Myths about Composers

[karlhenning]

Read his letters. They are full of shitting and farting. But this may well have been a family joke, or else something to do with growing up in Salzburg.

I have read them.  The question was:

Was Mozart really coprophagic[?]

Which is nonsense.

[schweitzeralan]

I have read them.  The question was:

Which is nonsense.

I hope indeed that there's no truth in it.  Many myths and lies have permeated society over the years, decades, or even centuries. Enough of any Mozartian quirks if indeed they exist.

[marvinbrown]

  I can not think of a bigger myth than this:

  J.S. Bach once said "I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."

  Yeah right! I'd sooner buy that bridge they were telling me about........

  marvin

 
 

[karlhenning]

  I can not think of a bigger myth than this:

  J.S. Bach once said "I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."

I should not call that a myth. It is modesty; a virtue which becomes even the great.

[Lethevich]

  I can not think of a bigger myth than this:

  J.S. Bach once said "I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."

  Yeah right! I'd sooner buy that bridge they were telling me about........

It would be interesting to think more about this. Certainly no matter how much effort they put into their music, many composers will not approach the level of Bach. But take the example of Anton Rubinstein, whom Brahms admired but also criticised for not 'taking enough time' over his compositions. This could certainly apply to a lot of composers, who may have been able to wring more invention and complexity (and as a result, depth) out of each of their pieces if they spent more time on them. With this criticism from Brahms, I do feel that it isn't simply ability that stops some composers from writing a lot of no more than "okay" music - it is that they lack the willingness to turn this into "great" music. I can sort of understand why - the recongition for writing great music often comes after death - so why take these measures which would probably curb your income anyway?

[Elgarian]

"I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."

Just playing with this idea in the world of painting: if you're a Pre-Raphaelite who works hard, you might be a Holman Hunt (as opposed to a J.E. Millais, who was a natural); if you're an Impressionist who works hard, you might be an Alfred Sisley (as opposed to a Claude Monet, who couldn't lay a brushstroke that didn't sing). So you can achieve greatness, or at least approach it - but it either tends to be of a different character, or it's only achieved rarely. The thing that's missing, or which is only sporadically attained, is quality of imagination. (I mean 'imagination' in Ruskin's threefold sense - that is, the capability of achieving penetrating insight, of associating ideas in a composition, and of making effective symbols.)

I don't know enough to draw comparisons with musical composition, though I might guess (and it's no more than a guess) that if you're a late Romantic English composer who works hard, you become a Bantock (as opposed to an Elgar). But I'm just thinking aloud here; not proposing any theories.

[karlhenning]

Might be a bad call of mine.  It wouldn't be modesty on Bach's part, if he were bragging about all his work, I suppose  0:)

[Elgarian]

There's another way of looking at it. There's a tendency for people to adopt the attitude: 'Of course he has a special gift, it's easy for him.' And that can produce a certain irritation in the artist, because what's overlooked is the immense hard work that's required, regardless of any special gift. It may be that Bach's comment was that kind of comment.  We need the context in which he said it.

[DavidRoss]

Just playing with this idea in the world of painting: if you're a Pre-Raphaelite who works hard, you might be a Holman Hunt (as opposed to a J.E. Millais, who was a natural); if you're an Impressionist who works hard, you might be an Alfred Sisley (as opposed to a Claude Monet, who couldn't lay a brushstroke that didn't sing). So you can achieve greatness, or at least approach it - but it either tends to be of a different character, or it's only achieved rarely. The thing that's missing, or which is only sporadically attained, is quality of imagination. (I mean 'imagination' in Ruskin's threefold sense - that is, the capability of achieving penetrating insight, of associating ideas in a composition, and of making effective symbols.)

I don't know enough to draw comparisons with musical composition, though I might guess (and it's no more than a guess) that if you're a late Romantic English composer who works hard, you become a Bantock (as opposed to an Elgar). But I'm just thinking aloud here; not proposing any theories.

I think there's virtue in the idea, however I suspect that Elgar was one who worked very hard at it, whereas Bantock may have been a natural who never had to work very hard to achieve passable results...?

[Elgarian]

I think there's virtue in the idea, however I suspect that Elgar was one who worked very hard at it, whereas Bantock may have been a natural who never had to work very hard to achieve passable results...?

You may have blown my idea out of the water there! And yet I think there may be something in it, even though I haven't quite pinned it down yet.... Was there, is there, anything in Bantock to suggest that he might have been capable of the kind of greatness that Elgar reached in his peaks? Is there in Bantock any intimation that he could have achieved anything of the stature of Elgar's cello or violin concertos? Of Enigma? Or Gerontius?

I'm coming to the end of my rope on this - I don't know enough.

