"Preserving this West"

Here is an email I sent to Larry Auster, while he was ill:

Larry,

As someone who grew up in the West, yet who comes from a non-Western background, you have helped me so much in remaining calm and confident when all those around me were ready and happy to knock down this wonderful and beautiful civilization.

I now continue in preserving this West from these alien, destructive forces.

Here is a Mozart piano sonata, which I hope you will enjoy listening to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v;=4RZiaBlkodE#at=375

(If this doesn't open, you can listen to it here.)

Kidist

[Note: the youtube page has been discontiued, but the Sonatas can be listened to here]

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Kenneth Clark's Civilization: Mozart's Symmetry

Design for a Chimney Piece, Harewood House, Yorkshire
Robert Adam: British, Kirclady, Scotland 1728–1792
Date: ca. 1769

Below is an excerpt on symmetry from Civilization by Kenneth Clark:

Clark writes about symmetry:
P. 293

The reasonable world of an eighteenth-century library is symmetrical, consistent and enclosed. Symmetry is a human concept, because with all our irregularities we are more or less symmetrical and the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam or a phrase by Mozart reflects our satisfaction with our two eyes, two arms and two legs. And consistency: again and again in this series I have used that word as a term of praise. But enclosed! That's the trouble: an enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit. One longs to get out, one longs to move. One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits, are enemies of movement. And what is that I hear - that note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger. Beethoven. The sound of European man once more reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave the trim, finite interiors of eighteenth-century classicism and go to confront the infinite. We have a long, rough voyage ahead of us, and I cannot say where it will end, because it is not over yet. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement, and still victims of the Fallacies of Hope.

And he continues that this restraint, this symmetry, was what the Romantics wanted to escape from:

I have used the metaphor of the sea because all the great Romantics, from Byron onwards, have been obsessed by this image of movement and escape.

Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar!
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead!

In Romantic art it usually led to disaster. The escape from symmetry was also an escape from reason. The eighteenth-century philosophers had attempted to tidy up human society by the use of reason. But rational arguments were not strong enough to upset the huge mass of torpid tradition that had grown up in the last hundred and fifty years.

It is as though Mozart was at the cusp of this desire to move, to escape, to gallop (as I write here) from the confines of symmetry.

Here is what I wrote about Mozart, and how he manages to rein in his music, despite the urgency:

[H]e never leads us far from the origin, and never teases us too much, although he loves to tease.

Still, Clark's Beethoven is a consequence of this desire to move, to escape, to gallop off. It is a dangerous desire, which leaves us groundless and always shifting, and open to attacks from all corners, spiritual and earthly.

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Vladimir Horowitz Plays Mozart; Who Does Bach Justice?

I got this comment from Rick at Reflecting Light on my earlier post on Mozart's Piano Sonata in A Major, K331, Andante Grazioso:

I have been listening to Mozart recordings quite a bit in the past few days. All symphonies from his "middle period" -- starting with no. 30, up to 35. I've enjoyed the performances although they're quite different.

Charles Mackerras and the Prague Chamber Orchestra: Mackerras was going through his horse-race period, no doubt influenced by the so-called "authentic" performance style. Most tempos way too fast, brash accents ... but Mackerras was a genius, and the rowdiness was tempered by a sensitivity to melody and phrasing. (He later got over that style, and some of his last recordings were of Mozart with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, wonderful readings.)

Colin Davis and the Staatskapelle Dresden: From the '70s but in typically excellent Decca sound. I cannot praise these recordings highly enough. Davis saw the light and imparted his vision to the fine orchestra in the city that was a smoking ruin only 30 years earlier.

Rick

I agree with Rick. There is a "horse-race" tendency in musicians today, and not just in Mozart. Bach's violin concertos are case in point. Performers compensate for this flight from the piece in different ways. Rick observes the brash accents; I notice a "prettification" of the music.

One of the things I was trained in as a choir performer and while studying piano, is how not to gallop off - it is apparently a natural tendency. It is not simply a matter of giving each note its due, but of controlling our internal rhythm, so we don't allow it to accelerate while singing or playing a piece of music. I think that there are also those with natural musical ability for whom this reining-in is easier. Not every-one can be a musician.

Here is perhaps my favorite piece of music: Bach's violin concerto in A minor, and specifically the first movement. There are performances where the movement is played too fast, bolting aggressively off into some far horizon.

Isaac Stern, in the video below, does it full justice, giving it a delicate grandeur. I love the stretches of yearning by the violin solo.


Bach violin concerto in A minor, First Movement, given an Allegro or an Allegro Assai tempo
Isaac Stern & the English Chamber Orchestra

Probably a composer who can be played in this "horse-race" manner is Vivaldi.

I wrote here about a choral concert by a "Korean-American" concert choir I attended in New York. One thing that struck me was the accelerated speed at which the choir (and the soloists) sang.

This seems to be a contemporary phenomenon. I don't think it is simply a display of virtuoso. I think people are bored with the music, and they don't spend the required time to play the notes, but rather gallop on to finish the pieces. Sitting and listening (like sitting and reading) requires a certain patience, a certain ability to leave the galloping world alone for a while. The world now is full of gallopers, from the fast car highways to the instant connections on the internet highway. Speech (conversation) is also becoming more jumbled and faster, as though people cannot string together words fast enough. So if the audience is based on the galloping type, I suppose the orchestra is also of the same ilk, not just because they want to deliver what they audience wants, but because they really are in tune (in the same wave length) as the modern concert-goer. Speed, expediency (the psychologists have a term for it - Attention Deficit Disorder) is part of contemporary man's make-up.

