'The Classical Style' reading group, week twelve

A 1789 miniature of Mozart (public domain). 

2. String Quintet 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

One Christmas in the 1990's my grandmother asked what I would like for Christmas. Inspired by this book, I asked for a CD of Mozart string quintets. The record store didn't have one, so she got me a terrific CD of Mozart string quartets instead. In the 2010's Rafi recommended the recordings of the Mozart quintets by the Griller Quartet with William Primrose playing the extra viola part. I bought that two CD set and loved it, but I haven't listened to these works for as many years as I have some of the other works discussed in this book. Media and economics help shape the music we listen to and appreciate.  

Joseph Kerman wrote: 

Years ago I floated an idea about Western music history, that it might be  viewed as falling into millennium-long phases: initially an oral tradition, with people performing music from memory; then a period of literacy (a term Leo Treitler was using at the time), predicated on scores and partbooks to sing and play from; and now a new model determined by sound recording and the activity (or passivity) of listening.  - Opera and the Morbidity of Music, pg. 85 

As a musician in the 1980's I felt guilty about reading about music. Pianist Gary Graffman called his memoir I Really Should Be Practicing. Musicians sometimes looked down their noses at reading about music. Most of my professional musician friends have next to no interest in writers like Rosen and Kerman.  

When I started taking ballet classes in 1990, my teachers explicitly told us not to practice ballet at home so that we would not practice wrong, since we really knew next to nothing about ballet at the time. Ballet class did reawaken my interest in classical music, so I reread Erich Leinsdorf's The Composer's Advocate in which he recommended Kerman's The Beethoven Quartets. I read that book and loved it and proceeded to read all of Kerman. Kerman raved about The Classical Style, so I read that, loved it, and read all of Rosen's books and listened to a bunch of Rosen's CD's.