Re: Why do you like Mozart's music?


david7gable@xxxxxxx wrote:
> >That's not right. While not "rationally" reflected, the musical
> decisions of the performer are to a large degree conscious.
>
> And to an even larger degree they aren't. There is a constant
> continuous ongoing interplay of conscious and unconscious. The
> unconscious decisions are, after all, the product of the same mind.
> But there is no way that the infinite number of microscopic decisions
> made in performing just one single movement are the result of conscious
> thought in real time.
>
> I don't have the time or the patience to argue with your analogy to
> painting. The HIPsters do in principle base their attempt on an
> approach analogous to the one that you describe. Suffice it to say
> that, while a gifted forger can study the brushstrokes and chiaroscuro
> of Rubens or Velasquez in the flesh, no musician can make an analagous
> study of Mozart's phrasing or that of his contemporaries. Some vague
> and general ideas about 18th century phrasing have survived, but no
> instances of it, and I would hate to have to recreate the manner in
> which Robert Mann shapes even one single sostenuto note from a verbal
> description of it.

That doesn't matter at all. Just like the brush stroke is never
"exactly" the same twice, neither are two notes "exactly" the same. But
if two players take the same instrument and play the same notes with
the same articulation, while they still sound diferent from each other
in nuances, the "basic message" is very similar. If that wasn't so, no
layers of traditions in your sense would exist. Everybody would just be
different from each other without a stylistic similarity in a given
layer or time and place. And yet there are very recognizable playing
styles from certain places and times.
If you pick up a period instruement, there will be different ways to
play it like there are different ways to play modern instruments, but
the very basic parameters are the same as when the instrument was
played 200 years ago, and it will give you the same kind of basic
sound. Then you are faced with the same challenge the performer back
then faced. How to make musical use of it. Even though there are no
recordings, it is extremely likely that people back then both played
different from each other and had certain playing styles in common, and
we can actually reconstruct a lot of these playing styles. The result
is not the "exact" replica of a concrete historical performance, say
the recital given by Mr Wilhelm in Amsterdam on February 17, 1767, but
a modern performance that you can be certain has a number of elements
in common with how they played back then.
It is like deciding which kind of hat to put in a historic painting
where the hat portion has been destroyed. You would paint a bowler hat
into a 16th century Spanish painting because, well, we don't really
know exactly what hat has been there before even if there are a lot of
parallel examples.
Come to think of it, you would basically deny most of our cultural
history and the fact that "digging into the past" is never going to
bring up the exact truth.

I asked this before and you never answered: what is your practical
connection to either the HIP thing or the glorious tradition of the
past? I am really curious about that because I actually studied in one
of the most traditional music schools in the world but also am very
interested in period performance, and I see absolutely no contradiction
in that. A good musician can easily play in different styles and
develop a good performance in more than just one subconsciously
automatized way. A lot of what you say makes it look like you have no
practical knwoldege of music making. Or am I wrong?


> -david gable

.

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