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Dan Coren
Take my hand and discover the scintillating secrets
of the musical form that dare not speak its name
DAN COREN
“Where’s that woman who loves fine dining, Mozart and baseball?”
Those words opened the personal ad I placed in Philadelphia Magazine in the summer of 1983. My wife bit, and we’ve enjoyed those talismans of the good life together ever since (although, truth be told, she really prefers Bach and classic jazz).
Just this evening, I asked her, “If I’d said ‘sonata-form’ instead of ‘Mozart,’ would we be married today?”
“Hmm,” she replied. “Probably not. That would have meant you’re nuts. Who would have known what you’re talking about?”
Of course, she’s known the awful truth for some time now. I am nuts. Sonata-form is to me what the New Testament is to a born-again Christian. All the articles I’ve written for Broad Street Review have just been a way of temporizing, biding my time before broaching this subject.
When I taught introductory music at Penn, I thought: If I just show my students how sonata-form works, their lives will be changed forever by the secrets I’ve revealed to them about the workings of the Classical style. Once in a great while, this transformation actually occurred. One August day, eight years after I’d left Penn, a former student recognized me on the main street of Castine, Maine, and introduced me to his companion as “Professor Coren, the man who taught me how to listen to Brahms.” That moment remains one of the high points of my life.
The moat of pretentious terminology
But the truth of the matter is far different. Those few music lovers who really care about how the language works and want to understand it better are intimidated by the moat of pretentious terminology that surrounds classical music and creates the impression that it is accessible only to an elite secret society of cognoscenti. Just about every time you attend an orchestral concert, you’re likely to read something like the following excerpt (returned to me after I Googled “sonata-form program notes”) from the program notes for a Boston Symphony concert of April 2005, written by the radio host Doug Briscoe:
“In previous symphonies, including Beethoven's own, the development section of the first movement is almost always substantially shorter than the exposition, but in the Eroica it is two-thirds longer, and the coda, which traditionally was… .“
Puh-leeze! … how is this going to help anyone understand anything?
I think most program annotators know in their hearts that they’re not really addressing the needs of the musical public by writing stuff like this. I think they do it because they think they’re expected to sound scholarly and have fallen into the habit of using the formulaic recital of sonata-form terminology as a display of erudition.
But the few audience members who already know what “development” and “exposition” mean almost certainly didn’t learn anything new about the Eroica symphony from these notes. And probably nobody else read them at all.
What the Viennese knew that the French didn’t
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would have stared at you blankly if you mentioned sonata-form to them. The term was invented in the 1840s. And I think they would be appalled to find their music quarantined behind all this intellectual barbed wire.
In my first semester of graduate school at Berkeley, I took a seminar on the contemporary musical criticism of late 18th-Century Vienna, taught by the Mozart scholar Daniel Heartz. We spent a lot of time reading the works of Ernst Ludwig Gerber, one of the first scholars to write an encyclopedia of music and musicians.
Gerber’s writing gives a picture of the Viennese musical public having a blast enjoying the sophistication and wit of their contemporary music. What, Gerber wondered, is wrong with the French? After all the improvements of music in the past 50 years, why are they still listening to Rameau? Are they, perhaps, deaf? All you have to do, he says, is listen to the music of Haydn to recognize that we are living in a musical golden age.
Mozart and "Everybody Loves Raymond'
To understand the inner workings of Haydn’s and Mozart’s music is to participate in the spirit of play that is at the heart of the Classical musical style. It’s a style that allowed these composers to create abstract musical comedies in which the characters are musical ideas and the plot is …well, there’s no way around it. The plot is, again and again, for two generations of musical genius, sonata-form.
Like all great comedy— whether it’s Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or “Everybody Loves Raymond”— the music of Haydn and Mozart (and, needless to add, Beethoven) can plumb the depths of human emotion. But its essence is entertainment: the expression of a desire to amplify the joys of human existence.
I remain steadfast in my idealism. I believe that, even if you have no idea what tonality is, even if you don’t read music, even if sonata-form has always been a MEGO topic for you, I can sell you on the beauties and pleasures of examining how this music is put together.
To read the next article, click here.
