Arnold Rosner blasphemes God
http://www.sequenza21.com/rosner.html
The frigging blogware doesn't seem to allow for post-level URLS.
I was lamenting the other day that Arnold doesn't post enough, and then he gives us THIS:
Do I dislike them all - Boccherini, Gluck, Haydn, early Beethoven? Yes, I do, but Mozart deserves a special place. It is not true that he is the worst of all composers; his prodigious technical skills developed by age six. Sometimes it is not so great to be a prodigy,- I often feel his emotional and dramatic palette is set at the same age. Rather he is the most overrated composer of them all. The difference between the (mediocre) quality of his music and the (celestial) reverance he is accorded is a gulf simply beyond belief.
He then proceeds to make his case, primarily by countering other people's cases in favor of Mozart. But his main problem with Mozart seems to be that...he wrote happy music! How DARE he use the major mode, and ideas built on triads? And this gives him a limited expressive palette...let's see, the joyous finale of the Jupiter vs. all of #40, the C minor wind serenade, or the A minor rondo (which if I ever kill myself, will be the music playing while I do so.)...I don't think so.
He saves special wrath for the Dies Irae of the Requiem. Now, to set the Tract in polyphony at all is somewhat presumptuous, I will grant, given that the chant is so perfectly suited for its purpose. But "tempest in a teapot"? I defy Rosner to give me a more terrifying piece of music written before the Mozart Requiem (there may be more terrifying pieces written after, but Mozart only had prior technology to work with). Then there's the Tuba Mirum, "the worst few minutes of music ever written" because it's "graceful and gentle", not a "trumpet of doom or wrath". I submit that this is the imposition of an Expressionist aesthetic on pre-Expressionist music, and that it ignores a crucial point: Mozart was a Christian. I firmly believe that the "letzte Posaune" will sound differently in a believer's ear; for him, the Trump will be the finale of the (Mozartean) opera, where all complications of plot and character are unravelled, and everyone lives Happily Ever After with Jesus. For the sinner, it will be a junior high band trombone sectional fed through a wall-high amp stack. Also, the Tuba Mirum is a compositionally necessary relaxation of tension after the Dies Irae, a tension that begins to build again with the entry of the tenor.
But there's Mozart, and Mozart. Far from "his prodigious technical skills develop[ing] by age six", Mozart didn't reach musical maturity until he discovered the music of Bach, about a decade before he died. Before then, Wolfie was beating J.C. Bach at his own game...good but not cosmic. Haydn and CPE Bach were both writing better music than Mozart when Mozart was 24...but were they doing so when THEY were 24? For that matter was Rosner? I don't think that Mozart would have been guilty of the inane phrase repetitions found in Rosner's 2nd Quartet.
There's an adage that states that the composers a composer most hates are the ones he owes (see Ives re Debussy or Ruggles re Brahms). Rosner's mature sophisticated use of sequence and thematic extension owes more to Mozart than he might admit.
Maybe in a future post I'll make up a list of better candidates for "the worst few minutes of music ever written" Just to stick with Classic-period literature by name composers, how about the "development" of the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 79? That's before we bring out the big guns like Asger Hamerik, Richard Nanes, or the operatic work of Stewart Copeland.
Comments
Posted by: Arnold Rosner
Posted on: March 28, 2006 05:28 PM
Well, nice to meet new friends, even over a disagreement or two. Thank you for your comments about my music and blogs, though,- for the record,- I wrote quartet no. 2 at the age of 17,- not 24 as the comments appear to(but do not quite) actually say. As for repetition, WAM does more than his share,- and for the sake of not burning up any transatlantic cables,- let's leave the new age boys out of this whole discussion.
As for specifics,- happy music is one thing. Insipid is another. The finale of the Saint-Saens 4th concerto has a truly wonderful tune entirely in major mode; some chorale moments in the finale of RVW's Sea Symphony are equally moving,- and equally "major". I referred in my original blog to the trumpet "lick" near the end of Mozart's 20th concerto; I'll stand on that.
Now,- the real interest is the title you have chosen - :AR blasphemes God. Well,- surely YOU do not think,- and you know I do not think that WAM is, was, or ever will be God. So I am speaking negatively,- not blaspheming,- as that verb implies striking a Buddha or the like. I suppose the thrust of it is that even as a Mozart lover you are "tongue-in-cheek" allowing that the Godlike reputation we have afforded him is a little extravagant.
The allegro of "Dies Irae" is, to my ear,- gapped intervallically,- rhythmically square, though musically very "busy" and thus a "tempest in a teapot". As for earlier terrifying music,- the "They Loathed to Drink" fugue in Handel's Israel in Egypt covers it,- as do many much smaller-scale works from the madigalists or even the keyboard school (Gesualdo, of course,- and some strange examples by even Giralamo Frescobaldi and Luis Milan). Monteverdi gives us many examples.
