Post by Fuggle on Jan 30, 2006 14:22:20 GMT -5
What Mozart and Sid Vicious have in common
Stephen Brown
It is true that one doesn’t normally speak
of Mozart and Sid Vicious in the same breath, but they do have this in common: primitivism. Rock’n’roll began as a primitivist movement, and it renews itself with mini-primitivisms, of which punk is just one example. To see Mozart as a primitivist is a little harder, since his style is so identified with the civilized and the rational, things we think of as anti-primitive, and yet the Classical movement in music, like its companion neoclassicism in art, owed everything to the primitivist desire to begin anew by stripping away the false and inessential. Écrasez l’infâme. To the Baroque’s heavy sauces, multiple courses, and thickly layered combinations of tastes and textures, the Classical would propose a nouvelle cuisine.
Primitivism can take many forms, as many as there are ways of jettisoning excess baggage in an effort to get back to basics. The problem is to identify the infamy that must be suppressed, and then to find the way to crush it. The method that empowered the Enlightenment was the method of doubt, the Cartesian solution. Doubt everything until you are left with irreducible truths, and then build logically and deductively from those axioms, constructing a new order as you would construct a proof in geometry. This was the method that imbued Jefferson’s thinking: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. From such axioms you can build a nation. For Descartes, it was “Cogito, ergo sum”; for Beethoven, dah-dah-dah-dum. From those four notes you can generate a symphony.
A formula for producing a convincing Classical piece of music might look like this: start with an axiomatic idea, one so simple and basic that it is hard to imagine reducing it further. You’re in the key of C? Then create an outline of a C major chord. (A little more than half of Mozart’s piano sonatas start with an outline of the home-key chord.) That’s a little angular; balance it with a softer turn of phrase. Now balance those two bars with two other bars. Where the first two used chords I and V, the balancing phrase could start with IV and work its way back to I. Now we have four bars without much flow; balance them with another four bars of running scales. Keep in mind that everything must be clear and distinct: no thick textures, just melody and accompaniment. Continue along this path, follow the rules of sonata form, and you too can create a bad – but realistic – example of Classical-sounding music.
I recently attended a concert where I heard a lovely performance of the Concerto for Two Clarinets by Franz Krommer, born in 1759, just three years after Mozart. It followed the kind of Classical formula described above and bored me nearly senseless with its predictability. But I have heard Mozart’s Piano Sonata No 11 in A major (K331), the one that ends with the famous “Rondo alla Turca”, countless times; at one time in my youth I could play the piece from memory; and even today I do not find it boring. How can Krommer be boring on a first hearing and Mozart not boring on the 500th?
It might help first to take an excursion into opera, in particular Don Giovanni, where the dramatic contrasts (unwanted sexual advances and a duel to the death are followed by broad comedy – Don Giovanni: I’m here. Leporello: Who’s dead, you or the old guy? – within the first few minutes) disrupt the style’s balanced flow. The danger that Classical-era music runs, that of being swallowed by its own equanimity, is one that Mozart will avoid, if we let him. He knew that his music was balanced and rational-sounding, and could play with the quality as a theatrical effect. In the famous first-act duet, “Là ci darem la mano”, he gives Don Giovanni perfectly matched, bookend phrases to begin his argument. “Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì. Vedi, non è lontano . . . .” The logic is irrefutable, musically speaking. (This is one of the reasons Beethoven objected to Don Giovanni. It’s not just that he’s a bad character, it’s that the music so aids and abets him.) Zerlina replies with equally balanced phrases, and the duet would close down quickly were it not for the tail end of her answer, where she mistrusts him and her melody flies up, unbalancing the phrase. Don Giovanni comes back with a more forceful line, conventionally masculine in
Classical-period terms, with wider intervals and angular motion. Zerlina’s response is conventionally feminine, graceful and turning. Don Giovanni responds more forcefully still. The music goes back to the top, and the interchange begins to heat up as they answer on one another’s heels until Zerlina’s turning motive of equivocation is repeated three times, each time lower, signalling her acquiescence and fall. The two of them then chime together: “Let’s go, let’s go, to ease the pain of an innocent love” (by making it a carnal one, is the implication). Don Giovanni says “Let’s go!” again, on his own, to which Zerlina then responds not with a feminine fall, but with a woman-on-top, rising forte sixth, “Let’s GO!!” – the climax of the piece – before they calm down just a bit to end in harmony. What began in pure Classical balance ends with a major reversal. In an attentive production, Don Giovanni should look a
little taken aback at Zerlina’s enthusiasm. Who’s seducing whom?
