ly formal grounds alone we can never account for even the technical procedures the purest music. Whenever we are given formal precepts in the abstract, we are led to expect a symmetry a mechanical and outwardly ingenious or involuted order. Then, taking the C major Sonata for a moment, why should Mozart, on purely formal grounds, have answered or balanced the first two bars the opening melodic phrase as he did ? The second pair bars might have been made up an exact inversion the melodic pattern, or an interchanged position dominant and tonic harmonies, or a reverse the pattern, or a literal sequence. What more fertile treatments could inhere entirely in the abstracted form the little phrase? But as soon as we consider these things, we observe that Mozart, who has always been belittled as the purest the composers brainlessly balanced absolute music, does not waste thought on such non-musical toyings with notes. His two-bar answer presupposes a primary concern with eloquent gesture and inflection the voice, and this leads him to a less symmetrical but larger tonal framework, and he draws the whole phrase towards an open-ended building the initial image. The process is far easier to follow in the music than in its verbal description, because this process is natural and proper to the art music; it arises from the real imagery that makes up the formed substance note-groups. On listening to Mozart's abstract music to-day, we are bound to lose a certain amount its initial imagery. Already most present-day listeners receive their musical experience at third hand, through recordings and not through their own performance. 36 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:20:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms REALISM IN ABSTRACT MUSIC 'Thereby they lose the tactile contact, and even the visual contact, with the act making music, to say nothing the accumulated experience which alone puts some life into such things as scale passages. In this respect our choice a well-known student piece brings our analysis closer home than would be the case with much instrumental music. Further, the full social and historical setting Mozart's music is not available to the present-day audience; it must be recaptured largely through wide readings and imaginative skill. The operas and concerts Mozart's contemporaries and immediate predecessors supplied a store conventions and associations which were significant in their own day to his audiences, but these ,conventions and associations are not so readily construed to-day, even with the best will. We no longer live Mozart's musical images. On the other hand Mozart had no call to write for posterity, such writing being the unrewarded illusion a later and more self,conscious age. Hence he could not have considered providing us with the picturesque tourist guides so readily obtained for the musical merchandise a century later. Finally, the genres or functional types late eighteenth-century music in Vienna are neither universal nor eternal, but highly specific, and while much their flavour remains, large segments have become for us vague, general and identified by dating rather than by vibrant imagery. Thus we can usually spot a dance image in Mozart's music, when we are not distracted from it by tales pure disembodied form, but we cannot always identify the type dance, unless intellectually, nor is its feeling close to us visually or kinasthetically, so that the audible realism is less distinct than it should be. In similar fashion the music worship or Masonic ritual Mozart's time and locale is no longer with us, so that such .associations as remain in his instrumental compositions are largely lost. If, therefore, the musical imagery Mozart is still strikingly plain and infinitely varied, and its interpretation remarkably direct and economical and lovely, once we free ourselves the rather useless search for a verification of pure forms , this can be due only to a richness and to a dexterity thought that bespeaks a realistic bent and an insight into human character and into the life around him, and also a quick and sure grasp every species form-content used for communication in his day. It is time that the problem significant content in music were brought to a new level discussion. The controversies the late nineteenth century over pure music and programme music have shown themselves to be ultimately shallow, though each 37 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:20:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
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Dec 11, 2023
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