# Agree or Disagree: "What the Great Composers teach Us"



## peeyaj (Nov 17, 2010)

Here's a very interesting reading.



> http://crosseyedpianist.com/2012/08/03/what-the-great-composers-teach-us/


I'm going to quote some of what is written:

"

*Bach - "counterpoint"*

how to approach separate voices and textures within a work. Useful not just for playing Baroque repertoire, but for any music where one is required to highlight different voices and layers of sound.

*Mozart - "clarity", "elegance"*

to play Mozart well, one needs precise articulation, finger independence, control, and lightness
an ability to utilize the full range of dynamics and phrasing, with minimal/sensitive use of pedal

*Beethoven - "strength", "structure"

*
an understanding of the building blocks and architecture of music, and the ability to highlight this
strength, projection, scrupulous attention to rhythm

*Schubert - "melody", "emotion"*

Beautifully shaped melodies, rapid shifts in emotion, musical chiaroscuro
the ability to move seamlessly between many emotions, from joy to despair, sometimes within the space of a handful of bars, or even a single bar

*Chopin - "sensitivity", "songlines"*

ultra-smooth legato, controlled shading, dynamics, voicing, pedalling
an understanding of the essential melodic line

*Liszt - "virtuosity"*

Play Liszt and you learn how to be a real performer, with the confidence, communication skills and strength to tackle the big warhorses of the repertoire (Russian concertos, Etudes etc) with true bravura

Fantastic technical grounding: double-octaves, chunky chords, projection, physical stamina, legatissimo and leggiero playing

*Debussy - "colour", "control", "detail"
*

Debussy often asks the pianist to forget how the piano works and instead demands touch-sensitive control, subtle shadings, fine articulation, absolute rhythmic accuracy and superb attention to detail. Observe each and every marking in Debussy's score - they are there for a reason!

T*wentieth-century composers - "percussion", "rhythm", "articulation", "colour"*

Bartok offers even the most junior pianist the chance to learn about percussion and rhythmic vitality, while Prokofiev combines these elements with references back to classical antecedents
Messiaen for rhythm, brilliance, emotion, meditation

"

I somewhat agree.

What do you think?


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## Guest (Apr 2, 2013)

I think that's a reasonably good very general assessment of music which would require rather complex performance practice consideration, and these comments represent just a tiny part of each composer's characteristics. I liked the chiarascuro comments about Chopin, but he did lots of additional things like Neopolitan harmonies which require fleshing out in performance. (Freddie Kempff always has interesting things to say about performing Chopin.) And I think one needs uber clarity in Bach!!

But these comments do reveal one thing: each composer needs to be approached differently when it comes to performance/interpretation. You say Debussy wants us to 'forget how he piano works" (I wish I could!) and yet each time I hear one of his Preludes, eg. 'Submerged Cathedral', I think these works are ALL ABOUT the piano itself and its capabilities after the invention of the sostenuto pedal. 

There's an interesting discussion to have too: composing for the available technologies - advances and limitations!!


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## peeyaj (Nov 17, 2010)

I really don't understand the big words :O

_musical chiaroscuro_
_
ultra-smooth legato
_

*legatissimo and leggiero playing*

???


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

Chiaroscuro = with striking contrasts. An analogy with the visual arts technique
Legato = smoothly
Legatissimo = really smoothly
Leggiero = lightly and delicately


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## Taggart (Feb 14, 2013)

Interesting that both Chopin and Liszt relied on their working through Bach to develop their technique.

I love this Liszt story:

One of the stops on this tour was Montpellier, where a local music-lover reproached him for playing Bach’s A minor Prelude and Fugue in a flashy and vulgar way.

Liszt patiently showed him his three ways of playing Bach’s piece.

The first way was simple and unfussy, “as the author must have understood it”, as Liszt explained. Then he played it again, “with a slightly more picturesque movement and a more modern style”. Then, as he lit a cigar, Liszt said: “Now here is the way I would play it for the public – to astonish, as a charlatan.” And he then played the piece, so the cowed and overwhelmed Frenchman tells us, with all kinds of virtuoso feats that were “prodigious, incredible, fabulous” – while still managing to smoke his cigar.


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## peeyaj (Nov 17, 2010)

ahammel said:


> Chiaroscuro = with striking contrasts. An analogy with the visual arts technique


Is Chiaroscuro synonymous with musical shading?