[Joe_Campbell]

I find your ideas compelling, Elgarian.  However, any fruitful discussion on the matter will inevitably become a never ending argument of what constitutes "great." Of course, by a general consensus, Elgar is most definitely a superior composer, but when we move beyond opinion and try to objectively measure the greatness of one composer against another, and by consequence the potential this or that composer may or may not have lived up to, we hit a brick wall, because greatness is ultimately subjective. We can measure output, form, complexity (I think), but we can't measure why two composers using a similar device, obeying all the compositional rules, and perhaps being equally creative (say, in a fugue) can elicit completely different responses.

In art, the wiggle room of any famous figure is such that they can be simultaneously the greatest and worst composer, depending on who's being asked.

[bwv 1080]

not really a myth - more of an urban legend, but this is my favorite:

Composer Webern was Double Agent for Nazis

By Heinrich Kincaid

(c) The Associated Press

BERLIN, GERMANY (AP) - Recent admissions by an ex-Nazi official living in Argentina have confirmed what some musicologists have suspected for years: that early twentieth century German composer Anton Webern and his colleagues devised the so-called "serial" technique of music to encrypt messages to Nazi spies living in the United States and Britain.

In what can surely be considered the most brazen instance of Art Imitating Espionage to date, avant garde composers of the Hitler years working in conjunction with designers of the Nazi Enigma code were bamboozling unsuspecting audiences with their atonal thunderings while at the same time passing critical scientific data back and forth between nations.

"This calls into question the entire Second Viennese School of music," announced minimalist composer John Adams from his home in the Adirondack Mountains. "Ever since I first encountered compositions by Arnold Schonberg I wondered what the hell anyone ever heard in it. Now I know."

Gunned down by an American soldier in occupied Berlin, 62 year old Anton Webern's death was until now considered a tragic loss to the musical world. At the time the U.S. Army reported that the killing was "a mistake", and that in stepping onto the street at night to smoke a cigarette Webern was violating a strict curfew rule.

It is now known that Webern was using music to shuttle Werner Heisenberg's discoveries in atomic energy to German spy Klaus Fuchs working on the Manhattan atom bomb project in New Mexico. Due to the secret nature of the project, which was still underway after the invasion of Berlin, Army officials at the time were unable to describe the true reason for Webern's murder.

Hans Scherbius, a Nazi party official who worked with Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, admitted at age eighty-seven that the Nazis secretly were behind the twelve-tone technique of composition, which was officially reviled to give it the outlaw status it needed to remain outside of the larger public purview.

"These pieces were nothing more than cipher for encoding messages," he chuckled during an interview on his balcony in Buenos Aires. "It was only because it was 'naughty' and difficult that elite audiences accepted it, even championed it."

Physicist Edward Teller, who kept a 9-foot Steinway piano in his apartment at the Los Alamos laboratory, was the unwitting deliverer of Heisenburg's data to Fuchs, who eagerly attended parties thrown by Teller, an enthusiastic booster of Webern's music.

Arnold Schonberg, the older musician who first devised the serial technique at the request of the Weimar government of Germany, composed in America to deliver bomb data stolen by Fuchs back to the Nazis, who worked feverishly to design their own atomic weapons.

As an example, Scherbius showed Associated Press reporters the score of Webern's Opus 30 "Variations for Orchestra" overlaid with a cardboard template. The notes formed a mathematical grid that deciphered into German a comparison between the neutron release cross-sections of uranium isotopes 235 and 238.

Schonberg responded with a collection of songs for soprano and woodwinds that encrypted the chemical makeup of the polonium-beryllium initiator at the core of the Trinity explosion.

And in Japan, Toru Takemitsu took time out from his own neo-romanticism to transmit data via music of his nation's progress with the atom.

"The most curious thing about it," says composer Philip Glass in New York City, "is that musicians continued to write twelve-tone music after the war, even though they had no idea why it was really invented. Indeed, there are guys who are churning out serialism to this day."

Unlike the diatonic music, which is based on scales that have been agreed upon by listeners throughout the world for all of history, twelve-tone music treats each note of the chromatic scale with equal importance, and contains a built-in mathematical refusal to form chords that are pleasing by traditional standards. Known also as serialism, the style has never been accepted outside of an elite cadre of musicians, who believe it is the only fresh and valid direction for post-Wagnerian classical music to go.

"Even if this is really true," states conductor Pierre Boulez, a composer who continues to utilize serial techniques, "the music has been vindicated by music critics for decades now. I see no reason to suddenly invalidate an art form just because of some funny business at its inception."

