All beginning is difficult

Alle Anfang ist schwer. A saying I learned in German class when I was in the 9th grade (in 1960!). "All beginning is difficult." It is for me certainly, yet if I don't begin this blog, no one will. So I have to set some kind of example.

I would like to have a thread on "What has surprised me," or "What I am learning from my study of this music." I would prefer it on the positive side.

In this category, I have been thinking about YIN and YANG

In Chinese philosophy yin/yang is used to describe how seemingly disjunct or opposing forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, giving rise to each other in turn.

It strikes me that much of what we have been studying and listening to in this pre-classical period has to do with the contrast and, at times, the blending of opposites. Thus the notion of galant and Empfindsamkeit, of the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime. Theorists and critics of the period are fond of pitting one quality against its opposite.

Koch wrote in 1802: "The principal object of music is to stir the feelings," while Tuerk wrote in 1789, "the expression of the ruling sentiment...is the highest goal of music."

Our understanding and appreciation for music of this period, then, must be based learning what these feelings were and how they were expressed.

I find one of the most useful discussions of how composers conceived and experienced their music, and really how the music "works," is Leonard Ratner's study, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (on reserve, ML 195 .R38). He bases his study of the music on theoretical treatises of the period, so he could begin to think and experience the music as they might have. He considers music as a "language," or analogous to language, with its own rhetoric, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. This is also the way contemporaries wrote and thought about music.

Music in the early 18th century, he writes, "developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for classic composers. Some of these figures were associated with various feeling and affections; other had a picturesque flavor They are designated here as topics--subjects for musical discourse. Topics appear as fully worked-out pieces, i.e., types, or as figures and progressions within a piece, i.e., styles. The distinction between types and styles is flexible; minutes and marches represent complete types of composition, but they also furnish styles for other pieces."

From here he talks about the elements of music in terms of rhetoric (e.g., harmony, melody, rhythm, texture) and develops a very effective way of discussing the music. I recommend you take a look at it.

In the meantime, it would be interesting for us to continue to play with opposites, as the composers obviously did, and explore the spectrum that lay between the opposite poles and how balance, rapprochement, and synthesis happened in the three great masters at the end of the period.

Now that we have begun...your turns.