The A Major Piano Sonata is if anything an even better illustration of rescue-from-equanimity. The first movement is a theme with variations, and the theme itself (modelled on a folk song) sits precisely under the hand, a note for each of the five fingers, pivoting on the C sharp under the middle finger: the epitome of equipoise. The left hand accompanies a tenth below. In between, a middle voice adds a pedal tone on the dominant, marking the beat. At the beginning of the theme’s second part, the melody pushes up a third, hinting at a more lyrical flight, but then comes dancing quickly down and returns to the opening phrases; a few notes are marked sforzando away from strong beats; and there is a short two-bar tag. These are the only elements that push away from symmetry; otherwise the mood is all luxe et calme. This is misleading. What follows is full of event, often expanding on those few asymmetric elements.
The first variation opens with a fragmented and stuttering, though still quiet and graceful, rhythm, which is then interrupted with drum-like patterns in the left hand. (This is the first instance of the Turkish March seeming to want to force its way early onto the stage.) The second variation, though more conventional, continues the tendency to bifurcate moods. A triplet pattern underpins it, but when that rhythm migrates to the right hand, the left hand starts a series of crushed notes that turn the piano into a de-tuned percussion instrument. The third variation – to my mind the most beautiful – moves to A minor. Instead of balanced periods, it consists of an unbroken stream of sixteenth-notes, almost a perpetuum mobile, the melody’s circular patterns giving it – at least in context – a distinctly Middle Eastern flavour. The second half of this variation begins with a lyrical leap that owes nothing to Turkey; it’s just one of those heart-stopping moments of beauty that Mozart occasionally tosses us without allowing us much time to savour it. Variation IV is by far the most conventional, with some hand-crossing which I suspect was the kind of showmanship Mozart used to exhibit as an eight-year-old when his father, on their trip to England, had him playing variations at 2s 6d per ticket every afternoon at the Swan and Hoop, Cornhill. The Adagio that follows is the least Classical of the variations, even though it begins with the signature Classical accompaniment, a clockwork Alberti bass. That pattern stops abruptly to shift into repeated drumbeats and scales. Classical composers liked isorhythm: once a rhythmic pattern is established (like Beethoven’s groups of four in the Fifth Symphony) they tend to stick with it. But this variation never settles into a pattern; instead it uses every kind of duration from quaver to hemi-demi-semi-quaver. The result is a movement-within-a-movement that leaves us unsettled, and ready for the certainty of the concluding variation, where the martial impetus comes back with great rolled chords in the bass forecasting those coming up in the Turkish March. Like Zerlina and Don Giovanni, we have come a long way from the initial calm of the opening theme. And yet there is not a note that does not seem the logical consequence of whatever preceded it.
