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From: salem@sri-unix.ARPA (Bruce B. Salem)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Knowing Large Pieces, Mahler
Message-ID: <199@sri-unix.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 22-Oct-85 18:24:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.199
Posted: Tue Oct 22 18:24:44 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Oct-85 07:41:31 EDT
Organization: SRI, Menlo Park, CA.
Lines: 50


   When it comes to matters of taste there is no despute. If someone
says that he doesn't like Mahler there is no need to persuade him otherwise
beyond the point where particular approaches can be suggested. This remark
is directed to the person who studied Mahler Symphonies for a year and a
half and still couldn't make anything of them.
    What I'd like to suggest is that one needs something to hang one's
ideas on. With artworks a certian degree of basic memory is necessary
to recall the pleasure of experiencing the art. I cannot stress this notion
enough. I would not mention the need to recognize basic forms in serious
music such as sonata form, variations, etc. without the view that the way
these ideas are used in Music Appreciation classes does the whole notion
a disservice by putting knowledge of form before knowledge of music. You
have got to hear Mozart 40th Symphony in your head before you can appreciate
the fact that the first movement is a sonata form. To talk analytically
about music one has to assume that someone knows the piece you are talking 
about.
   With the above reservation, I can go on to say that when I was still
in High School, 22 years ago, I discovered that a pocket score was an
excellant aid to the simple task of remembering much about a piece of
music. Since then I have taught myself much basic theory and skills of
music including sight-singing from collecting pocket scores and learning
the literature with them. I have studied all the Mahler Symphonies from
score and although this is not necessary it does speed one's acquaintence
with the music and you can point to specfics and do detailed analysis.
   The visual experience of having a beautifully printed score in front
of you, I'm thinking of the Dover set of the Beethoven Quartets from the
Urtext, is wounderful, an excellant aid to learning the music.
   Formal approaches to music are aids to memory and they require some
skills, for example emough tonal memory to hear the arrival back at the
tonic key in a sonata form. I found it hard at first to keep the transition
to the second key subject, or key area, in a sonata exposition separate
from the false transition in the recapitulation which goes to the rhyme
of the second key area in the tonic. The real payoff of such considerations
is that you get insight into the way a piece was composed. This includes
tricks with form as a method of composition.
   Use of form within form is an important consideration, for example the
use of a fugue as the developemnt in a sonata movement as in the first
movement of Mahler's Eighth Symphony, First Mvt. Beethoven Quartet in F
op. 59 no. 1, or in a variation as in Last Movt. Beethoven Eroica.
   I do not really criticize the alturnative notion that subjective feelings,
images, rhymes etc., can do something like all of the above. I find that
music carrys for me recollections of my past, but through the music. There
must ultimately be something that makes the music in one's own mind. It is
as if we must recompose it ourselves which is not so uncreative when 
recalling a large movement. I find that if I listen to a piece with the score
that I must go through it again with the score alone if I am going to 
learn the music.

Bruce Salem