Yes, there are other contenders for "worst music ever",- but I'll stick with the bicycle pump.
The comment that a composer owes the most to the composers he comes to hate may be true in many cases, and it certainly provokes thought. I don't think it applies to myself and WAM,- unless,- and this is still a stretch,- one allows an indirect connection with an intermediary. So where Brahms, Dvorak or Mahler owe something to Mozart,- and I owe something to one or another of them,- as I said,- a bit of a stretch.
I wonder,- if we never knew K 626,- never HAD 626, and it was discovered tomorrow with a signature of a student of KPE Bach,- just how would the cognoscenti evaluate the various sections? There is already the persona of Sussmayr in the mix, after all.
Yours from New York
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: March 29, 2006 12:52 PM
Dr. Rosner,
Thanks for taking the time to comment; I've not heard much from you since the old days when you used to post to Usenet. I am working on an extended entry about your music; I figured I owed you after beating you up over Mozart (since the music is worthy of comment), and I had just gotten the orchestral CD with the 2-trumpet concerto on it. It's taking awhile, as I want to be insightful and not idiotic, so I'm listening to everything I have. But there will be a bit of persiflage about Mozart in it; be thankful that nobody believes that "There is no God but Mozart, and Mohammed is His Prophet", else you'd be doing a Salman Rushdie.
On to your comments:
I danced around the dating of the quartet; I knew it was early but I didn't have the CD to hand and couldn't remember how early. Given that it beats the pants off anything I was writing at that age, there's enough said. As for Newage (rhymes with sewage), sometimes repetition is part of the function of the music. It's intended to be soporific.
As for the title: certainly I was tongue in cheek to the extent that I don't believe Mozart to be literally God; were that the case, it is I who would be guilty of blasphemy. But there is much Mozart which incites worship in me. On the other hand, the spirit of iconoclasm springs eternal, so I understand the motivation behind your Mozart piece. When I was an undergraduate, I used to make smart-ass comments about Beethoven, and I didn't "get" Brahms until I was pushing 40. I recall one exchange in college with a pianist friend who had played more than his fair share of Brahms piano accompaniments. I said, "I'd trade all 4 symphonies for another Liebeslieder Waltz." He replied, "You think that's bad? I'd trade the symphonies and both piano concertos for one of the Hungarian Dances." We grow...
I'll have to listen to the Handel when I'm not at the office. I blush that I don't know it, but Mozart could very well have known it. But I doubt if he knew any of the earlier music you mentioned. I know the Renaissance repertoire fairly well as a performer, and while Gesualdo, Josquin and a few others explored the negative emotions, I can't think of any music I'd consider terrifying.
Re "blind" evaluation of K626: It's a good question. Certainly we bring a lot of baggage to our listening of music. I once spent some time listening to the 7 piano sonatas of Viktor Ullman, trying to decide if there were really an audible and objective difference between the last three (written in Terezin) and the first 4 (pre-Terezin). I heard it, but I couldn't stop 2nd-guessing myself.
So what would musicologists say about the anonymous "Requiem in d minor"? They'd say that the composer obviously knew Michael Haydn's Missa pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismundo, and that he was obviously Austrian (only place around with a solo trombone tradition at that time). They would probably see several hands in it, one great ("Could this be Mozart?") and one less than great. To address what I assume your point was, would they attribute the Tuba Mirum to the first hand or the 2nd? I'd attribute it to the 1st, more competent hand. Why? Because it's unexpected. A less-great composer would not have broken the Sequence there, but at "Liber scriptus", carrying the affect of the Dies Irae all the way through, with possibly a more somber affect up to "Recordare". But that would have been too long. But could they have written the Tuba Mirum to fill in after a specified break by hand 1? Possibly. Eybler orchestrated this; I haven't looked at the sketches, but it is in fact possible (though not probable) that the trombone is his and not Mozart's. In any case, geniuses don't do the expected. That's always the trouble with any completion; if you work meticulously based on scholarly knowledge of what the composer did, you still can never know what he would have done. An interesting case is the realizations of Ives' Universe Symphony. Austin sounds a lot more like Ives than Reinhard does, but there's no way the piece sounds like Ives at all, and thus Reinhard sounds more Ivesian in spirit. And I rather like the notion of Ives foreshadowing spectralism and minimalism; one can imagine a hipper Horatio Parker saying, "Ives, must you hog all the isms?"
But I digress...and am out of time.