To read a response, click here.
of the musical form that dare not speak its name
DAN COREN
“Where’s that woman who loves fine dining, Mozart and baseball?”
Those words opened the personal ad I placed in Philadelphia Magazine in the summer of 1983. My wife bit, and we’ve enjoyed those talismans of the good life together ever since (although, truth be told, she really prefers Bach and classic jazz).
Just this evening, I asked her, “If I’d said ‘sonata-form’ instead of ‘Mozart,’ would we be married today?”
“Hmm,” she replied. “Probably not. That would have meant you’re nuts. Who would have known what you’re talking about?”
Of course, she’s known the awful truth for some time now. I am nuts. Sonata-form is to me what the New Testament is to a born-again Christian. All the articles I’ve written for Broad Street Review have just been a way of temporizing, biding my time before broaching this subject.
When I taught introductory music at Penn, I thought: If I just show my students how sonata-form works, their lives will be changed forever by the secrets I’ve revealed to them about the workings of the Classical style. Once in a great while, this transformation actually occurred. One August day, eight years after I’d left Penn, a former student recognized me on the main street of Castine, Maine, and introduced me to his companion as “Professor Coren, the man who taught me how to listen to Brahms.” That moment remains one of the high points of my life.
The moat of pretentious terminology
But the truth of the matter is far different. Those few music lovers who really care about how the language works and want to understand it better are intimidated by the moat of pretentious terminology that surrounds classical music and creates the impression that it is accessible only to an elite secret society of cognoscenti. Just about every time you attend an orchestral concert, you’re likely to read something like the following excerpt (returned to me after I Googled “sonata-form program notes”) from the program notes for a Boston Symphony concert of April 2005, written by the radio host Doug Briscoe:
“In previous symphonies, including Beethoven's own, the development section of the first movement is almost always substantially shorter than the exposition, but in the Eroica it is two-thirds longer, and the coda, which traditionally was… .“
Puh-leeze! … how is this going to help anyone understand anything?
I think most program annotators know in their hearts that they’re not really addressing the needs of the musical public by writing stuff like this. I think they do it because they think they’re expected to sound scholarly and have fallen into the habit of using the formulaic recital of sonata-form terminology as a display of erudition.
But the few audience members who already know what “development” and “exposition” mean almost certainly didn’t learn anything new about the Eroica symphony from these notes. And probably nobody else read them at all.
What the Viennese knew that the French didn’t
Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven would have stared at you blankly if you mentioned sonata-form to them. The term was invented in the 1840s. And I think they would be appalled to find their music quarantined behind all this intellectual barbed wire.
In my first semester of graduate school at Berkeley, I took a seminar on the contemporary musical criticism of late 18th-Century Vienna, taught by the Mozart scholar Daniel Heartz. We spent a lot of time reading the works of Ernst Ludwig Gerber, one of the first scholars to write an encyclopedia of music and musicians.
Gerber’s writing gives a picture of the Viennese musical public having a blast enjoying the sophistication and wit of their contemporary music. What, Gerber wondered, is wrong with the French? After all the improvements of music in the past 50 years, why are they still listening to Rameau? Are they, perhaps, deaf? All you have to do, he says, is listen to the music of Haydn to recognize that we are living in a musical golden age.
Mozart and "Everybody Loves Raymond'
To understand the inner workings of Haydn’s and Mozart’s music is to participate in the spirit of play that is at the heart of the Classical musical style. It’s a style that allowed these composers to create abstract musical comedies in which the characters are musical ideas and the plot is …well, there’s no way around it. The plot is, again and again, for two generations of musical genius, sonata-form.
Like all great comedy— whether it’s Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or “Everybody Loves Raymond”— the music of Haydn and Mozart (and, needless to add, Beethoven) can plumb the depths of human emotion. But its essence is entertainment: the expression of a desire to amplify the joys of human existence.
I remain steadfast in my idealism. I believe that, even if you have no idea what tonality is, even if you don’t read music, even if sonata-form has always been a MEGO topic for you, I can sell you on the beauties and pleasures of examining how this music is put together.
To read the next article, click here.
To read a response, click here.
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