Vă invit să vă alăturaţi grupului Facebook Mişcarea DACIA, ce-şi propune un alt fel de a face politică!Citiţi partea introductivă şi proiectul de Program, iar dacă vă place, veniţi cu noi !
O puteţi face clicând alături imaginea, sau acest link
Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 7)
Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 7)
Cinema was perhaps the most significant art form of the century. It unified the arts magnificently and, though it often got very experimental, it never alienated the popular audience, becoming a key part of the artistic consciousness of ordinary people.
The idea that popular entertainment could now be considered as high art was significant. Something similar happened in the 20th century with music. While classical music grew ever more experimental and obscure, popular music exploded, ceasing to be mere entertainment and leading to one of the most widespread outpourings of human creativity in history.
At the beginning of the century, in New Orleans in the USA, the huge melting pot of cultures led to the development of a new genre of music. Musicians got together in bars and clubs to perform for the people. The music was based on various folk traditions of the various cultures represented in the city, yet the musicians tended to be highly skilled and were often playing what would normally be considered ‘classical’ instruments, such as trumpets, trombones, clarinets etc. The sound of all these instruments playing together was something quite new, especially when anchored by a rhythm section of piano, guitar, bass and drums. The skill of the musicians led to them playing in a far more complex way than the folk traditions called for, often showing their skill in improvised solos, both individually and in groups. This new music became known as Jazz.
Jazz benefitted, as did most popular music of the time, from the new technology of sound recording. The first Jazz record was released in 1917, initially as a kind of novelty, yet soon Jazz grew in popularity and spread all around the US, becoming the soundtrack to the prohibition era of the 1920s.
Whilst beginning as a form of popular entertainment showcasing the improvisational talents of Jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong’s masterful trumpet playing, eventually Jazz would develop into a far more serious art form, an entirely new way to compose serious music.
One of the first, and greatest Jazz composers, and one of the most important and significant composers of the century, was Duke Ellington. Ellington was the man who first raised Jazz music to a serious art form, easily rivalling the ambitions of any classical composer. His compositions for large Jazz band became ever more elaborate, combing strictly composed music with elements of improvisation and even pushing the boundaries of recording technology as Ellington’s compositions grew ever longer, requiring more and more records and leading, ultimately, to the development of the long-playing record, which would become the standard format of all popular music.
While classical music was being appropriated by an academic elite, Jazz composers became far more appealing to ordinary people, as they were expressing the struggles of everyday people using a musical language that was both familiar yet also exciting and new.
In the 1940s, brilliant performers such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie developed Bebop, a new form of Jazz which emphasised smaller ensembles and intense and highly expressive improvisation. In the 1950s Miles Davis pioneered firstly Cool Jazz and then Modal Jazz, before, in the 1960s, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others developed Free Jazz, which saw the start of Jazz’s descent into avant-garde experimentation. All the while, the true heir to Duke Ellington was the great composer Charles Mingus, who, in 1963, released ‘The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady’, perhaps the most brilliant Jazz composition of all time.
However, at this time Jazz was becoming more and more experimental, eventually falling out of favour with popular audiences. Yet now another new form of music had emerged, Rock And Roll.
US blues musicians had switched to electric instruments after the invention of the electric guitar, which would become one of the most important and expressive instruments of all time. Eventually, in the 1950s, Rhythm And Blues developed into Rock And Roll, a wild, exciting form of entertainment aimed towards rebellious teenagers. The music industry saw the potential of this new form of music and launched Elvis Presley, who became a huge sensation all over the world. Although a phenomenal performer, Presley was ultimately just another pop star, a singer singing songs written by songwriting professionals. The true spirit of Rock And Roll was better represented by the first great composer of Rock music, Chuck Berry.
Chuck Berry truly created a musical revolution. He brought the electric guitar to prominence, switching it to the lead instrument of the rock band and playing it in a brilliant, wild and at times aggressive manner. He also sang songs which addressed the everyday issues of young people, giving them something to strongly identify with. But most significantly, Chuck Berry was singing songs that were his own. With Chuck Berry the composer and the performer became one and the same, and subsequent Rock musicians weren’t taken seriously unless they were the authors of their own material.
Chuck Berry’s wild music, with its themes of adolescent love (and, implicitly, adolescent sex) was met with great resistance by the conservative society in the US of the 1950s, and Rock And Roll was repressed and replaced by more streamlined pop singers, who had assimilated the Rock instrumentation, yet were singing far more acceptable material. Rock And Roll might only have been a brief fad, yet it had not been defeated, but had simply gone into exile.