It may be a little late for this question, but: what are we really talking about? I chose the examples above because they are familiar ones; there seemed a reasonable chance that a reader could call them to mind. Even if this is so (and I have to admit that as familiar as the “Elvira Madigan” piano concerto is, I can never remember how it goes unless I actually hear it), the experience we share isn’t exactly the same: it’s a memory, and each person’s memory is an amalgam of different hearings, differently remembered. So we are like viewers in an imaginary art gallery, where I am that irritating person saying “Notice how the use of impasto . . .”, except that there is no object in front of us, rather some kind of abstracted performance ideal, whose very existence is one of those wholly Western assumptions that the critic Christopher Small, something of a primitivist himself, urges us to jettison, at least in trying to understand a wider panoply of musical cultures. He is surely right to suggest that “the idea of a musical composition as having an abstract existence apart from the performer and the performance, to which the performer aspires to present as close an approximation as he can” – this from his 1977 Music-Society-Education – is, from a world-historical perspective, an aberration. He goes on to question other basic things, like the common notion that music is communication. Small, I think, reacts against the Romantic sense of an individual genius communicating to a receptive (and passive) audience. Nevertheless, I believe that there is value still in the old “abstracted performance ideal” and that something is being communicated by it, and that the central question remains the one Robert Browning asks in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”: “Told them something?”
The dark star of Romanticism, the gravitational lens of which distorts our view of everything close to it, is the great falsifier of the Classical style. You might think that a Romantic interpretation of Mozart would exaggerate his dramatic contrasts, making him one of them. Not at all. Romanticism – and here I refer not so much to the Romantic movement itself as to that decadent derivative which continues to flow so strongly through our culture – reserved that kind of falsifying for his life (and it will be interesting to see, in the year of his 250th birthday,
if those legends have finally been put to rest) while finding in his music an excuse for one of those favourite Romantic emotions, nostalgia for a golden age. Romanticism needed an Age of Innocence and needed Mozart to be its voice – in this it aligned itself to the image pushed by his father, Leopold – which was that of a perpetual child who receives glorious musical messages from Heaven, each note of which deserves reverence and treasuring.
This was surely not true for Mozart’s contemporary listeners. They, like Galuppi’s audience of Venetian socialites, or the Sex Pistols’ roomful of jumping teens, may not have cared to look into the artist’s soul in what would become the Romantic habit, but they did participate in a shared vision of the world. In this case, it was a world based on comprehensible principles,
ultimately subject to understanding rather than mystery, in whose exploration one would encounter alarms and excursions and every sort of emotion, but also delight, amazement, and moments of heart-stopping beauty.
Stephen Brown
It is true that one doesn’t normally speak
of Mozart and Sid Vicious in the same breath, but they do have this in common: primitivism. Rock’n’roll began as a primitivist movement, and it renews itself with mini-primitivisms, of which punk is just one example. To see Mozart as a primitivist is a little harder, since his style is so identified with the civilized and the rational, things we think of as anti-primitive, and yet the Classical movement in music, like its companion neoclassicism in art, owed everything to the primitivist desire to begin anew by stripping away the false and inessential. Écrasez l’infâme. To the Baroque’s heavy sauces, multiple courses, and thickly layered combinations of tastes and textures, the Classical would propose a nouvelle cuisine.
Primitivism can take many forms, as many as there are ways of jettisoning excess baggage in an effort to get back to basics. The problem is to identify the infamy that must be suppressed, and then to find the way to crush it. The method that empowered the Enlightenment was the method of doubt, the Cartesian solution. Doubt everything until you are left with irreducible truths, and then build logically and deductively from those axioms, constructing a new order as you would construct a proof in geometry. This was the method that imbued Jefferson’s thinking: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. From such axioms you can build a nation. For Descartes, it was “Cogito, ergo sum”; for Beethoven, dah-dah-dah-dum. From those four notes you can generate a symphony.
A formula for producing a convincing Classical piece of music might look like this: start with an axiomatic idea, one so simple and basic that it is hard to imagine reducing it further. You’re in the key of C? Then create an outline of a C major chord. (A little more than half of Mozart’s piano sonatas start with an outline of the home-key chord.) That’s a little angular; balance it with a softer turn of phrase. Now balance those two bars with two other bars. Where the first two used chords I and V, the balancing phrase could start with IV and work its way back to I. Now we have four bars without much flow; balance them with another four bars of running scales. Keep in mind that everything must be clear and distinct: no thick textures, just melody and accompaniment. Continue along this path, follow the rules of sonata form, and you too can create a bad – but realistic – example of Classical-sounding music.
