Steven Schwarz [[log in to unmask]] wrote: >If Beethoven consciously adapts these four notes as such (and you've >yet to show even this), the sequence may be analogous to a Renaissance >composer's use of a plainchant. Right now it's like arguing that anybody >using the phrase "It's gonna rain" is quoting Steve Reich. This is poking on something very interesting. If I say a thing I always have to quote many people [that happens to be the meaning of the saying "nothing is new under the sun"], but the question is always whether I do it in order to 1) quote on purpose as a matter of acting actively 2) passively just being 'reporting' or 3) acting actively and utter the same thing as another without having the intent doing so (now it is hard to actually get away from). When Bartok quotes Sjostakovitj 7th symphony in his Concerto for Orchestra, he does so to able to fart and laugh at him, so thats an example of the first, if you needed to have one. The swedish composer Martin Q Larsson composed a work called "1000 years in 1000 seconds" which includes everything from Viking Bronzehorn to Baroque fugues, Classicist Sonata, Romantic orgy, floating Impressionist sounds, to 12-tone and onto Modal...and should only have been intended to illustrate. (Between comes the cultural pages in papers where the difference between reporting writing and active writing is hard to sort out). But all too often the same elements, or elements very like each other occur in two totally differnet works or circumstances, giving them a superfical similarity of perpeuteousness. Every time a composer comes up with a fate motif, the thoughts leads leads to Beethoven. When Wilhelm Stenhammar used his fate-motif however, he was likely thinking and meaning something completely different then Beethoven did. Should I compose a symphony with a choral section in the end, it likely will not matter whether I mean that as a hail to joy, a hail to evilness, to the wether or just to anything; The pundits will come and scream it there is a connection nevertheless. Not even to mention all times composers has used a melodic figure, which another used, meaning something totally different or not meaning at all. If History does not actually repeat it must nevertheless give an image of doing so, as true as I not quoting anyone when I write "the" for example, but still same bricks will have to repeat coming. So if one want one could conclude saying that history give a feel to repeat, when some common elments occur in totally differnet circumstances. Yet differnt thoughts, differnt notes, differnet circumstances, and different actors ....for the one who is not alluded by perception, Composers will always compose, and Kings will always build castles, and then it could be the ground to a great analysis upon: "The repetetive History of the Western Artmusic" Mats Norrman [log in to unmask]