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Date: | Fri, 6 Aug 2004 16:13:52 -0400 |
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Steve Schwartz wrote:
>It cheers me up to see that Mahler can still cause controversy.
>However, I'm having trouble following the discussion. What do folks
>mean by "perfect" and "messy" as applied to the symphonies? I can think
>of weak passages in something like the finale to the First (as far as
>I'm concerned, a wonderful symphony anyway), but who's written a perfect
>symphony, and which one? And is a perfect symphony the same thing as a
>good symphony?
Hmmm. "perfect" applied to music or visual art, or literature probably
has no meaning at all, but let us try. A perfect crystal is a lattice
of atoms, regularly spaced in all directions. Pretty dull. A perfect
tone is, by analogy, is a pure tone. People do not rush out to buy cds
of d minor - and for good reason. (" The Bernstein d minor is the one
to own." Not likely.) Conclusion: the perfect symphony is a dull,
meaningless, infinitely repetitive work. That was easy!!Too much order
is perfect, but dull!!! Too little order (an orchestra tuning up?) is
without meaning.
But order is entropy- and we have a stretch of acceptable values of
entropy ranging from the classical low entropy side (Haydn, Mozart) to
the high entropy Mahler.
And this is a perfectly foolish theory.
Bernard Chasan
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