Just a little something to throw out there so we have a diary. I've deliberately absented myself for the last three weeks and was on the verge of doing so this week, but I got the sudden idea for this.
We're nearing the end of our series on Mozart, and I'm planning to move on to Beethoven soon. Hopefully, we'll cover the whole Beethoven Ninth before the end of the year.
But I wonder if I communicate well what Mozart was really about? Because when we get to Beethoven, a composer who was alive at the same time as Mozart, a man who, as a boy, met Mozart and almost got Mozart for a teacher, a man who composed most of his music in a style SIMILAR to Mozart's, yet drastically more forward-looking, the temptation may be to look back at what Mozart did as a pale imitation that didn't try to achieve what Beethoven did.
But it's in understanding Mozart that we can understand Beethoven better, understanding the roots of the music that he emerged from. Mozart isn't lighter Beethoven. Where Beethoven, as we will see, introduced dramatic concepts into music, Mozart was about the music. And I've discovered through writing these diaries that it isn't adequate to analyze whole Mozart works because the sheer beauty is in the many details.
When I started this series last summer, my concept was to focus on the big picture, to give new listeners a sense of the total geography of a piece so they could try to get a grasp on long music that was otherwise too much to process. I think now, that method short-shrifts Mozart.
So with that in mind, I wanted to focus just in one short diary on something that makes Mozart's music more distinctively Mozarty than anything else. And that's his CADENCES. I've made a three minute clip, below, of excerpts from six of his piano concertos to try to demonstrate my point.
Cadences in Six Selected Mozart Piano Concertos
First of all, what is a cadence? I wrote a whole diary on the subject of cadences last year. (Go back and read it, if you missed it; it's an EXCELLENT diary, if I do say so myself.) To shorter version is that a cadence is the PERIOD on the end of a musical SENTENCE. Traditional tonal music for the last several hundred years, (excluding the atonal composers, of course), relies on this idea that music has to end in a cadence in the key of the music. It's the reward for your pleasure center. We are conditioned like little lab rats, used to pushing our bars and waiting for our food pellets. We get frustrated as all hell if we don't get our pellet!
Think then of music as a number of different ways of satisfying and denying and delaying gratification in creative ways rather than a medium for expressing profound ideas about the cosmos. Not that we can't have profound ideas AND get our pellets, too! Of course we can. (And next week we'll prove that by analyzing part of the Mozart Requiem as my farewell to Mozart). But the task for musicians is to do this by toying with our stimulus-reward conditioning.
The basic cadence, the basic stimulus-reward, is the V7-I cadence, which I explained in the previous diary on cadences. If that sounds like gibberish, think of it this way: Every song you learned as a kid ended in a V7-I cadence. Without that cadence, the song is unfinished, like a sentence without a
So how many ways can you deliver that period? And this is where Mozart really excelled, because Mozart gave us some of the most beautifully elaborate periods on the end of his sentences.
I think this may be one reason that some people don't get Mozart right away, and I'll confess to being one of those people. It took me years to really get Mozart. We have become so accustomed from listening to the more complicated chord progressions of more modern music that just HOW that little period gets delivered escapes our notice. It's not on our radar. To Mozart, though, that period, getting it or not getting it, is most of the fun.
This is one reason that I have described Mozart's music as erotic. I might be the only person in the world who holds that view -- I can't say I've ever heard it described it that way. But there's a certain cock-teasing aspect to Mozart's cadences.
Which brings us to Susan McClary, somebody I've been long searching for a way to bring up here. In the seventies, Susan McClary and some other feminists introduced a feminist interpretation of music theory. I'll confess up front I find it fatuous bullshit, but fascinating bullshit. From Wikipedia's entry on Susan McClary:
This work combines musicology within feminism. McClary suggests that sonata form may be interpreted as sexist or misogynistic and imperialistic, and that, "tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire." She interprets the sonata procedure for its constructions of gender and sexual identity. The primary, "masculine" key (or first subject group) represents the male self, while the allegedly the secondary, "feminine" key (or second subject group), represents the other, a territory to be explored and conquered, assimilated into the self and stated in the tonic home key.
So I'm not completely alone, I guess, when I see a sexual aspect to the process of delivering cadences. Which, if you accept that, makes Mozart one of the most erotic of all music composers. Take that, Wagner!
So, why did I choose Mozart's Piano Concertos for the example clips? Well, it's easier for me to dig through them for the material that I need, because Mozart established a solid form for his concertos making it easy to navigate them. My diary on the Piano Concerto #17 of a few weeks ago was a good introduction to the form, I think, and you could apply the same analysis to any of them. They aren't very different from each other in respect to form. What I have chosen is the short sections at the end of the exposition before the development. You could dig through any of the rest of his concertos, piano or otherwise, and find the same thing. His symphonies, not so much, because they have a different agenda since they have no soloist who needs to show-off.
What you listen to, above, is the way Mozart drags out and elaborates on what, in anybody else's hands, would probably be a straight forward V7-I cadence. Less screwing around. Fewer harmonic delaying tactics.
Let's compare it to Beethoven's Fifth for example. (And we'll do the whole Beethoven Fifth in a later diary.). Here's Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra in an old recording of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth
In particular, if we want to compare apples to oranges, listen to the cadence at the end of the exposition just before the development. That would be 1:34 to 1:47. It's great music. Jesus, it's Beethoven's Fucking Fifth. Of course it is. I just want you to notice what a different musical place Beethoven was from Mozart. The cadence is simpler, more tonally certain. Beethoven has a kind of story to tell with his music, so he's not going to get bogged down in the sensual wallowing that Mozart does in his piano concertos!
But let's notice something else about the Fifth. The first eight notes. Dadada DAH! Dadada DAH! What's going on there? That's not V7-I. That's I-V7. Sort of an anti-cadence! The first DAH is an I chord (C minor chord). Hear the tension on that second DAH? That's a V7, a G7 chord. That V7 sets up tension that calls for release in some way. We, the audience, the poor lab rats in this drama, push the bar, but we get no pellet! Not yet. For Beethoven, achieving that climax is a longer, drawn out affair, more akin to drama and story-telling. Listening to these contrasting examples, can you tell which of these two men had the more discipline?
Future Agenda Items:
If you've missed your CMOPUS fix, I just want to make sure you know that you can still get your fix on Mondays. Proud Tobeliberal is hosting his own classical music series, Monday Musical Meditations, a companion series to Thursday Classical Music, every Monday evening. His last diary (Monday before last), was on Franz Liszt's romantic masterpiece, Les Preludes.
In coming weeks, I'll be doing a diary on Mozart's K.364 Sinfonia, the Mozart Requiem (I have a really good angle on that one, to make it interesting), a REBOOT diary explaining Sonata form, probably with Haydn or Mendelssohn, and then we will begin to do as much Beethoven as we can before the year ends, probably starting with Beethoven's Fifth. The order I have in mind is #5, #7, #9, #6, #3. Why all higgledy-piggledy? Because I think the Beethoven Symphony #3 may actually be the hardest to do. And I want to get the Ninth done before Christmas.