Like Jazz, Rock music had begun as a quintessentially American form of music. Yet after its suppression, it travelled across the Atlantic and arrived in Britain in the form of record imports. British kids of the time became enamoured of the likes of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, but in Britain there was far less resistance and Rock music there flourished and developed into something truly magnificent.
Eventually, British bands of the 1960s would take Rock music back to the US, and this time, there was nothing which could stop it. The British Invasion, spear headed by The Beatles, who became mega stars, also featured bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Animals And The Who.
While The Beatles were the heirs of Presley, pop stars whom the industry used to make millions, the true spirit of Rock music was better represented by The Rolling Stones, the true heirs of Chuck Berry’s Rock And Roll. Wild, rebellious and often overtly sexual, the Stones turned everything up to maximum and made Chuck Berry look quaint as they unleashed the true Dionysian spirit of Rock And Roll.
This is truly the most significant element of Rock Music. The Ancient Greek God Dionysus had been known as the god of wine and intoxication and his followers indulged in wild lascivious behaviour and, in retrospect, it might be better to designate him as the god of ‘sex, drugs and Rock And Roll’. Although Rock music didn’t exist in Ancient Greece, that spirit had always been there as a fundamental part of the collective human psyche. Christianity and other religions had so heavily repressed humanity that, with the fall of ancient paganism, the Dionysian spirit had all but been wiped out. With the arrival of the Rolling Stones in the mid 1960s, Dionysus was back with a vengeance. Music had always had the potential to release the Dionysian, yet the artistic heights of classical music had usually been far more Apollonian in nature. Rock music, however, was exactly what humanity had needed. Dionysus was back and Rock music conquered the world. In the subsequent decades a truly astonishing quantity of brilliant music would be made, as more and more ordinary people came to realise the creativity they had within them. To be a Rock musician did not require years of training and Rock often favoured low skill levels, yet it was still capable of producing great artistic masterpieces. As such, this became the music of choice for humanity. Whilst it may have never reached quite the artistic heights of the great classical composers, Rock music is nonetheless one of the most significant developments in the entire history of humanity.
During the early 1960s, when Rock had been driven into exile, there had been a brief fad for folk music in the US, with Bob Dylan rising to stardom with his political protest songs. In 1965, after the British Invasion, Dylan saw the potential of Rock music and quickly converted, to the outrage of many of his fans. Dylan took Rock music and combined it with his own style of visionary songwriting and, on his album ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, delivered the first major artistic statement of Rock music. After this, the floodgates opened and Rock began producing a huge quantity of great music, from the psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead in San Francisco, Pink Floyd in Britain, the astonishing guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix which inspired Jazz musicians to accept Rock as a serious art (with Miles Davis pioneering Jazz-Rock fusion), the harder blues rock of British bands such as Cream and Led Zeppelin, the experimental genius of composers such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and folk rock masters such as Van Morrison and Tim Buckley.
The Dionysian heart of this era was best represented by The Velvet Underground, perhaps the most influential band of all time, and the mesmerising presence of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, who pushed the boundaries of acceptability in his live performances.
Into the 1970s many Rock musicians began creating ambitious compositions to rival classical composers, with Progressive Rock in Britain and a particularly creative school of German bands such as Can and Faust. Singer-songwriters of the age also took the art of songwriting to levels it had never before risen to, artists such as Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel And Tom Petty.
Then, in response to this complex creativity, came Punk Rock, loud, aggressive and more musically simple, yet a magnificent unleashing of the real fury and frustration of ordinary people. The Sound had been pioneered earlier by The Stooges, then by the Ramones in the US, before British bands such as The Sex Pistols and The Clash created an explosive movement of a new generation of Rock Music.
Following the Punk revolution, the sheer quantity of great artists increased to the extent that they can’t all be related here. Rock music in the 1980s became incredibly diverse, Punk, Hardcore, Heavy Metal, Synth Pop as well as completely new styles like Hip-Hop which had little to do with the original concept of Rock Music. The darker, more Dionysian strain of Rock was kept alive by Gothic Rock bands, Singer-Songwriters such as Nick Cave and Industrial rock going into the 1990s with a masterpiece like ‘The Downward Spiral’ by Nine Inch Nails representing a high point.
Perhaps more than any other art form in history, Rock music represents the heavily repressed Shadow of humanity desperate to be unleashed. Is there anything quite like the Dionysian mayhem of a great Rock concert?