I recently attended a concert where I heard a lovely performance of the Concerto for Two Clarinets by Franz Krommer, born in 1759, just three years after Mozart. It followed the kind of Classical formula described above and bored me nearly senseless with its predictability. But I have heard Mozart’s Piano Sonata No 11 in A major (K331), the one that ends with the famous “Rondo alla Turca”, countless times; at one time in my youth I could play the piece from memory; and even today I do not find it boring. How can Krommer be boring on a first hearing and Mozart not boring on the 500th?
It might help first to take an excursion into opera, in particular Don Giovanni, where the dramatic contrasts (unwanted sexual advances and a duel to the death are followed by broad comedy – Don Giovanni: I’m here. Leporello: Who’s dead, you or the old guy? – within the first few minutes) disrupt the style’s balanced flow. The danger that Classical-era music runs, that of being swallowed by its own equanimity, is one that Mozart will avoid, if we let him. He knew that his music was balanced and rational-sounding, and could play with the quality as a theatrical effect. In the famous first-act duet, “Là ci darem la mano”, he gives Don Giovanni perfectly matched, bookend phrases to begin his argument. “Là ci darem la mano, là mi dirai di sì. Vedi, non è lontano . . . .” The logic is irrefutable, musically speaking. (This is one of the reasons Beethoven objected to Don Giovanni. It’s not just that he’s a bad character, it’s that the music so aids and abets him.) Zerlina replies with equally balanced phrases, and the duet would close down quickly were it not for the tail end of her answer, where she mistrusts him and her melody flies up, unbalancing the phrase. Don Giovanni comes back with a more forceful line, conventionally masculine in
Classical-period terms, with wider intervals and angular motion. Zerlina’s response is conventionally feminine, graceful and turning. Don Giovanni responds more forcefully still. The music goes back to the top, and the interchange begins to heat up as they answer on one another’s heels until Zerlina’s turning motive of equivocation is repeated three times, each time lower, signalling her acquiescence and fall. The two of them then chime together: “Let’s go, let’s go, to ease the pain of an innocent love” (by making it a carnal one, is the implication). Don Giovanni says “Let’s go!” again, on his own, to which Zerlina then responds not with a feminine fall, but with a woman-on-top, rising forte sixth, “Let’s GO!!” – the climax of the piece – before they calm down just a bit to end in harmony. What began in pure Classical balance ends with a major reversal. In an attentive production, Don Giovanni should look a
little taken aback at Zerlina’s enthusiasm. Who’s seducing whom?
The A Major Piano Sonata is if anything an even better illustration of rescue-from-equanimity. The first movement is a theme with variations, and the theme itself (modelled on a folk song) sits precisely under the hand, a note for each of the five fingers, pivoting on the C sharp under the middle finger: the epitome of equipoise. The left hand accompanies a tenth below. In between, a middle voice adds a pedal tone on the dominant, marking the beat. At the beginning of the theme’s second part, the melody pushes up a third, hinting at a more lyrical flight, but then comes dancing quickly down and returns to the opening phrases; a few notes are marked sforzando away from strong beats; and there is a short two-bar tag. These are the only elements that push away from symmetry; otherwise the mood is all luxe et calme. This is misleading. What follows is full of event, often expanding on those few asymmetric elements.