[Elgarian]

when we move beyond opinion and try to objectively measure the greatness of one composer against another, and by consequence the potential this or that composer may or may not have lived up to, we hit a brick wall, because greatness is ultimately subjective. We can measure output, form, complexity (I think), but we can't measure why two composers using a similar device, obeying all the compositional rules, and perhaps being equally creative (say, in a fugue) can elicit completely different responses.

I agree completely with this, and I think the whole notion that there's some way of measuring 'greatness' in art, or of establishing it objectively, is ill-conceived. It's another of those category errors we fall into - so in this case when we look at a Monet painting, or listen to Gerontius, we sense 'greatness' intuitively, and immediately look for some way of pinning it down, of quantifying it, of demonstrating that the greatness is 'real', that it can be 'proved' in some objective way that all can agree on. But that's the misconception - we behave as if only the objective is real. Whereas the only thing that was real, and indeed the only reason for giving art any importance at all beyond the sociological and political, was that positive subjective experience that made us aware of 'greatness' in the first place.  

When we begin our dissection of the corpse we will of course find various pieces of proof that the animal was well-constructed, and those may be interesting to discuss. But this thing here on the dissecting table is no longer a living creature, so we can no longer 'know' it in the same way, and the original reason for our overwhelming experience with it is gone, and undemonstrable.

So I'm not suggesting, here, some way of persuading a sceptic that this composer is great, and that one merely good. I'm suggesting a way of talking that might be helpful between two or more people who've already made that decision on subjective grounds.

[Renfield]

Elgarian, to begin with, thank you for yet another one of your hearteningly measured and unfailingly thoughtful posts. I'm not a fan of overstating the obvious, but credit should be given where due: especially when the forum is filled with at least some degree of nonsense.

However, I will just add a tiny bit of wiggle-room for non-intuitionists, in that the formal properties of the music are evident aside from the experience of its sound; in effect, this animal is quite like its corpse! It would, thus, not seem entirely misguided to me if one supported a view of 'greatness' based on formal excellence, even if you would still need intuition to make the value judgement per se.


(Yes, I don't post for a while, and all of a sudden I blurt out something entirely off-topic in an already slightly irreverent thread. Go figure! )

[eyeresist]

Just playing with this idea in the world of painting: if you're a Pre-Raphaelite who works hard, you might be a Holman Hunt (as opposed to a J.E. Millais, who was a natural); if you're an Impressionist who works hard, you might be an Alfred Sisley (as opposed to a Claude Monet, who couldn't lay a brushstroke that didn't sing).
I don't know enough to draw comparisons with musical composition, though I might guess (and it's no more than a guess) that if you're a late Romantic English composer who works hard, you become a Bantock (as opposed to an Elgar).

To continue this game: you might be a Mussorgsky, or a Rimsky-Korsakov.

[Elgarian]

I will just add a tiny bit of wiggle-room for non-intuitionists, in that the formal properties of the music are evident aside from the experience of its sound; in effect, this animal is quite like its corpse! It would, thus, not seem entirely misguided to me if one supported a view of 'greatness' based on formal excellence, even if you would still need intuition to make the value judgement per se.

I think we're OK, and that this isn't OT - because this sort of discussion is necessary if we're to consider the Bach quote above, and decide whether there's any truth in it.

It's tantalising that you raised this because I don't know enough to reply, except with a question - though the question isn't easily formulated from my position of ignorance. When you speak of 'the formal qualities of the music', I presume you're talking about something that can be understood by reading the score, rather than by listening? Now, that process of reading the score - is it purely intellectual, or are you hearing the music in your head? In other words, when you marvel at the brilliance of the unexpected key change in the 18th bar, or the daring dissonance between the violin and the cello part, are you hearing the change, or the dissonance, or merely understanding that they're there?

The reason why I think this might be important, is that if you're 'hearing it' imaginatively, then indeed the corpse is still alive, and the dissecting activity may have a more subjective component than appears on the surface. On the other hand, if you're not; if you're only intellectually examining the formal structure, then may you not be being misled? May not something that looks clever, be rather disappointing in fact when actually listened to? Does the apparent excellence of the formal structure count for much if no one perceives 'greatness' when they listen (subjectively) to the music?

I can more easily talk about these subjective v analytical issues in painting. For example, if we take one of Cezanne's great landscapes it's often possible to divide the canvas up into a series of Golden Sections, and show how key elements of the composition are determined by those geometrical divisions; and if we've done that, the temptation might be to think that we've sussed it: 'the golden section as a key to Cezanne's greatness'. But however brilliant and telling the geometry is, and however we may shake our heads at its cleverness, that appreciation isn't the same kind of experience as we get when we just look at the picture and are overwhelmed by it. (And of course many painters use the Golden Section in clever ways, but their paintings remain merely good - not great.)

I say all this not with the certainty of an advocate, but with the curiosity of an explorer!