II THE CLASSICAL STYLE
2. Structure and Ornament
By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
The references to Rossini on page 101 makes me think of the popularity of his “The Barber of Seville” in the mid-twentieth century from Bugs Bunny in “The Rabbit of Seville” to Alfalfa of the Little Rascals singing “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro”. Joseph Kerman has written about how people have complained about the “death” of classical music for over a hundred years. Kerman notes that classical music survives, but often not in the way some people wish it would. In his wonderful (non-technical) book Opera and the Morbidity of Music Kerman notes the surprising revival of the popularity of opera in the 1990’s and the popularity of the Three Tenors and the CD Chant.
The discussion of ornamentation in this chapter makes me think about popular music in the last forty years, especially post-Mariah Carey, post-Whitney Houston singing, where singers typically add more ornamentation than in the music of the seventies and eighties. Watching American Idol in the 2000’s I noticed how young singers tended to add way more ornamentation than I tended to like. I think about changing performance styles of “The Star-Spangled Banner”.
I love the Heisenbergian tone of pg. 104, with Rosen’s uncertainty about how to find an accurate interpretation of music especially when it comes to knowing what kind of ornamentation Mozart would have liked in the slow movements of his piano concerti.
The first 108 pages of this book have laid the groundwork for appreciating the classical style. We have reached the top of the roller coaster. Enjoy the ride!
1 comment:
Excellent graphic! Figaro also makes an appearance in the opera section of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
I only finished the previous chapter yesterday. I like the section beginning on p. 95 about humor in classical music: "Truly musical jokes could be written." Mentioning "[t]he buffoonery of Hayden, Beethoven, and Mozart ..." interests me to find out more about them. There seems a stereotype of classical music that regards it as very very serious. A sentence on the last page perfectly aligns with Deleuze's notion that nonsense can make a donation to sense, as he puts it. "If wit can take the form of a surprising change of nonsense into sense, a classical modulation gives a splendid formula: all we need, as here, is one moment when we are not sure what the meaning of a note is." (p. 98)
I listened to Perahia playing Mozart's K. 271 and could appreciate it more.
This weeks chapter proved much easier to read and follow. Good for Beethoven that his later works don't need ornamentation. Rosen makes it very clear what ornamentation looks like in classical music by showing the sheet music. It essentially means adding notes or flourishes not written into the score. It seems less clear to me what this looks like in pop or rock music which often has no score or chord chart until after getting made. The examples you gave, Eric, aren't familiar to me. I saw a documentary on Tina Turner, one of my favorite singers, and wouldn't be able to differentiate ornamentation from interpretation in her performances. When recording vocals, we'll often get the singer to do a vocal ad lib pass after the main parts have been put down. Often, most of these ad libs don't get used, but that seems the closest to modern ornamentation I can think of.
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