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In Reply to: RE: Interesting analogy posted by Penguin on January 21, 2015 at 10:22:37
Mozart is a difficult composer, but his music wouldn't be so great if he weren't! Anyway, in my experience, the key to appreciating a difficult composer is to listen to lots of his work (and music in a similar style). At some point it all clicks, and then you're in nirvana.
That being said, most experienced Mozart listeners will say that one of the remarkable things about Mozart is that his music *doesn't* seem forced or difficult, but seems to proceed naturally. It's artifice, of course, but he was the great master of it, as well as having a special affinity for the human voice, and probably the greatest melodist of all time (no accident that Tchaikovsky worshipped him). Maybe you're listening too analytically, trying too hard?
I think we know a lot about his character, his life was well documented and his letters are very revealing. He was ("Amadeus" notwithstanding) a serious man, with however a fun side. Sociable, somewhat childish, brilliant and witty, irresponsible, expressive and emotional, somewhat show-offish (think Leonard Bernstein), with an unfortunate tendency to badmouth rival composers but by the same token expressing enthusiasm and admiration for great ones like Haydn and Bach. He would gladly play for hours for those who wanted to listen. Contemporaries say that you had to hear him work out his ideas at the keyboard to appreciate the depth of his genius. And of course, through most of the career we know, he was young. He starts to mature as well all do at 30 and that of course can be heard in his music.
All in all, a wonderful man.
Follow Ups:
And I knew most of that, I read his biography, have tons of his music, and the only piece i actually enjoy from him is the Requiem, because it is so different. And i really have to be in the mood for even thatt, The rest, i could sell and never miss it. Just like you will never make me lament about the inner beauty of tensor math or the glory of the Maxwell equation. Good riddance i was so happy when i finally passed all the exams 30+ years ago, and was even happier when i learned that there is software for all that stuff.
Mozart is like that for me, I know his genius is towering over his generation, but for me it is hard work, just like math was in college, i practiced it enough i got it, passed the exam, with an A mind you, then had a drunken night with all my fellow sufferers and promptly forgot it all.
You kinda sound like my electrical science professor way back then, getting almost teary eyed when he explained to us that the Maxwell equations can describe any wave form! Not just electricity!.Ha!... and then he promptly started into optical phenomena, and how the lights of distant starts can be described around things and how the Maxwell equations explained some esoteric fringe aspect of the whole thing, while I was busy scribbling all his hap hazard equations down and wondering if the second line had div as opposed rot. He was frenetic...Then he just turned to us and asked "isn't this magnificent?" we all looked at him in disbelief, he threw the chalk on the desk and ran out mumbling that we were just cattle, and he should not be subjected to morons like us. Guess what was one of the exam questions...explain the phenomena on the surface of an optical flat using the Maxwell equations. 50% of the class never knew that an optical flat is used for surface flatness measurements using interference patterns. I was lucky. Back in the eighties i was still reluctant to buy cassettes with Maxwell printed on them, but they sounded better than most.
Me disliking Mozart does not make hime any lesser of a musical giant, just as me disliking Maxwell does not make him any less important in engineering, heck without him we would not be able to have this exchange, but i still shudder when i have to write his name.
dee
;-D
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
I loved tensors. And Maxwell's equations do have a remarkable elegance to them! But I was never really interested in the working out of problems of the kind you mentioned. Tended to snooze through those parts of the lecture. OTOH, while my formal musical training is limited to childhood piano lessons, I find music theory fascinating and could learn it endlessly. Perhaps because it connects to something that I love?
Which I guess brings me to the disconnect I'm sensing here. As intriguing as I find tensors, I experience them as mathematical abstractions, brain teasers of a kind. Music of course is equally mathematical, and can be approached as math. But as a non-musician I experience it intuitively and emotionally. They miracle of music -- that broken symmetries can make us soar and cry!
Sure, if I look at the notes on the page I see thirds and fifths and tonics and subdominants, and time signatures and keys and leading tones. But those are usually the last things on my mind when I listen.
So maybe I'm misreading this, I almost get the sense that you're struggling to listen analytically, rather than letting your intuition do the lifting. In my experience with difficult works or difficult composers with whom I'm not particularly familiar, the best thing to do is just to listen repeatedly until it clicks. I had to do that with Brahms, to whom I had little exposure growing up; his works sounded like noise to me when I first listened to them. And I also had to do it with unusually difficult works by composers with whom I was familiar, like the Missa Solemnis. For me, the learning process had nothing to do with conscious analysis, or a struggle to understand.
Certainly, for someone who mastered E&M (even if he then forgot it (not that it isn't there in cold storage, ready to be resurrected if you ever need it), this isn't a question of adequate brain power! I think you may be applying the wrong part of your brain, or perhaps being too frustrated by the fact that the works won't yield their riches right away, as the works of lesser composers do.
