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
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