On 27 Jan 2006 at 15:40, dhbailey wrote: > The whole notion of playing music in public performance by composers > who had died 200 years ago is something new, something foreign to > Mozart's whole outlook on music, which was that music written by > living composers should be heard.
Well, that concept didn't develop long after Mozart's death. It was definitely in place by 1820-30 or so. And, of course, Bach was actually well-known to a lot of people, even those outside Leipzig, though a very limited repertory of his music, long before Mendelssohn's supposed revival. Bach performed Palestrina. Mozart knew quite a bit of music more than 50 years old even while still working in Salzburg, music that was part of the church tradition there. And he was involved in a circle of musicians in Vienna that were very interested in reviving older music (e.g., the Mozart arrangements of Handel). There also seems to have been significant interest in Vienna c. 1800 in older music, as evidenced by the Traeg catalogs, which listed substantial bodies of older music for sale, much of it not Viennese in origin. So, the idea that historical consciousness is entirely a modern concept is simply untrue. The major change is in the extent of the performance of older music. In Bach or Mozart or Beethoven's time, older music was known and performed, but was in the minority -- most of the performances were of newly-composed music. Today, the ratio is exactly backwards to the first half of he 19th century, with programming consisting primarily of old music, with the occasional leavening of new music. Of course, that's not quite as true as it once was. Ensembles like Eighth Blackbird don't perform much older music at all, and any number of groups dedicate themselves to performing new music almost exclusively (sometimes with a leavening of older music). It's the high-profile, big-budget organizations, like the big 5 orchestras and the major opera companies that tend to be musical museums. And, of course, the US is aberrant in comparison to European countries in this regard. Seems to me that things are not quite as cut-and-dried today or in the past as the rhetoric would have us believe. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