Take for example the Bartok String quartets, I cannot think anything much more complex than that, and that music just grabs me drags me along for the jagged ride beats me up messes up my brain and spits me out on the other end exhausted from the experience, and i did not once stop to think about the complexity because i connect with the soul of the music on an emotional level. I never managed to get to Mozart that way, just when i get close to it he gets into some snarky crap that drags me out of the emotional experience and makes me concentrate on the sudden WTF or some other crap. Like being taken for a tango, just to be kicked in the groin. :). I cannot explain why. I am not trying to follow scores, i suck at it anyway, or analyze the structure of his music, he shoves his stuff in my face when i least expect it, and i hate that.That is why he and i never will get along :) But that is cool, i do not have to like him for him to be great, Don't even ask me what i think of Tchaikovsky :).
edit: One more analogy. I know how much skill and design and ingenuity goes making a a Louis VIX curved side commode it is mind boggling, and i know what it takes to make a George Nakashima or James Krenov piece or the rocker of Sam Malouf. The later pieces may look simpler, but could not have been made in the time of Louis VIX, furniture making had to evolve to that point. And you know what I would never want to own a Louis VIX piece, i cannot stand the way they look :).Gladly would have any of the mid century masterpieces.
dee
;-D
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Edits: 01/23/15
Well, actually, I don't much like Tchaikovsky either. Great melodist but his understanding of structure was rudimentary, to say the least. I think he's at is best in relatively unstructured works like the Nutcracker.
I think Mozart's work is far more complex than Bartok's. It's the complexity of genius -- maybe profundity or intellectual depth would be a better word. Or what a professor of mine once referred to as the "density of ideas." A superficially simple work can contain far more information than a superficially complex one.
The curious thing is that you seem to be reacting to some of the very features of Mozart's music that I most love about it! Those rabbit-out-of-the-hat moments seem to me the essence of great music. Anyone can write music that's predictable. To do something that's new and clever and works so brilliantly that you can't imagine how it could have been done differently is a very rare gift. When I hit one of those moments in Mozart, I get chills down my spine. With someone like Wagner, you wait maybe 15 minutes for a great idea. With Mozart, particularly the late Mozart, the flow of ideas is constant. By the time he's reached his peak with Don Giovanni, the flow of genius is so overwhelming that you're held in some kind of trance or rapture for hours. It's hard to imagine what would have happened had he lived, it almost feels like the human mind couldn't survive anything greater. The only other composer who has that effect on me is Bach.
But I think many would disagree with you that Tchaikovsky's understanding of structure was "rudimentary". Speaking for myself, I would rather hear just about any Tchaikovsky symphony than any Mozart symphony. Can you summarize your understanding of structure? (BTW, this is not a trick question - just trying to understand your assertions.)
I agree with you that anyone can write music that's predictable - and Mozart himself wrote a lot of it!
Hi Chris,
That's a tall order, for two reasons. One is that this is primarily something that I hear, not something that I intellectualize. The other is that even with my very limited knowledge of musicology, a summary of my understanding would be pretty darn long! But see this colorful analysis of the finale of the Jupiter Symphony to see a clear example of the kind of thing I'm talking about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._41_%28Mozart%29
And also Grove's very perceptive comments. Tchaikovsky was a master of melody and harmony, but as I believe we've discussed before, Brahms mystified him and he couldn't hear the genius in Bach. I think that sophisticated structure was the forte of the Germans, after the Renaissance, at any rate. Tchaikovsky's peculiar genius lay elsewhere.
We are not comparing apples to orangutans :). To me complexity in Mozart's music is like interior of a rococo church there is all this stuff everywhere and Bartok is more like a building architected by Frank Ghery. But there is 200 years of evolution in music that took place between the two of them.It would be a better brain teaser to imagine that a genius like Mozart was born around the turn of the 20th century and had the clarified ideas and the diversity to draw on like Bartok and Stravinsky had, what kind of music would that be?
dee
;-D
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Edits: 01/23/15 01/23/15 01/23/15 01/23/15
That's a very interesting question and one I've asked myself many times. I tend to think that a 20th century Mozart would have wasted his genius as Schoenberg did. Genius never exists apart from culture, and the culture of the early 20th century wasn't conducive to writing great music. The modernist idiom was too limiting, consisting as it does essentially of a thoughtless rejectionism that reduces ultimately to the freedom to do anything that hasn't been shown to work. Which, unfortunately, omits everything that has been shown to! Since music isn't arbitrary, but is heavily constrained by physics, mathematics, and human perception and psychology, the freedom to screech, moan, and wail wasn't freedom at all.
I have Bersteins box of the Mahler symphonies. The sound seems acceptable and the music also, but I'm not knowledgible at all about the preferred version(s). Help?
I am not the guy to ask. never claimed to be a Mahler aficionado :).
dee
;-D
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
quote by Kurt Vonnegut
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