I also think this is why the Korean choral group performed in the manner it did. It is not "in tune" with Western music, so its interpretation is to get through - virtuoso manner - the musical piece. I wrote about this same lack of sensitivity in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, an Asian-dominated orchestra group, in the same blog post Asians Playing Western Music.

I wrote in the post:

As the [choral] concert progressed, I began to realize a certain "prettiness" in the performance, a lack of force, drive and even drama. I don't think this is simply a cultural phenomenon (as in misunderstanding the Messiah's content, message, meaning, etc...). I think it is a physio/cerebral problem. I've seen it happen in art and design, and even in science... At some level, I think Asians demonstrate some ability (i.e. memorization, or fast, scale-like exercises). But there seems to be an inability to create a synthesized beauty, which is what much of art (and order in Science) is about.

Perhaps this galloping-off by white members of orchestra and other musical ensembles is also influenced by this multicultural environment, where the deep study of the Western music is being overshadowed by other things like audience appeasement, and non-white (and specifically East Asian) dominance in classical music.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

An Idiot Playing at Genius

Actor Tom Hulce, aging adolescent hippy at age 53.
Mozart looked nothing like this in later years.

There is silly film on Mozart, called Amadeus, where he is made out to be a bumbling idiot. The portraits of Mozart show him to be a serious, observant man. He has to be, to write the kind of music he wrote.


Posthumous Mozart portrait painted by Barbara Kraft in 1819,
under the supervision of Nannerl Mozart
(Here is more information on the authenticity of the portrait - pdf)

One theory about the above portrait is that its model is a Mozart family portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce painted in 1780. Mozart would have been about twenty-four then. Men were mature and serious in their early twenties. Now, we have immaturity all the way to the grave.


Mozart
Date Painted: 1790 (a year before Mozart's death, at age 34)
By: Johann Georg Edlinger, 1741-1819
Oil Painting
31.5 x 24.5 inches

This is a more relaxed pose than the one above, with Mozart's hand casually on the back of a chair. Probably by then, Mozart was more confident about his talent, and his role and position in German society.

The actor who plays Mozart in Amadeus looks nothing like him. Why wouldn't a director try to find an actor with as close a resemblance to the character as possible? And if that wasn't possible, why not use film props (make-up, costume, hair, weight gain/ weight loss, etc.), to make him look like his character?

One reason, I think, is that a Hollywood film on a classical musician is difficult to sell to the general public. It might work for a serious production like the BBC, or as a documentary, but for the popcorn popping audience, we need something more FUN. And the idiot the filmmakers chose to play Mozart certainly has that fun credential.

His call to fame, besides his Mozart role, is acting in National Lampoon Animal House as a freshman in college trying to get into a fraternity. The only one that would consider him are The Deltas, who:

...are a motley fraternity of rejects and maladjusted undergraduates whose main goal is disrupting the staid, peaceful, rigidly orthodox, and totally hypocritical social order of the school. The Deltas, oblivious to the danger they're in, are having a great time, steeped in irreverence, mild debauchery, and occasional drunkenness, led by the seniors and pledge master John "Bluto" Blutarsky (John Belushi). They're given enough rope to hang themselves, but even then manage to get into comical misadventures, culminating in the commission of one last, utterly senseless (and funny) act of rebellion.

Roger Ebert, the film critic, says of the film:

The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological. It finds some kind of precarious balance between insanity and accuracy, between cheerfully wretched excess and an ability to reproduce the most revealing nuances of human behavior.

Roger Ebert, for some reason, writes affectionately about these brothers, calling their debauchery mild and their drunkenness occasional. The film is one long drunken debauchery, not by maladjusted undergraduates, but mentally deficient young men who had no reason being in college. (I myself saw it in college, as a hard-working college student. My degree was in biology. There was no time to fool around.)

Wikipedia says that Hulce is "openly gay." Trust Hollywood to cast a homosexual in the role of Mozart, who then portrays him like some kind of fairy. Even Mozart's relationship with his wife Constanze, whom he called "Dearest, most beloved little wife," is depicted as some kind of adolescent frolic.


Constanze Mozart
Date Painted: c.1789
By: Joseph Lange, 1751–1831
Oil on canvas
12.7 x 9.8 inches


Left: Portrait of the widowed Constanze Mozart
Date Painted: 1802 (she would be forty years old)
By: Hans Hansen, 1769-1828
Oil on Canvas
[I cannot yet find the dimensions of the original]
Right: The girlish actress who portrays Constanze in Amadeus in 1984

Can the Hollywood actress who played Constanze ever look like the mature widow?

Here is the answer:


Elizabeth Berridge, who played Constanze in 1984,
fifty and still girlish in 2012.

Mozart's music is everywhere. I am sure most people would recognize some melody or piece, which they may have heard in some elevator muzak, in a commercial, or in a restaurant. Many films also use classical music, and I'm sure Mozart's fills in many a background soundtrack. Thus, directors could try a little harder to bring Mozart to the public. Not by making him into a bumbling idiot, but by bringing out the inherent joy of life that Mozart had (as I write here about Mozart's twists and turns, almost joking with us, in his music).

But Amadeus isn't even using comedic artistic licence. It is something much more nefarious than that.

Amadeus demonstrates the general desecration of beauty by a small elite of sophisticated people. They know what they're doing. Demeaning Mozart and destroying his music is like destroying beauty. Destroying beauty is destroying God, the good, and our land and civilization. What they want is to form something else out of the rubble of their destruction, something which they can recreate to their own desires and specifications. Their ambition is nothing short of god-like. They are the Nazis of our era, but even more sophisticated, more patient, and less overtly violent.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat

Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K331. Andante Grazioso

Pianist: Jeno Jando
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat