On 11 Jan 2007 at 12:09, Kim Patrick Clow wrote: > On 1/11/07, Johannes Gebauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The problem with pre-classical and early classical music is quite > > complex. There are very good reasons why we find a lot of that music > > boring today. > > Could you list some of those reasons? > > I've always been curious how the "preclassical" music was able to > become the musical rage of the time, because in many ways-- it seems > so boring compared to what was going on in the baroque.
I am convinced that the Galant style was a very rhetorical style, much like the French Baroque, where you have to get the gestures and nuance right or it just sounds terrible. It takes a lot of style to get the music off the page, and most of the recordings of this repertory have not been by people who've absorbed that still. > My work on > Christoph Graupner's music reinforces this hunch, because in many > ways, his sinfonias are more interesting than sinfonias that were > being written just a few years later in Vienna. And while all the > Viennese composers get credit for their innovations I think you're running off the rails here. The whole idea of "who did what first" is a discredited, 19th-century style of approaching music. It's not innovations that keep music from being boring -- it's much more a matter of having musical materials and processes in the piece of music that hold our interest. > using wind > instruments in the symphony, Graupner was doing it consistently > decades earlier (in the baroque). Haydn's use of timpani and brass in > a slow movement in the late 1780s set the musical world reeling (see > H.C. Robbins Landon's discussion about this); but Graupner was using > that innovative technique as early as 1730. Graupner was also using > tympani solos to make thematic statements in a symphony (Beethoven > typically gets credit for that with the 9th). > > So here you have specific instances of compositional techniques that > were "invented" during the baroque; skip the "early preclassical" only > to be picked up at the end of the classical period or romantic > periods. This kind of thing goes on and on. The whole "Beethoven" sound that we associate with his early period is just the Viennese sound, not something specific to Beethoven (though he had his own flavor of it that is highly individual), and many of the "innovations" that are used to teach Schubert in Music History 101 courses were just common Viennese techniques (e.g., common-tone modulation, which is a great favorite of Anton Eberl, who died in 1807). In the search for "who did it first" many people make connections between the pieces they know, and then assume that there's no music that's important that they've overlooked. I once read some very embarrassing notes on a recording of the Beethoven masses that made a huge point of what a cool thing it was to bring back the music of the Kyrie for the Dona nobis pacem, and how this was a novel idea of Beethoven's. One need not delve into minor composers to find counter examples (Mozart's Coronation Mass is probably the most famous example of this that people would be likely to know), but this was actually a *convention* of the so-called "Viennese" mass (i.e., as opposed to the Neapolitan mass -- the distinction between the two types is whether the mass movements are broken down into subsections (Neapolitan), or if the Gloria and the Credo are one single movement, as in the "Viennese" model). There was nothing truly specific to Vienna about this, though the edicts about church music from Joseph II around 1780ish (he called for simplification and the removal of "operatic" elements from church music, a direct stab at the Neapolitan tradition, in fact) would lead to a less florid tradition of mass settings in territories under Austrian dominion. Anyway, the whole point is that "who did it first" is only meaningful when you know 100% of the music composed, and that's never going to happen, so it's completely stupid and hopeless to ever worry about it. > There is a wonderful Benda harpsichord SACD on CPO. And the liner > notes talk about this notion specifically-- there was never really > any single block of compositional technique in place in 18th century > Europe: ideas about the forms and how to compose would come and go. > Some of these would influence other composers; and the technique would > have a unbroken line of use. Other techniques could be developed by a > composer, then only die out, never used again. Yes, as with the term "pre-classical" (which has always bothered me since I know that JC Bach did not sit down at his desk and say to himself "I think I'll write a pre-classical symphony today!"), it is later historiographers who are imposing this on the music, trying to come up with patterns. This is largely the result of an obsession with tracing "influence" (another overrated topic in music discourse), as true influence is almost impossible to trace. > Comments about early Mozart being "boring": I do find it interesting > that the most cosmopolitan and jaded composers from the 18th century, > who no doubt heard compositions of many other composers, always > describe the young Mozart's music in very complimentary terms. And you > never see the word "boring" used. I don't know that Mozart's youthful music was praised except as the achievement of a child, basically a trained monkey -- anything would have been remarkable, no matter how far it was from the standards one would expect of an adult. This is a topic that really interests me, and I've done some work in trying to figure out how Mozart's early keyboard/violin sonatas compare to those of his contemporaries. I use the repertory found in the Breitkopf catalogs as point of comparison, but, unfortunately, much of it is unavailable except in original sources, so I haven't gotten terribly far with the project. -- 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
