Felix Delbruck <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>I would suggest that there are different kinds of repeat.  Some are purely
>conventional; some, as in Beethoven, are special effects, occuring only in
>some works.  Some, as often in Haydn or Mozart, may be conventional but the
>compositional substance is specially designed to exploit that convention.
>
SInce the composers didn't say, "I'm putting this repeat in to be
conventional" or not, you have no basis on which to speculate for any given
repeat.  Regardless of the motivation, it is for the composer to decide.

>What I am suggesting is that some repeats appear to be more important
>to the compositional, structural integrity of the work than others.
>Now as Stirling Newberry pointed out, that is no hard and fast thing.

No, but what is a hard and fast thing is what the composer wrote, and he is
the one who decides what structure his piece should have.  Altering that is
vandalizing art.

>We have to guess as best we can given our knowledge.  In the Romantic
>era, when people took a narrative, psychological view of musical
>structures, repeats seemed unnecessary and unnatural.

What "people?" The only "people" whose count in this area are the
composers.

>What happens, for instance, in the case of composers like Schubert who
>continues to routinely include repeats in the first movements of his late
>piano sonatas, even though they no longer Clearly follow the classical
>aesthetic that gave life to those repeats? Do these repeats contribute to
>the structural interest and meaning of the movement or do they just make
>it longer? If the latter, is the length itself a virtue, contributing to
>the epic 'heavenly length' of the work, or is it just tedious?

It is for Schubert, and only Schubert, to decide.  I submit that, given
Schubert's genius, if the repeats seem tedious, then it is probably a
shortcoming in the listener's attention span or the performance of the
piece.  But don't remove a column from Schubert's architecture just because
there is another like it in the design, because it sometimes takes more
than one column to support the structure.  Schubert realized this, as did
Beethoven and many others, which is why they put the repeats in when they
did.  When the repeats were no warranted, the composer did not put them
there.  That's one reason they're great.

-Jocelyn Wang
Culver Chamber Music Series
Come see our web page: www.bigfoot.com/~CulverMusic