"You've never heard of Eine Kleine Nachtmusic?" my aunt asked one day in disbelief. Actually, I had heard it --often-- but I had never learned its name. My dad's taste in music was remarkably similar to my own (probably unsurprising), but he hated to pronounce foreign words. (I still remember him blushing furiously when he happened to say hors de combat one day, in passing, and was caught saying it. We didn't make a fuss, but he was embarrassed all the same!) So dad often played it at night, as we kids were about to fall asleep, but we never knew what the piece was called.
Mozart is commonly believed to have been very intelligent. I stumbled onto this idea late in life --around the time people started playing Mozart to their babies-- and I thought it was a little precious. I knew he was eccentric, all right; that was common knowledge. But how could people deduce that he was a genius? The evidence is still not clear. But as far as I'm concerned, Mozart's genius is very much like pornography: I can't define it, but I know it because I can hear it.
Unfortunately, Mozart muddies the evidence just by trying to be clever. Most of what I know about the times Mozart lived in is from Mozart's own letters, and he makes perfectly clear that he just knew himself to be several cuts above the rest, at least as far as musicianship was concerned. Musicianship in the late 1700s was all about economy; killing several birds with one economical stone, but letting brilliance flower. If you stopped too soon, you had no genius. If you went on too long, you became boring. Mozart played this game of one-upmanship all the time, and when I read his letters as a teenager, I was appalled at the conceit of the man, and of course I completely missed many of his allusions, simply because I did not know the people involved. But that he should stoop to criticize people of lesser talent than himself I could not understand! You could not score points by being vicious. I knew all about scoring points as a teenager; that's what my teen years were all about. (The first thing you thought as you woke up in the morning was how to avoid becoming the fulcrum of someone else's point-scoring.)
Mozart was not only brilliant, he was utterly innocent. On one hand, he could put himself inside someone else's head to a certain degree, but unfortunately --I believe-- he misunderstood their motives in rather amusing ways. (I wish I could give you specific examples, but my speculations are actually going in a different direction.) But his genius lay in how he was able to get everyone else, at least partially, into his own head.
The question arises: do we want to get inside Mozart's head? And my opinion is: definitely yes.
First of all, I have to make it clear that Mozart wrote a certain amount of stuff that does not make sense to me --at this time. But so does Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and most other composers. One must assume that it may have made sense on some occasion, or they may just have been having a bad day. But don't write them off permanently; sometimes I've accidentally listened to a piece I had written off as useless, and it suddenly sounds perfectly plausible and meaningful. But with the proviso that not everything Mozart wrote is immediately certifiable as brilliant, I encourage you to give his work --at least the best known works-- a try.
Just the other day, I was showing my Mini-Disk player to a friend, and put on a disk I had recorded. (MiniDisks are tiny two-inch disks that you record yourself. They come in a protective shell, so that they just can't get scratched. Each one can hold 75 minutes of music, and most MiniDisk recorders permit you very sophisticated editing capability. Of course, sound editing software is available on the Internet for free, for recording your own CDs and so forth, but the MiniDisk systems really made it very easy, and you did not have to link them up to your computer; you could do it all on your stereo system.) Anyway, to get back to Mozart: it happened to be a compilation of "slow movements" from Mozart. (Symphonies, concertos, sonatas, all have these lovely jewels, an Andante, or Adagio 2nd movement, and it is the easiest thing in the world to compile them into a 75 minute collection.) The first one on the disc was the Andante Cantabile called the Minuet in D. This particular piece --just a movement from some serenade-- has no function except to be delightful. Knowing Mozart, he was probably trying to be clever when he wrote it, but as always, the cleverness is not intrusive. He might go back and refer to the piece in a letter, indicating that the whole thing was sheer artifice, and all the feeling in the thing was completely fake. But one listens to it, and one weeps, because there is no artifice to be found in it at all!
I have written often about the wonderful Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, and the Clarinet Concerto, and the Concerto for Flute and Harp, but I would like to write about something else. One of the earliest major works by Mozart that I learned to enjoy is the Symphony No. 40 in G minor. It is just a jewel, all four movements of it. (Apparently there are two versions: one with clarinets, and one without; I haven't really studied the matter.) Oh, where to begin?
The structure of the opening movement of a Symphony is complicated, but it's worth learning. It is based on two themes, which are simply tune-fragments. (In Mozart's time, they were quite recognizable melodies, but by the time Beethoven got his hands on the idea, they were brief, terse melodic atoms, allowing a great deal of twisting and bending without breaking, if you know what I mean.) The first theme --let's call it A, is introduced first. Then the music moves into a related key. In the G minor symphony, it moves into B Flat. There, the second theme is stated; call it B. (If they're playing the symphony as it is supposed to be, this entire section would be repeated, but in these busy times, the repeats are often skipped to make room for commercials.) Now comes a section called the development, where there are really no rules, but that the two themes are developed and combined in various ways, and the composer gets to be very clever and painfully musical in the process. There is a noticeable increase in tension, the listeners wondering what the heck is going on, and the composer sweating, wondering what to write next. At any rate, the music gradually approaches a big pause, and we get ready to hear the two themes once again.
To this point, the music has been A, B, C, where C is of course the development section. Now we hear A again; this is the recapitulation. But, in an interesting twist, the theme B is heard not in the related key in which it was originally heard, but in the same key as A. In major-key works, this doesn't make a huge difference; it is only the bridge between the two themes that betrays the fact that the second theme is in the theme of the first: you can hear this in the first movement of the Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. But in the present case, in the recapitulation, theme B --originally heard in B Flat major, is now in G minor, which makes an enormous difference; it makes this recapitulation all the more heartbreaking. The emotion is not worn on the sleeve; to me it seems as if the work sets out to express grief, but changes its mind and decides to be graciously cheerful. But every once in a while, the gracious facade crumbles, and we see the tears beneath. So, the structure is A, B, C, A, B*, where B* stands for the slightly modified second theme.
All first movements of symphonies of this era have this structure, including many written by Beethoven, who first began to tinker with the form. It had worked for several decades for good reason; it gives the composer great expressive freedom within the form, and the fact that later composers felt the need to discard it simply tells you that Beethoven had done so much with it, that it was too much to live up to. (The same thing is going to happen to SUV's; they're all the same shape at the moment, and someone has to come up with a startlingly different shape to seduce new generations of idiots. Maybe something that looks like an enormous hybrid, but with the letters SUV emblazoned on the windscreen, just to make sure there's no confusion.)
And now this: I wish they would invent a new video format for cartoons!
The well-known "jpeg" file format for photographs is designed to represent photographs as efficiently as possible. The changes from pixel to pixel in an ordinary photo are generally smooth; jpeg is most efficient at representing smoothly varying data in an image with the smallest possible file. They do less well with sharply defined images, such as, for instance, a page of print.
The same situations arise in video. When you film scenes from life, the colors vary smoothly from point to point, unless you're filming a stick man, for instance. Unfortunately, though, the generally available video formats are all intended for video from cameras, which vary smoothly from moment to moment, and pixel to pixel.
In contrast, cartoons are sharply-defined images that are made to move. So the motion has to be smooth, but the image has to be sharp. This means that a file type is required with minimal smoothing, to help smooth motion (such as "anti-aliasing", which is a simple averaging method for neighboring pixels), combined with some sort of palette-based image representation. Well, here's to anyone who invents such a thing!
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