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## Amateur (Mar 21, 2013)

Collectively they teach us to build upon the past and across borders. This is what makes us human. 
The loss of our musical heritage makes much other mischief possible. Think how Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four shows how important it is to destroy history and culture so authoritarianism can take hold.
My freedom-loving grandparents came to this country with very little formal education, but they found movies that featured he likes of Stokowski, Jose Iturbi and Mario Lanza, they found Leonard Bernstein teaching people about serious music on Omnibus and the Young People's Concerts, and they found Ed Sullivan including Nureyev and Fonteyn alongside Elvis and the Beatles. My grandparents watched because they wanted to "improve" themselves. 
But my own college-educated generation considers itself new and improved, and very few people I know know much about any of the humanities. 
Most classical composers -- even when they weren't scholars like Brahms -- knew a lot about there they came from, and this allowed them to reach new heights. 
In short, classical composers help teach me how to live.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Tovey once wrote that there was one thing we could not learn from the greats: How to get out of a jam. "Because they never got in one."


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## ahammel (Oct 10, 2012)

peeyaj said:


> Is Chiaroscuro synonymous with musical shading?


I think it's usually used to mean dark and intense passages sharply contrasted with light and sunny bits (for instance: the funny parts of the Trout quintet's 4th movement). "Shading", for me, would be something more subtle.


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## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

I'd put an extra article on Haydn - bringing out the contrasts in his works and being able to communicate the humour aspect is important, in my opinion.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Thinking it is reductive, to the point of misleadingly simple-minded. A brief and bad check-list, with a number of ill-chosen, though obvious, composers slapped on to each category.

Nothing much to learn there. Better if the list were just the musical elements to consider.

Sigh.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

PetrB said:


> Thinking it is reductive, to the point of misleadingly simple-minded. A brief and bad check-list, with a number of ill-chosen, though obvious, composers slapped on to each category.
> 
> Nothing much to learn there. Better if the list were just the musical elements to consider.
> 
> Sigh.


I agree. I was going to say you can find examples of most of those descriptions in the works of all those composers mentioned, assuming you enjoy their work and are familiar with most of it.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

GGluek said:


> Tovey once wrote that there was one thing we could not learn from the greats: How to get out of a jam. "Because they never got in one."


Cute, a bit glib, and the thing many a writer is guilty of doing, coining a neat phrase, having it sound pithy and clever, while at the expense of a more in-depth or accurate statement.

Beethoven, in many a surviving sketch, is hard evidence to the contrary. Even in many of his many successes, you can sense the composer literally wrestling with the materials he is working with.

Less cute and glib and closer to the truth: they knew how to solve those problems when they ran into them, so well, that what we hear in the end product is seamless, and we can not detect where there might have been a problem.

So much less tidy, so much closer to the reality.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Beethoven, in many a surviving sketch, is hard evidence to the contrary. Even in many of his many successes, you can sense the composer literally wrestling with the materials he is working with.


And in the final product, you'd hardly know there was a problem in the first place. Well, sometimes maybe. I'm often happiest with LvB for his imperfections. No Mozart he!


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> And in the final product, you'd hardly know there was a problem in the first place. Well, sometimes maybe. I'm often happiest with LvB for his imperfections. No Mozart he!


Agreed!

Many are appalled when you point out the more than awkward and less "successful" (as far as smoooth) side of Beethoven. Those elements, or problems, and how he so ingeniously plowed through them _and ultimately made them work brilliantly_ is very much a part of the musical personality, and I think whether the listener knows it or not, very much part of what draws us in and holds us.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Yes, tovey was being glib, but he was also the most insightful musical analyst of the early twentieth century -- and I quoted it only because I remembered it and it seemed apropos.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

I think those are huge over-simplifications


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## ericdxx (Jul 7, 2013)

Bach - counterpoint

Mozart - speed

Beethoven - structure, chord progressions


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

To elaborate my perfunctory "over simplified" point:

Counterpoint: From Perotin, ca. 1200, through to yesterday, composers have used counterpoint, developed it, varied it, the best of them -- of which there have been many -- through all that time spectrum each "teaching us" what good counterpoint, use of it, is.

This sort of "Bach teaches us counterpoint" leaves people associating counterpoint with only the period and style of Bach. After Perotin, we have Guillaume de Machaut, and that litany of superb contrapuntal composers throughout the later medieval and renaissance, etc.

