REALISM IN ABSTRACT MUSIC

Autor: Norman Cazden
Rok vydání: 1955
Předmět:
Zdroj: Music and Letters. :17-38
ISSN: 1477-4631
0027-4224
DOI: 10.1093/ml/xxxvi.1.17
Popis: ly formal grounds alone we can never account for even the technical procedures of the " purest " music. Whenever we are given formal precepts in the abstract, we are led to expect a symmetry of a mechanical and outwardly ingenious or involuted order. Then, taking the C major Sonata for a moment, why should Mozart, on purely formal grounds, have " answered " or balanced the first two bars of the opening melodic phrase as he did ? The second pair of bars might have been made up of an exact inversion of the melodic pattern, or an interchanged position of dominant and tonic harmonies, or a reverse of the pattern, or a literal sequence. What more fertile treatments could inhere entirely in the abstracted "form" of the little phrase? But as soon as we consider these things, we observe that Mozart, who has always been belittled as the purest " of the " abstract " composers of brainlessly balanced "absolute " music, does not waste thought on such non-musical toyings with notes. His two-bar answer presupposes a primary concern with eloquent gesture and inflection of the voice, and this leads him to a less symmetrical but larger tonal framework, and he draws the whole phrase towards an open-ended building of the initial image. The process is far easier to follow in the music than in its verbal description, because this process is natural and proper to the art of music; it arises from the real imagery that makes up the formed substance of note-groups. On listening to Mozart's "abstract" music to-day, we are bound to lose a certain amount of its initial imagery. Already most present-day listeners receive their musical experience at third hand, through recordings and not through their own performance. 36 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:20:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms REALISM IN ABSTRACT MUSIC 'Thereby they lose the tactile contact, and even the visual contact, with the act of making music, to say nothing of the accumulated experience which alone puts some life into such things as scale passages. In this respect our choice of a well-known student piece brings our analysis closer home than would be the case with much instrumental music. Further, the full social and historical setting of Mozart's music is not available to the present-day audience; it must be recaptured largely through wide readings and imaginative skill. The operas and concerts of Mozart's contemporaries and immediate predecessors supplied a store of conventions and associations which were significant in their own day to his audiences, but these ,conventions and associations are not so readily construed to-day, even with the best will. We no longer live Mozart's musical images. On the other hand Mozart had no call to write for posterity, such writing being the unrewarded illusion of a later and more self,conscious age. Hence he could not have considered providing us with the picturesque tourist guides so readily obtained for the musical merchandise of a century later. Finally, the genres or functional types of late eighteenth-century music in Vienna are neither universal nor eternal, but highly specific, and while much of their flavour remains, large segments have become for us vague, general and identified by dating rather than by vibrant imagery. Thus we can usually spot a dance image in Mozart's music, when we are not distracted from it by tales of " pure " disembodied form, but we cannot always identify the type of dance, unless intellectually, nor is its feeling close to us visually or kinasthetically, so that the audible realism is less distinct than it should be. In similar fashion the music of worship or of Masonic ritual of Mozart's time and locale is no longer with us, so that such .associations as remain in his instrumental compositions are largely lost. If, therefore, the musical imagery of Mozart is still strikingly plain and infinitely varied, and its interpretation remarkably direct and economical and lovely, once we free ourselves of the rather useless search for a verification of" pure forms ", this can be due only to a richness and to a dexterity of thought that bespeaks a realistic bent and an insight into human character and into the life around him, and also a quick and sure grasp of every species of form-content used for communication in his day. It is time that the problem of significant content in music were brought to a new level of discussion. The controversies of the late nineteenth century over " pure " music and " programme " music have shown themselves to be ultimately shallow, though each 37 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:20:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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