Were the good old days better

[waiting man]

were The Good Ole Boys better?

[Timfonie]

Having to do all the composing in your head first gives the best opportunity for great coherence between all elements of a composition. That is .. when you are able to hold all the different lines CLEARLY in mind at the same time which requires a superior working memory.

Mozart could do that much better than almost anyone else. And wasn't it Mozart who could perfectly and instantly copy (and enhance) a piece of music he just heard someone else playing? (or is that only a romanticized perception of him?)
With a world population much higher today there are probably some musicians with a likewise great musical mind. There's only one thing as a proof: demonstrating the same thing in public.

I agree with someone who came with the analogy of the pocket calculator preventing a mind to fully develop it's full rote calculating potential. Yet I think this is not the only reason why Mozart is considered quite a rare genius. I don't think there are plenty of prodigies on earth who just didnt't become like Mozart because their brains are spoiled by high tech music composition tools.

[jens]

7- if you cant whistle a single note, you have exposed the futility of your own argument.

No, my point was that for me Mozart doesn't stand out amongst classical composers. I can rip into Beethoven or Strauss or Prokofiev or Wagner or Tsaikovsky but if you asked me to hum some Mozart I'd be completley stumped.

he had a few very good compositions though (e.g. his piano concerto #26 - that's one of my most favourite classical compositions even if I do not rate Mozart very highly)

[dick]

Having to do all the composing in your head first gives the best opportunity for great coherence between all elements of a composition. That is .. when you are able to hold all the different lines CLEARLY in mind at the same time which requires a superior working memory.

Mozart could do that much better than almost anyone else. And wasn't it Mozart who could perfectly and instantly copy (and enhance) a piece of music he just heard someone else playing? (or is that only a romanticized perception of him?)

Yes this is what i have been saying, and i also agree with Bones, that was the tradition he was born into, a tradition that was a product of a certain point in time, the industrial revolution destroyed the tradition, because technology demanded a different relationship to time, out goes species counterpoint, operas etc, in comes commodities, the Viennise Tradition becomes petrified in a museum, no longer a living presence

[james0tucson]

Mozart could do that much better than almost anyone else.

On the other hand, he did a lot of draft and revision, and struggled to complete some orchestrations. He was really quite human, and that becomes clear when you observe his processes. Mozart was a composing genius, but not a god.

And wasn't it Mozart who could perfectly and instantly copy (and enhance) a piece of music he just heard someone else playing?

He transcribed a chorale after hearing two rehearsals and two performances. Aside from the fact that he did it at a very young age, it's a skill that's been routinely required for conservatory entrance.
Evem at a public university, we were required to transcribe ten or twelve bars of four part harmony as part of the ear training jury.

Please don't think I'm dismissing Mozart; I practically worship him. But studying him, I've discovered that he understood he had a gift, but that he was quite humble about it, and that he struggled a great deal whenever he pushed the envelope of his talent. It's because he worked so very hard at his craft, *beyond* the amazing level that he seems to have been born with, that he's so great.

[james0tucson]

So...for every Mozart there are a dozen Salieris?

Popular ideas about Salieri seem to derive from a certain film that took distinctly biased biographical liberties. This is derived from another fictional account, Pushkin's opera about Mozart and Salieri. The historical facts aren't nearly such a dramatic conflict. The kernel of truth behind it, is that the Viennese government (with Salieri at the helm of the musical administration) tried to shut down Le Nozze di Figaro. To be fair, that opera is a pretty brutal satire of the very people that made the performing arts possible in Vienna...

Salieri's problem is that, as court composer, he wrote a whole lot of very mundane church music -- the 18th century equivalent of radio jingles -- and so the bulk of his work was forgettable.

[Debutante]

The average listener does not value talent, only self affirmation, so it takes a while for the deeply talented to be appreciated (not to say that pop singers aren't talented) and the more modern audience hasn't the time to appreciate

acronyms are cool....K.I.S.S. keep it simple stupid.

I always thought that one meant Kids In Satan's Slavery.

I heard it was Knights In Satan's Service

[eidenk]

The two propositions complement each other quite well.

[Milos]

I like Johan Sebastian Bach very much.I Especially like his organ works-Passacaglia bwv 582 is my favourite:)I haven't listened Mozart much though.

[Milos]

I think Vangelis found great compromise beetween composing and technology.
First,he use synthesizers that are easy to use and respond in natural way(like the Yamaha cs80).He doesn't want to spend all day on big modular synthesizer which is btw monophonic
Secondly,he doesn't use computers,only tape recorders:D
The best thing of all is that Vangelis can't even read notes He only plays what he hears in his head.Music is not all about beeing musical-mathematical-harmonic genius,to me it's more spiritual thing
I'm glad Johan Sebastian Bach put together both things

[james0tucson]

I like Johan Sebastian Bach very much.I Especially like his organ works-Passacaglia bwv 582 is my favourite:)I haven't listened Mozart much though.

We can trace Bach's composing procedures to the very beginning. He made his own manuscript paper with a writing tool called a Rastral and there is enough material to reconstruct the mechanics of his process all the way to tabula rasa. For some work, he prepared a large supply of paper in advance, without regard to the musical layout of the score, and for other work, he made the paper with the precise number of staves required for a given composition, even leaving space for things he planned, but did not lay out calligraphically.

For example, when making the staff paper, Bach, sometimes assisted, and sometimes alone, would spread out a folded sheet, and ruled from the outside edge of each page to the center fold. The staves overlap at the fold, and rarely extend to the edge of the page.

I have enough musical examples of Bach's revision style to base a Masters thesis on it; I considered it actually. A great deal of insight into the composer's processes can be deduced from the corrections he made in various Chorales, since there is a decent amount of source material to study.

You mentioned BWV 582. That's interesting; even though it's one of Bach's most famous organ works, my understanding is that there is no autograph manuscript known, only late contemporary copies. There were references to manuscripts, but none is known today. Two points of controversy are that there is some evidence that Bach didn't intend for this Passacaglia and Fugue to be a single work (even though they work together magically), and, that the fugue was not an organ work at all, but was composed for pedal harpsichord.


I'll stop my ranting now; I'm sure Baroque music history isn't exactly what the KVRians are into

[dick]

james0tucson wrote

I'll stop my ranting now; I'm sure Baroque music history isn't exactly what the KVRians are into

please rant on

On the other hand, he did a lot of draft and revision, and struggled to complete some orchestrations. He was really quite human, and that becomes clear when you observe his processes. Mozart was a composing genius, but not a god.

But this statement means very little, without more background information, eg, did he struggle when he was composing at 5 years old, or after 1781 when he achieved full maturity.

Listening to so much of his mature music, I am astonsished at how much like an improvisation his music sounds, I mean this in the sense of its immediacy, I think the art of improvisation is really high speed compostion, or compostion is slowed down improvisation, not sure if that make sense, but listening to a great improviser is for me the greatest of musical experiences.

The conventional wisdom, that Mozart completed the compostion in full in his mind, before commiting it to paper, rings very true to my ears.
And i think it is the spontanaety of the original conception, that still communicates strongly to us even now.

[tetraplan]

I'll stop my ranting now; I'm sure Baroque music history isn't exactly what the KVRians are into

Oh, please baroque on.

Groet, Erik

[tuz]

go listen to some non western music people. broaden your world. it inspired some great westerners you know, including the heavily mentioned mozart. it goes both ways. west listens to east/east listens to west. north/south whatever. don't get stuck with "mozarts" and their greatness. look at what made them great. their ears and their brains.

[tangerine]

Mozart was nothing compared to Bach and Beethoven!!!!