On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:15:27 +0200, Alan Hope
<usenet.identity@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Josh Hill goes:
>
>>Seriously,
>
>Seriously, he says. What a ****ing arse.
>
>>AFAIK, Mozart did write most of his stuff in his head. He'd
>>work out his ideas by improvising at the keyboard, develop them in his
>>head, write them out the next day or whenever -- famously, while
>>carrying on conversations at parties. So it wasn't a matter of his not
>>being prodigious, but rather of his wanting to "hone" his legend.
>
>Mozart listened to the Miserere of Allegri once and once only, then
>went home and transcribed it note for note. You don't need to hone a
>legend like that, you puffed-up tit.
Dude, you are falling into the habit of being habitually wrong.
Mozart wrote it out the first time, listened to it again the next
night, and made some revisions.
Which of course has nothing to do with my assertion about Mozart,
except perhaps to illustrate the value of honing a legend and the fact
that people will do it whether the legendee is involved or not. And
which, like your failed defense of Beethoven, is based not on any
knowledge, but your wish to believe something.
As was the case with Beethoven, what I've said here about Mozart is
based on reading, not wishful thinking. And that, unless you've a
scholar's knowledge of the composers' lives and can argue at the same
level as my sources, means that your arguments are fools' errands.
Bach, it's said, used to say that he thought he could play everything
at sight. One day, a friend of his placed a work with a fiendishly
difficult passage on the stand of his clavier, knowing that it was
Bach's habit upon visiting to walk over to the clavier and try out the
music there. That the composer duly did upon arrival, until he got to
the fiendishly passage, whereupon the music stopped. Bach backed up,
the music resumed -- and stopped again at the fiendishly difficult
passage. "You know, I guess you /can't/ play anything at sight," said
Bach to his laughing friend.
Truth be told, I was kind of disappointed when I read that story, just
as I was kind of disappointed when I read about Mozart's secret
sketches. But -- if it makes the man less of a god, doesn't it make
him more human? Bach himself used to say that, with hard work, anyone
could accomplish what he had. Beethoven too referred to his having
become what he had through his labor. The gifts of these men and their
fellows in genius seem to me even more impressive when seen against
the background of a talent that, while marvelous by ordinary
standards, was not infinite, and the hard work that was required to
develop it.
That being said, my nobility is here, and here (pointing to my mouth
and crotch). I 'umbly submit that if I'm a puffed-up git, you're the
veritable Peking Duck of gits, the Araby of arrogance, the Parnassus
of pomposity. Which roles may, however, reverse if you persist in
arguing against facts you just don't happen to have read because you
don't happen to want to believe them.
I've always considered you my equal in knowledge and intellect, have
in fact sometimes been shy in responding to your posts for that
reason. But if you start playing Sylvia and criticizing me over
"angled decks" and claiming that microphones are powered by trucks,
well, it will be pretty damn hard not to feel puffed up, if only in
the sense that a fed man would at Auschwitz.
--
Josh
"This keeps out the stalkers, the obsessed, the dysfunctional, the
abusive, and
the general, all-around jerks who get off on turning a group so toxic that
nobody's
left after a while but the person and some of his associates or
collaborators.
It's the slow poisoning of a group." - J. Michael Straczynski
|