This major unleashing of human creativity at the end of the 20th Century shows just how ripe humanity is for major revolution. Rock music is the human collective unconscious literally screaming out for release.
We have suffered centuries of repression, but Dionysus will have his due!
Brice Merci – hyperian
Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 4)
Hyperian History Of The World (20th Century, Part 4)
The academic fracture of the 20th century also applied to the arts, particularly music. The romantic era of the 19th century drew to its end at the beginning of the 20th century with the mighty symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Like Wagner before him, Mahler utilised huge orchestral forces and crafted symphonies of epic length and huge scope. The final part of his eighth symphony sets the text of the final scene of Goethe’s Faust to music resulting in an intensely dramatic experience. Finally, in his ninth symphony, Mahler composed one of the most deeply profound works in music history, the best reflection of Mahler’s own statement that, ‘a symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.’
Mahler died in 1911, and at around that time, other composers had begun to do something strange. For centuries composers had made use of traditional diatonic harmony which had become the standard musical language. There is some evidence for the breakdown of traditional harmony in the symphonies of Mahler, and even further back in the operas of Wagner, yet this was nothing like what was to come. Rather than build on and develop the systems of the past, composers began to just completely create their own systems of harmony from scratch.
The most famous composer to invent a new system of harmony was Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg noticed that, in traditional diatonic harmony, certain notes (depending on which key one was in) were more privileged than others (out of the twelve in the scale). The main note of a key (known as the tonic) and the note a fifth above it (known as the dominant) were far more privileged than the others in the scale, and occurred more often in a piece of music. Schoenberg decided, for what ever reason, to create a new system of composition in which no note is more privileged than any other and each of the twelve notes has just as much chance of occurring than any of the others. Originally called twelve-tone composition, this system came to be known as serialism, and it produced very odd, unusual sounding music without any sense of harmony. It did, however prove very influential in the 20th century, inspiring composers to move away from traditional harmony and explore ever more unusual and avant-garde ideas.
However, most of this music alienates average audiences. Classical music in the 20th century became increasingly intellectual, often in an overly pretentious way. Perhaps this was the reason for the rise in the artistic merits of popular music in the 20th Century, with firstly Jazz and then Rock music becoming the music of choice for ordinary people.
As an intellectual endeavour, 20th century classical music has produced an incredible array of ingenious ideas. In a very short time music has progressed to a state where, literally, anything is possible. There are no rules anymore, a composer can literally do anything he or she wants (even as far as sitting and doing nothing) and it can be called music. But now, there is huge polarisation. Ordinary people dismiss this all as nonsense, “this is not music!” they say, they view it as overly intellectual, pretentious and even arrogant. But, the highbrow musical intellectuals, those ‘in the know’ dismiss the views of the ‘ignorant’ masses, and insist that they and they alone have what it takes to appreciate this art.
Armed with the right knowledge, and the right mindset, one can find appreciation in the bizarre soundscapes of Stockhausen, Boulez, Carter, Penderecki, Ligeti, etc. But, if one is being honest, something is lacking. This music doesn’t contain any of the magic, any of the majesty of a Beethoven symphony, a Wagner opera, a Mozart concerto or a Bach oratorio. Mozart and Beethoven certainly did not compose for a highbrow intellectual elite. They were men of the people and their music was for the people. Beethoven frankly despised the elite, and his music speaks regularly of a universal brotherhood. Perhaps, then, this is because his music was making use of a more ‘natural’ system of harmony. Once again, to understand this, we must go all the way back to Pythagoras.
Pythagoras realised the connection between mathematics and music. He noticed that musical notes that sounded pleasing together had simple mathematical relations. A bell exactly half the size of another bell gives a note exactly an octave higher and so forth. For Pythagoras, mathematics was the very basis of all existence, it was something that existed naturally and was discovered by humans, not invented by them. Therefore, pleasing musical sounds were ones most in line with this natural order. Musicians, when composing pleasing music, are simply tapping into the natural mathematics of the universe, and discovering the harmony therein, this universal harmony that Pythagoras called ‘The Music Of The Spheres’.
Over the centuries following this discovery, musical theory developed, and was always based on these fundamental elements found in nature. When a note is played by an instrument, it actually generates many notes at once. The primary note that is played generates other notes, or overtones, and these all combine to produce the final sound. The overtones are always based on the original note in the same mathematical way, therefore the fundamental note plus its overtones constitute what is known as the ‘Harmonic Series’.
