May 12, 2004
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Earlier today I was listening to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. And I was thinking: This is music from the late 1700s. 1784, if memory serves, re-arranged in 1901 (some of the manuscript was lost, so a composer filled in the gaps). The version I was listening to had been re-re-written, since the arranger believed the 1901 addenda weren’t true to Mozart’s time. Of course, Mozart wasn’t true to Mozart’s time, sooo…
But I was listening to it, and thinking about it, there on the couch, wrapped up in my sleeping bag. What can I say? It was cold, and I like the constricted feeling of being in a sleeping bag. I sat there and listened and hallucinated mildly, seeing some nifty shapes and colors and, more importantly, beautiful empty spaces between the shapes and colors. The key is that it was beautiful. Not simply the abstract places my mind was going, but the concrete places the music was going. Mozart’s Mass is, by any observation, about as objectively beautiful as anything can be. It’s purpose is beauty. It’s truth is in it’s beauty.
So I was sitting there, and in between mild hallucinations, I thought: Why do I have to go back 200 years in history to find a work of beauty? I fast-forwarded through my knowledge of music history, and couldn’t find the same kind of pure beauty anywhere. Arvo Pärt came close, but his beauty is austere and implied, a bit like the space I mentioned before, the space between the shapes.
Most of Pärt’s music is religious in nature. Mozart’s desire (with the Mass) was to reveal the glory of God in the ornate complication of the aesthetic of his time. Pärt is revelatory in the act of removing all complication.
And as luck would have it, Pärt wrote a mass, as well. Which happened to be in the CD rack near where Mozart was. So I listened to it, too.
And I thought of Debussy as a kind of pure beauty, but his aesthetic is representational. Which is ironic, because he hung out with the cubists and surrealists. If Claude Debussy were here to argue with me, he’d take exception to being called representational, but he’d miss that all his music makes direct connection to images from mythology and real life. ‘La Mer,’ the sea. Prelude to the afternoon of a faun. Just read the title of the piece and you know what’s coming, right? He was trying to get away from the more formal aspects of orchestral music (no repeated melodies, texture over substance), but missed a biggie: the title of the piece.
So, as a channel for pure beauty, the vessel of Debussy is flawed, as far as I’m concerned. I dig the guy’s work, but he doesn’t make this particular cut. I’m too distracted trying to figure out which instrumental theme is supposed to be the faun to see the overarching beauty.
So it’s true: Unless I want austerity, I have to go back 200+ years if I want beauty. The time of revolution in the New World. A time of European empires. Religious intolerance and political upheaval. The last remaining embers of the Enlightement still bright enough to be seen, but too dim to cast any shadows. Just enough technology to get everyone in big trouble.
That’s where beauty lives.
Comments (13)
Mozart is a pretty unique talent. I wander all over the musical spectrum but always come home to Mozart. It is indeed pure in amazing ways.
Mmm…your description of visualizing the music as colors and shapes…but most importantly the space in between them – wow. I couldn’t have put words to that, but so damn true. Really makes me miss my cello and french horn…alot.
Oooh. You have a pretty brain.
we don’t have quite teh same investment in symphonic composition that they did back then.
but. eh, some of trent reznor’s instrumentals, for example, have a different sort of road to beauty… though often the title does get in the way of purity of representation.
genius is unduplicateable. but i imagine you could find that sense you are looking for in a work of comparative power. mozart’s a pretty high bar to set, though.
See, I’d disagree that we don’t have the same investment in symphonic composition. I think symphony is only slightly less rarified now than it was then. No one but the elites went to the symphony, particularly in Mozart’s time, just like today. If you can afford a ticket, you can go, but you likely can’t afford a ticket. If you watch ‘Amadeus,’ you’ll see that there were operettas for the middle classes, but these were more like musical theater, which we still have, and you’d really have to stretch to say they were about beauty. Certainly, not everyone was invited to Mozart’s Mass in the church, which was out of reach.
Plus, there are composers making a lot of money writing film soundtracks.
But music doesn’t have to be symphonic to be beautiful. I think the key to both Mozart and Pärt is that they’re trying to show you what’s behind the curtain, if you will. They’re trying to get their art out of the way of something else.
Beauty lives here, now, too.
F
not much contemporary music can compare to mozart, even modern classical arrangements, and certainly not pop or rock ‘n roll…. it’s all about look anymore, and i can’t imagine mozart’s inspiration and talent in brittney spears’ body?
only in a utopian world…..
looking backwards from Mozart it’s hard to find anything that compares. imho. he was pretty singular.
53 hugs.
Great depression, wpa and world war two produced abstract expressionism, Dada came largely out of WWWi. Upheaval and revolution seem to occur cyclicly and spawns cultural change as well.
maybe you would argue that none of those artists had talent to compare to Mozart, maybe correctly. I think it’s hard to say.
Great post Homer. You’ve got a great state of mind.
Have you seen, or heard “Man with a movie camera”, The sound track Cinematic Orchestra made for that black&white Russian film? It’s pretty amazing. Alot of what they do is “pretty colors in your brain” amazing. Sigor Ross (I think that’s how it’s spelt) is unbelivable. I get emotional when I listen to it, just like alot of my favorite older works, like some Mozart, to use your example. I always get the chills when I hear Saint Sien, but in a good way. A very very good way.
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Nice site by the way.
Oh, and I like string, so I recommend Joran, a Quebecois artist. Cello and voice. Might be a little creepy Fr. chick for you, I don’t know your taste.
I like Sigur Ros, but it doesn’t make me weepy. And I agree with Feith that beauty is everywhere, everytime. But I also know that that wasn’t what you were disimplying (is that a word!?).
All in all, I’d have to agree with you, although music and my cognitive brain don’t react as well together as they do in your world. I wish I could explain why certain music hits me in the gut. It does not happen very often. No, sir.
I kind of feel sorry for you. You shouldn’t have to travel 200 years to find beauty. I mean, there you are, perched in a tree, you should find it all around you.
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