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A Good Folk Tune
-- is worth a thousand symphonies!
It's as I wrote in my article, "Most Timpani is a Big Trick", Music is an
appreciation of time. In a sense, music is the song to the beauty of time and
time's passage. And so every decent composer throughout history, from the
classics to the gentry, from symphonies written on pages or folk tunes composed
by ear and passed on by performer to listener, tympani was used to complement
the work, or as a part of it. Drum cadences were complex and could only be
performed by accomplished musicians.
But this really is more than tympani. It's about melody and also it's about
meaning. When speech is formed in the mouth of the human being, it is sound
being sculpted by the concept behind the inference of what that human being can
gather of whatever it is he or she is trying to communicate.
In reality, the folk tune is really supposed to be a basic form of everyday
communication. But the hatchet-hacking business world got into the scene and
ruined everything. I wrote a song about this a long time ago , called "The song of
the man, where did it go?". So from practically day one, people lacked the
energy to continually sing. I'm one of the guys that would sing all day long,
but I was a street performer with an open guitar case, and I was usually singing
memorized pre-composed songs.
But singing all day long, as years past, I ultimately found that I could
actually spontaneously, on the spot, sing songs and perform music straight out
of my head and perform it directly; in other words, spontaneously. That's where
your music comes from, ladies and gentlemen. Composition, deliberation,
painstaking rehearsals and recordings -- of course , they all have their place
and all the rest of the paraphernalia the comes with and is associated with the
music profession, as it were. That's what
A Sea Song, parts one through
four, is. It was sung and recorded spontaneously and unrehearsed, with the
exception of the inclusion of a few precomposed songs, mostly in the second part.
This is one of the things
that made Beethoven so great. He used to be spotted, in the middle of the
night, and often into the morning again, walking through the park near his digs
whistling tunes. That's probably the essence of his greatness right there, maybe
he didn't share it with others, maybe he did, but the point is, Beethoven also
composed folk music, right on the spot, while walking through the park.
Whereas Mozart, as in "the Mozart to merrier", was picking up on one aspect of
the age of enlightenment: The music of time. Of course, that's a broad
statement. There certainly was a lot more involved in his compositions than just
a structure of time, among other things something I call "musical architecture".
But this is important to realize at this point, because it has been lost for
so long due to commercialism, and I wish those book-cookers would keep their
grubby little paws out of these important things, such as music and education.
By architecting the staccato note, and extending a cord progression for a period
of bars, the composer perhaps unwittingly, though I doubt that of Mozart, enabled
the people who hung out in the same neighborhood, namely Europe, to get a sense
of time and other things that enabled them to enter the technology of the
machine age, and to come up with so many other European concepts, including
atomic sciences and rocketry -- so often attributed to the United States and the
Soviet Union, but largely only possible by them because of the Europeans that
either fled to their countries or were stolen by them -- so you see what a
pivotal role music plays.
That is why the United States is going nowhere fast, because of the
commercialization of the music industry. It's arguable that music itself is
impossible in a climate like this. What they do is take very basic things and
distance it from the common people, successfully giving the people the impression
that it is something that is impossible for them to attain. When in all
actuality, the common public is more capable of superior music than is actually
being mass-produced by the music industry itself. In essence, it seems
impossible for modern music, or any future music, to ever attain the
functionality and aesthetics of the classical and folk productions of the age of
enlightenment and subsequent ages up to the early 20th century.
Click here to see the article in the Work-in-Progress Weblogs section.
Or here to see a growing article about time in music, "Music About Time".
--Fine art,
digital art,
music,
several voice
introductions by me about my work, articles about
my artwork
and other topics such as
sociology,
the cosmos,
economics,
education,
medicine,
poetry,
humor,
something I call premonitions,
and a series about covered bridges,
all by
yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are
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classes.
Beethoven also
composed folk songs.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
Mozart was picking up on the music of time.
23 March, 2005
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