Comment by jancsika
5 years ago
Well, he did compare to Mozart. To pick a rando Mozart piece[1]:
1. Sounds like cutesy little throw-away dance with nowhere near the gravitas of a Beethoven or Mahler
2. Listen closely and hear that the phrases are written purposefully so that the music sounds bad when the musicians choose to obey the repeat signs. In other words-- the music flows beautifully if you ignore the repeat signs, but that flow is broken when you obey them and go back to the beginning of the phrase.
3. Musical jokes later in the piece depend on the players actually taking the "wrong warp" repeats
4. Listen closely and realize that Mozart actually left out the main melody of the piece. (In fact, that melody finally appears only once at the end of the piece)
5. Listen more closely and realize that one of the subsequent main melodies are based off the accompaniment figure for the missing main melody
6. Listen even more closely and hear the striking dissonances and imitative polyphony that is exactly the kind of thing admirers talk about wrt Beethoven, Mahler, etc.
7. Remember that it's difficult enough to write a cutesy little throw-away dance in the style of Mozart, much less pull off all these formal experiments with such subtlety that most modern performances continue to play this music as if it's just a cutesy little throw-away dance
And that's just a random example. For a specific example: if Beethoven had written the Introitus of the Requiem Mass instead of Mozart, it would count as the most sophisticated counterpoint that Beethoven had ever written. (And there are probably more impressive examples of Mozart's counterpoint than that.)
1: last movement of String Quartet in E-Flat Major, K. 428
Whether or not it's actually impressive is irrelevant, the point was that more people than usual were just making random things up about it.
As someone who loves Beethoven but could never get into Mozart, I would appreciate a link or dozen to actual, good performances of the pieces you mention as needing special attention. Thanks.
In its particular field (the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices), it is just as superior as Mozart's work in his field.
But AFAICT this author's prowess in the field you defined is no more or less than a mastery of that singular skill.
For the author to be a "Mozart" (as in the historical figure, not the myth[1]) you'd need to show a richness of the author's approaches that makes the reader aware of the challenges of and breadth of the field. Something like this:
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a rhyming scheme
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow a (line-based and paragraph-based) rhyming scheme
Oops, wait...
* the brute force justification of monospaced text by creative word choices which follow an intricate rhyming scheme where certain paragraphs are mashups of archaic German verse and 1970s gospel lyrics
Oops, wait... there are also some patterns of words where the pattern is written twice, but punctuation was inserted in a seemingly arbitrary place so that I didn't even notice the repetition on the first reading. Something like, "One two three four one. Two three four." Except each sentence was grammatically and contextually correct. Mozart did stuff like that-- there's an example somewhere in the clarinet concerto but I can't remember where.
1: I mean, there's no law against using the mythical Mozart here. But I imagine we'd be trolled by HN'ers if we did that regularly with, say, von Neumann or Einstein.