Jan Templiner to Mike Leghorn:

>>In short, evolution doesn't mean improvement; it means adaptation to
>>change.
>
>But doesn't in this context adaption is pretty much the same as
>improvement?

Not exactly.  Nature has no terms of value.  In which sense was the mammoth
"worst" than our elephant?.  We may *think* that every change that drives
to survival is an "improvement", but this is just because we have a scheme
of values in which survival is generally "better" than death.  This scheme
is not even universal: in some contexts certain humans may think that
death is preferable to change and then, that adaptation to the context is
far from being an improvement.  Would they be "worse" for this?.  Who knows
if the mammoths were too proud a species to tolerate baldness and short
teeth?:-).  In music we can say without much risk that there's evolution;
the problem begins when we talk about improvement.  Improvement (and its
derived term "progress") implies a view of the world according to a
previous value scale and a directional view of time.  All this implies of
course an ideology, an ideal model from which we may be far or close in
different moments.  I find preferable to employ the term evolution in its
plain sense simply because music, just like Nature, is not supposed to have
ideal models.  By the way: G.K. Chesterton made incredibly thoughtful
commentaries on these subjects in "Orthodoxy" and "Man the Everlasting".

>>Forms that are best suited to the environment thrive, while less suitable
>>forms die off.
>
>This raises a question, which I couldn't find an answer to: Why do
>certain periods have certain forms? Why did the central Europe of the late
>18th century create the sonata form? What was the driving force behind
>that?

I think that the problem lies at how do certain periods views certain
forms.  There's a romantic view of the sonata form in which the opposition
of themes was felt as a dramatic opposition of characters, and the whole
form was viewed as a narrative in which the themes were the "characters".
The "creation" of the late 18th century was not the sonata in itself,
rather a "literary" or "theatrical" view of the sonata that influenced
obviously the composition of many of them.  The question would be then:
why a literary view?.  That was what early romantics needed (consciously
or not): a way out of music considered as a mere sensorial pleasure.

>And why didn't the late romantics come up with something new?

What about Schoenberg?.  Wasn't he a late romantic...?

Pablo Massa
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