/22/12 (2)
- Interesting - I never met Jonathan Berger - Chris from Lafayette 13:50:50 04/22/12 (1)
- RE: Interesting - I never met Jonathan Berger - josh358 14:41:35 05/18/12 (0)
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