The first variation opens with a fragmented and stuttering, though still quiet and graceful, rhythm, which is then interrupted with drum-like patterns in the left hand. (This is the first instance of the Turkish March seeming to want to force its way early onto the stage.) The second variation, though more conventional, continues the tendency to bifurcate moods. A triplet pattern underpins it, but when that rhythm migrates to the right hand, the left hand starts a series of crushed notes that turn the piano into a de-tuned percussion instrument. The third variation – to my mind the most beautiful – moves to A minor. Instead of balanced periods, it consists of an unbroken stream of sixteenth-notes, almost a perpetuum mobile, the melody’s circular patterns giving it – at least in context – a distinctly Middle Eastern flavour. The second half of this variation begins with a lyrical leap that owes nothing to Turkey; it’s just one of those heart-stopping moments of beauty that Mozart occasionally tosses us without allowing us much time to savour it. Variation IV is by far the most conventional, with some hand-crossing which I suspect was the kind of showmanship Mozart used to exhibit as an eight-year-old when his father, on their trip to England, had him playing variations at 2s 6d per ticket every afternoon at the Swan and Hoop, Cornhill. The Adagio that follows is the least Classical of the variations, even though it begins with the signature Classical accompaniment, a clockwork Alberti bass. That pattern stops abruptly to shift into repeated drumbeats and scales. Classical composers liked isorhythm: once a rhythmic pattern is established (like Beethoven’s groups of four in the Fifth Symphony) they tend to stick with it. But this variation never settles into a pattern; instead it uses every kind of duration from quaver to hemi-demi-semi-quaver. The result is a movement-within-a-movement that leaves us unsettled, and ready for the certainty of the concluding variation, where the martial impetus comes back with great rolled chords in the bass forecasting those coming up in the Turkish March. Like Zerlina and Don Giovanni, we have come a long way from the initial calm of the opening theme. And yet there is not a note that does not seem the logical consequence of whatever preceded it.
It may be a little late for this question, but: what are we really talking about? I chose the examples above because they are familiar ones; there seemed a reasonable chance that a reader could call them to mind. Even if this is so (and I have to admit that as familiar as the “Elvira Madigan” piano concerto is, I can never remember how it goes unless I actually hear it), the experience we share isn’t exactly the same: it’s a memory, and each person’s memory is an amalgam of different hearings, differently remembered. So we are like viewers in an imaginary art gallery, where I am that irritating person saying “Notice how the use of impasto . . .”, except that there is no object in front of us, rather some kind of abstracted performance ideal, whose very existence is one of those wholly Western assumptions that the critic Christopher Small, something of a primitivist himself, urges us to jettison, at least in trying to understand a wider panoply of musical cultures. He is surely right to suggest that “the idea of a musical composition as having an abstract existence apart from the performer and the performance, to which the performer aspires to present as close an approximation as he can” – this from his 1977 Music-Society-Education – is, from a world-historical perspective, an aberration. He goes on to question other basic things, like the common notion that music is communication. Small, I think, reacts against the Romantic sense of an individual genius communicating to a receptive (and passive) audience. Nevertheless, I believe that there is value still in the old “abstracted performance ideal” and that something is being communicated by it, and that the central question remains the one Robert Browning asks in “A Toccata of Galuppi’s”: “Told them something?”
The dark star of Romanticism, the gravitational lens of which distorts our view of everything close to it, is the great falsifier of the Classical style. You might think that a Romantic interpretation of Mozart would exaggerate his dramatic contrasts, making him one of them. Not at all. Romanticism – and here I refer not so much to the Romantic movement itself as to that decadent derivative which continues to flow so strongly through our culture – reserved that kind of falsifying for his life (and it will be interesting to see, in the year of his 250th birthday,
if those legends have finally been put to rest) while finding in his music an excuse for one of those favourite Romantic emotions, nostalgia for a golden age. Romanticism needed an Age of Innocence and needed Mozart to be its voice – in this it aligned itself to the image pushed by his father, Leopold – which was that of a perpetual child who receives glorious musical messages from Heaven, each note of which deserves reverence and treasuring.
This was surely not true for Mozart’s contemporary listeners. They, like Galuppi’s audience of Venetian socialites, or the Sex Pistols’ roomful of jumping teens, may not have cared to look into the artist’s soul in what would become the Romantic habit, but they did participate in a shared vision of the world. In this case, it was a world based on comprehensible principles,
ultimately subject to understanding rather than mystery, in whose exploration one would encounter alarms and excursions and every sort of emotion, but also delight, amazement, and moments of heart-stopping beauty.