Musical Styles --Continued

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In my previous post, I tried to get started —somewhat clumsily— on addressing the different styles of the better-known classical composers, in the general setting of Christmas music.  If you were to obtain a copy of either the Northern Lights Orchestra, or the Hampton String Quartet’s recording of either“White Christmas,” or “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” respectively, you will hear a fairly good parody of Mozart’s style; I think the playing of the String Quartet is marginally more convincing.

Casual listeners to music in the various styles can often immediately pounce on various aspects of the music that seem distinctive, and quite honestly, those features are probably what will count most strongly as the distinctive style elements of each composer.  Ironically, what is considered stylistically distinctive in each composer’s music is sometimes the very opposite of what the listener hears.

Let’s start with the transition from Bach to Mozart.

The musical ideal in the time of Bach was counterpoint, which is the combination of multiple strands of melody.  The attention of the casual listener is often grabbed by two strands of melody that are separately recognizable as actual tunes, such as in the elaborate chorales of Bach.  In this sample, the music has been queued to a point where two melodies enter in quick succession, one in the violins right away, and one in the trombones a little later; ten seconds of it should be enough to get the idea across.  The style of Bach’s is called Baroque, initially with a derogatory intent, referring to the highly ornamented building and furniture style of the century leading up to Bach’s day —the 17^th— which corresponded with what was perceived as fussiness in the music.  The dense counterpoint strikes some as fussy, others as heavy, others as elaborate, and yet others as clumsy, but of course to lovers of Bach, it sounds inspired and balanced!  Consider the bass lines, just to begin with.  Below is a tiny bit of the same chorale, with the bassline doubled by the Organ, illustrating a typical Bach


Warning: This clip is supposed to sound a little different, because we have a horn instead of the trombone which played the tenor vocal line before, and the bassline has been made louder.  [Another video of this same tune illustrates the bass line so much better: it is Wachet auf played on an ocarina!]

This is by no means one of the most interesting Bach bass lines; for instance listen to the first few seconds of (the bass line of) this one (Turn down the volume first!): Ach, wie fluchtig.

The characteristics of Bach era music were grandeur, intellectual density, complexity, and very generally speaking: seriousness.  Soon, even while Bach was alive, there was a reaction to this oppressively dense contrapuntal sound, and Handel, and Bach’s own son J. Christian Bach, who is incidentally credited with introducing the new style of music, began to write music that was more elegant, lighter, simpler, and (in the view of musicians of that time), economical.  Simplicity and charm was everything.  Music and art (graphic art) took their cue from literature and philosophy, and this period was called the Age of Enlightenment, because the intelligentsia of the time believed that their thinking and their Art was more rational, reasonable, than the Art of earlier times.  Just sufficiently many notes for the purpose, and no more.

And no fewer, either.  While Mozart embraced the principles of logic and reason in his music, he could not resist a certain complexity that was necessary to convey the sophistication of his ideas.  In hindsight, today we see how, as he grew older (though he wasn’t given much of a chance to do too much of that) Mozart’s music gained in complexity, but he was always at pains to obscure that complexity with simplicity.  He always insisted that anything in his music was there for a purpose, but of course, every composer we know always said that.  But to modern ears, Mozart’s music comes across as frilly and fussy, and ironically, it is these frilly, fussy bits that parodists sieze upon, to convey an essentially Mozartian sound!  Isn’t it ironic?  So all the little notes that Mozart used to convey a certain grace and charm, are now parodied to create a certain silliness, which, unfortunately, is not the essential quality of a Mozart work.  Make no mistake, the man was silly.  But not as far as his music was concerned.  So, in a sense, the parodists are creating something (which unfortunately does come across as superficially Mozartian) which would make Mozart cringe.  But what can we say?  If it sounds superficially Mozartian, isn’t that what we really want here?

In the YouTube video consisting of cuts from the Northern Lights Orchestra CD, the first tune is “Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” which to my mind has been arranged to sound something like in the style of Frederick Delius, a wispy, impressionistic style.  (The composer of these pieces will probably be furious to be criticized by mere amateurs, but if one sets out to parody a composer whose music is as widely known as Mozart, one has got to take one’s lumps.)

The second tune (Do you hear what I hear?) sounds very 20^th Century, except for a few gestures that sound like perhaps Mozart or Haydn.  In fact it sounds like BBC incidental music!  It is nice, but it is certainly not Mozart.  Perhaps the instrumentation gets in the way; the large orchestra, or the record engineering sounds un-Mozartian.  At times it sounds like Leroy Anderson (0f Sleigh Ride fame).

Next, I want to find some examples that will illustrate the styles of Mendelssohn, Brahms and Wagner.  All of these composers admired Beethoven, and Brahms and Wagner were strongly influenced by them.  (I can’t quite figure out the influences on Mendelssohn by simply listening; I may have to cheat and read some books.)  Anyhow, these composers are going to be a challenge, because at that time, there were so many excellent models in classical music, and musical scores were becoming so widely available, that a young composer could adopt elements from a number of different composers for his or her purposes, sometimes within the same composition.

Until that’s ready, so long!

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