Teaching the Bach = counterpoint schtick is not only short changing either children in early school or those taking a primer sort of music appreciation class, it is, de facto, condescending toward those students big time.

Since almost all of basic music ed is so like this over-simplified, condescending _and supremely lazy type of teaching_ that I can readily work myself into a rant against it, spittle flying from my mouth, I'll leave it there.


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

> *Schubert - "melody", "emotion"*
> 
> Beautifully shaped melodies, rapid shifts in emotion, musical chiaroscuro
> the ability to move seamlessly between many emotions, from joy to despair, sometimes within the space of a handful of bars, or even a single bar


Part of my soul dies a little bit each time I see Schubert described primarily as a melodist, and not equally as a harmonist. It's doubly sad here because surely the "ability to move seamlessly between many emotions" has something to do with his ability to move seamlessly between the most mindbogglingly distant or unrelated keys as if he were taking a casual evening stroll. In this Schubert was without peer, in my not-humble opinion, with the possible exception of Chopin.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

"My teachers were first and foremost Bach and Mozart; secondly: Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner.

From Bach I learned:

1. Contrapuntal thinking, that is, the art of inventing musical figures [Tongestalten] that can accompany themselves.
2. The art of creating everything out of one thing and of bringing it all together.
3. The independence of bar sections.

From Mozart:

1. The unevenness of phrase lenghts.
2. The bringing-together of heterogeneous characters into a thematic unity.
3. Deviating from the evenness of bars that make up a theme.
4. The art of molding secondary ideas [Nebengedankenformung].
5. The art of introductions and transitions.

From Beethoven:

1. The art of developing themes and movements.
2. The art of variation and varying [Variation und Variierung].
3. The diversity of large-movement structures.
4. The art of writing carelessly long or heartlessly short, whichever is required.
5. Rhythm: moving figures to different sections of the bar.

From Wagner:

1. The turnability [Wendefähigkeit] of themes with regard to expression and their conception to this end.
2. Relationship of tones and chords.
3. The possibility of handling themes and motifs in a mannered way, through which they can be used as dissonances against harmonies [wodurch sie dissonant gegen Harmonien gestellt werden können].

From Brahms:

1. Much of which I had unconsciously learned from Mozart, particularly unevenness of periods, expansion and shortening of phrases.
2. Plasticity of forms: not to spare when clarity demands more space; bringing each figure to its completion.
3. [Systematik des Satzbildes - not sure what he means]. 
4. Economy and yet: wealth.

I have also learned from Schubert and from Mahler, Strauss and Reger. I was open to everything and can therefore say about myself: my originality is based on the fact that I copied everything good I encountered. Even if I didn't encounter it in others first. Indeed I may say: often enough, I encountered it in myself first. That's because I didn't stop at what I encountered: I took it to make it my own; I developed and expanded it, and it has led me to new things."

- Arnold Schoenberg


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## Petwhac (Jun 9, 2010)

*What the great composer's taught me?*

..I shouldn't have given up my day job!!

(actually never _really _had one for long)


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

GGluek said:


> Yes, tovey was being glib, but he was also the most insightful musical analyst of the early twentieth century -- and I quoted it only because I remembered it and it seemed apropos.


Still he could not resist making that tidy quip, knowing he was likely penning a quotable quip, inevitably sounded out of context of the body of that more earnest and detailed analysis. As I said, writers are prone to do this, as self entertainment if nothing more.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Eschbeg said:


> Part of my soul dies a little bit each time I see Schubert described primarily as a melodist, and not equally as a harmonist. It's doubly sad here because surely the "ability to move seamlessly between many emotions" has something to do with his ability to move seamlessly between the most mindbogglingly distant or unrelated keys as if he were taking a casual evening stroll. In this Schubert was without peer, in my not-humble opinion, with the possible exception of Chopin.


I don't know about dying a little each time, I just get angry 

Certainly both Schubert and Chopin learned more than a little from Mozart, who could modulate and / or shift "mood" astonishingly rapidly: like the phrase has it, any of these could "turn on a dime."


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Eschbeg said:


> Part of my soul dies a little bit each time I see Schubert described primarily as a melodist, and not equally as a harmonist. It's doubly sad here because surely the "ability to move seamlessly between many emotions" has something to do with his ability to move seamlessly between the most mindbogglingly distant or unrelated keys as if he were taking a casual evening stroll. In this Schubert was without peer, in my not-humble opinion, with the possible exception of Chopin.


