Tonight I will write something about qualities and their inherent differences. Coming up in a few hours....
I´ll be back soon.
20:45 I´m back!
A short lesson about quality and differences.
When we listen, we use a capability to distinguish between different categories of sound. It is this possibility to hear the difference between two tones or two instruments that makes music or speech possible. This is elementary but yet very important when we talk about what constitutes quality in music.
Quality to me is when a composer like Beethoven uses the listeners possibility to hear differences in bulding the musical form. For instance, Beethovens fifth symphony, 2nd movement beginns with a long melody where the jumpy rythm in the melody towards the end becomes a straight rythm. He does this to send a signal to the listener that the theme is coming to an end and that is for rethorical reasons. Beethoven was a rethorical expert. In the middle of the theme there is is also a contrast working like these-antithese, or vorsats, nachsats, but that is more normal. That a composer uses very simple means of contrasts is not what I mean. I mean the small differences that are small but yet very important for form building.
For the same reason, -as a composer, it is important to remember that small differences can be great tools when we create form. This means that when we eridicate differences, by for example making every tone equally important like many composers did when they turned to twelve tone music, we also eridicate quality. Much of the music written in a system where one idiom rules lacks this ability to create quality. If we don´t compensate by other means of course.
Well it´s a hell of business!