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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. Basically , 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 that comes with and is associated with the music profession, as it were.
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 that 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 accord 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. Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved. |