Old reputations die hard, of course--to my knowledge, appreciation of this fact is really an early 20th century development, thanks in large part to scholarly types like D.F. Tovey. The reason people came so late to this appreciation is because of certain obvious weaknesses in his expositions and developments, which Tovey (in the Mainstream of Music) explains as connected to his invention of "a new kind of form." If Schubert's modulations are surprising even by Wagnerian standards, it's not surprising it took till after Wagner to appreciate them!

And, of course, his melodies are incomparably beautiful! :lol:


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

And, on further reflection, to be fair to Tovey, I think there's a difference between watching Beethoven wrestle with a problem he set himself, and getting into and out of a jam. Brahms probably had the right idea, destroying all his notes and drafts as he went.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

GGluek said:


> Brahms probably had the right idea, destroying all his notes and drafts as he went.


Yeah, damn him, limiting the field of topics available to musicology majors for their theses


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

GGluek said:


> And, on further reflection, to be fair to Tovey, I think there's a difference between watching Beethoven wrestle with a problem he set himself, and getting into and out of a jam. Brahms probably had the right idea, destroying all his notes and drafts as he went.


Funny you should mention Brahms. It makes me think of this customarily intriguing and impossible-to-prove statement from Tovey:



> It is impossible in a summary non-technical statement to demonstrate what were the new forms towards which Schubert
> was tending; and the mechanical triviality of the accepted doctrines of sonata form makes even a detailed technical demonstration more difficult than work on an unexplored subject. I must therefore beg permission to leave this matter with the dogmatic statement that the fruition of Schubert's new instrumental forms is to be found in Brahms, especially in the group of works culminating in the Pianoforte Quintet, op. 34.


p.s. Brahms is one of those composers who should not have been allowed to destroy anything--I don't care if it was just a grocery list, let alone a score!


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## NightHawk (Nov 3, 2011)

Simplistic, as is my post - no disrespect intended to anyone.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Blancrocher said:


> Brahms is one of those composers who should not have been allowed to destroy anything--I don't care if it was just a grocery list, let alone a score!


I'm agin it.

Make public only that which you think the finished product: consign the wood, marble and paper chips and dusts to the incinerator.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

PetrB said:


> I'm agin it.
> 
> Make public only that which you think the finished product: consign the wood, marble and paper chips and dusts to the incinerator.


I might agree with you, if it weren't for what Sibelius did to his 8th. Perhaps there could be a different rule for alcoholic composers.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Blancrocher said:


> I might agree with you, if it weren't for what Sibelius did to his 8th. Perhaps there could be a different rule for alcoholic composers.


Right or wrong, alcoholic or with any other drug problem (or for any reason at all), it is the artist's prerogative to withhold, or destroy, anything they've made. Once publicly released, it is out of their control. Before then, it is theirs to do with as they see fit, whether we agree with that decision or not.

Too many artists are aware of histories like that of Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu, an early work which Chopin had such strong reserve about that he got his publisher, who had the manuscript, to promise he would never publish it.

Chopin dies, et voila, Fantasie-Impromptu, published and public -- promise not honored. Chopin would have been better off if he had purchased that piece back from his publisher and burned it.

I destroy all sketches once I'm certain a piece is as best I can make it -- what is the point of hanging on to them? (The only sketches kept are ones of ideas that came up but did not belong in that piece -- those might later be worked into something else.)

You want to know the composer's "process?" Listen to the finished pieces... kinda obvious, I think.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

have I mentioned that I hate the word melodist? If somebody is a composer who writes melodies, which is pretty much every single composer who ever lived except those who only wrote for non-pitched sounds (and even those things are debatable), then they could be considered a melodist. It just strikes me as a dumb term. It also bothers me aesthetically :3


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

BurningDesire said:


> have I mentioned that I hate the word melodist? If somebody is a composer who writes melodies, which is pretty much every single composer who ever lived except those who only wrote for non-pitched sounds (and even those things are debatable), then they could be considered a melodist. It just strikes me as a dumb term. It also bothers me aesthetically :3


"Harmonist" is o.k. then? Haaaa Haaaaaaa Haaaaaaaa.


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## BurningDesire (Jul 15, 2012)

PetrB said:


> "Harmonist" is o.k. then? Haaaa Haaaaaaa Haaaaaaaa.


No.

....................


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