Kevin Sutton responded to Mats Norrman:

>> I go with Stirling and we recommed a listen to Gesualdo, a propos
>> dissonance...
>
>Can't go along with either of you, especially where Gesualdo is concerned.
>The chromatic madrigals of the sixteenth century, while indeed dissonant,
>would not have been readily known to audiences accustomed to typical
>classical period practices.  I dare say that only a limited number of
>people would have known Gesualdo, or Lasso's chromatic works at all.  The
>point is, that an audience accustomed to common practice harmonic structure
>would have thought it strange when they first heard Creation, regardless of
>their like or dislike of it upon hearing.  This hair-splitting is coming
>from a 20th century point of view and with 20th century scholarship taken
>into account, and therefore, an irrelevant argument where the mind set of
>Haydn's audience is concerned.

What Kevin seems to over look is

1) Common practice harmony wasn't all that well established then.

2) There was more chromaticism around then he might think - in the works of
Clementi for example.

3) more people might well have been familiar - in the Vienna audience of
the time - with folk songs of the sort that Bartok was later to transcribe,
and more people in London would have been familiar with Handel - who is not
common practice harmony - than with the Mannhiem school.

and what he does not establish is by what means he *knows* what the
audience would have felt or not.  In looking through comments from the time
on the creation - I don't find comments on its strangeness to be abounding.
In fact, it wasn't an era that took excessive discomfort to the strange,
having just come out of a pan-stylistic period, and still having a taste
for battle pieces with percussive explosions and tone clusters to stand in
for cannon fire.  The Creation seems to have been remarkably well accepted
in both Vienna and in London.  This isn't the only case where one can point
to Haydn engaging in some very far reaching harmonic moves that, none the
less, seemed not to have raised many eyebrows.  It is, some would argue,
part of what makes him a great composer.

What many people seem to over look is that there is as much skill in making
the very strange seem normal, as in creating music which sounds strange to
the ears.

In painting there are some painters who expose their brush strokes, we
marvel at the craft of Monet or the boldness of van Gogh.  Others are
equally proud of hiding almost any sign of their brushwork - creating
a smooth surface that seems as if it were simply poured onto the canvas.
Haydn, generally, was of the latter persuasion.

Stirling Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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