Say the fundamental note has a frequency of 100 Hz. The first overtone will be a tone with frequency 200Hz. This being double the original tone (a ratio of 2:1), it will sound exactly an octave higher than the first tone (just as Pythagoras said). The second overtone will have a frequency of 300 Hz. This is not double the first overtone, so won’t be another octave higher, but it does relate to the first overtone with a ratio of 3:2, a ratio which Pythagoras had noted produces the interval we call a fifth. While not quite as harmonious as an octave, the fifth still sounds very pleasing, very harmonious. The next, third overtone has a frequency of 400Hz. This is double the frequency of the first overtone, so will sound exactly an octave higher than that tone (and therefore two octaves higher than the original). But it also relates to the second overtone with a ratio of 4:3. This produces the interval known as a fourth. Slightly less pleasing that the fifth, but still quite nice. As we continue on with the harmonic series we get more and more overtones that have more and more complex mathematical relations. The more complex the ratio, the less pleasing the interval. Pleasing, harmonious music is that which is based on the simpler ratios, the more harmonious intervals.
Why are there twelve notes in the conventional octave? Traditional, diatonic music is based, primarily on the relations between notes that are a fifth apart. Other than the octave (which is the same note but higher, or lower), the fifth is the first interval produced by the harmonic series. If we start with the lowest A on a piano and play the note a fifth up from it, we play E. Then, continuing to add fifths, we get B, F#, C#, G#, D# (or Eb), Bb, F, C, G, D and then back to A (the very highest A on the piano). By going up in fifths until we get back to A, we have passed through twelve different notes, and these are the twelve notes that make up the conventional chromatic scale.
These chromatics notes, when played side by side, can often sound jarring, due to the more complex mathematical relations between them. But when anchored by notes with more simple relations (octaves, fifths and fourths) we can attain a more pleasing harmony. This is what was discovered over time by musicians, and culminated in the glorious harmony of the Baroque era, which itself culminated in the harmonic genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was easily the most mathematical composer of all time, and he fully and completely established a harmony that was able to cleverly use chromaticism but maintained harmony by anchoring it all down with fifths and other more basic intervals. Bach’s harmony ushered in the glorious era of classical music giving us Mozart and Beethoven before the romantics reached dizzying artistic heights in the 19th century.
Then, as has been said, everything got weird. Bach’s diatonic harmony was based on natural mathematical relations. Composers were still, as per Pythagoras, tapping in to the natural order when they composed their music. But, into the 20th century, composers started to get too big for their boots, trying to establish their own systems of harmony, of composition that bore less relation to the natural mathematical order, and became something far more ‘man-made’.
Beethoven had been tapping in to the pre-existing realm of mathematical perfection when he composed, rather than constraining himself with an artificial, man-made system like Schoenberg and others were now doing. Interestingly, Schoenberg thought he was freeing himself from the ‘dogmatism’ of diatonic harmony, yet he had done this with one fundamental misunderstanding. He had failed to realise that traditional harmony is the way that it is because it all comes from the natural order of mathematics, the one that Pythagoras discovered 2,500 years ago.
Schoenberg’s ‘man-made’ system of composition is just like the man-made systems of logic which mathematical philosophers were attempting to formalise at the same time before Gödel’s incompleteness theorems destroyed the idea. Just as these mathematicians failed to understand that mathematics was the arche of existence, Schoenberg and many other 20th century composers failed to understand that traditional musical harmony was a direct subjective experience of true mathematics, the arche of existence.
Going back to music, we can see the connections here. Diatonic harmony is the music that derives from natural mathematics. 20th century composers abandoned this in favour of artificial, man-made systems. This music, though it produced its masterpieces, has simply run its course. All the radical ideas have been explored, everything has been done. When, in 1952, John Cage composed his infamous 4:33, in which the performer sits in silence and that’s it, the musical world should have known that this era of avant-garde experimentalism was over. With Cage this music reached an abominable terminal point.
Being based on natural mathematics, diatonic harmony is not constraining at all, in fact, it is the gateway to infinite possibilities, as opposed to much 20th century music, which ran its course quite quickly and now produces nothing but the same old pseudo-intellectual nonsense over and over again.
Yet there were still some composers who kept clear of these man-made systems. Igor Stravinsky did in fact abandon traditional harmony in his epic ballet ‘The Rite of Spring’, yet he didn’t constrain himself with a man-made system like Schoenberg, and the music of this ballet, although lacking traditional harmonic elegance, ends up sounding very ‘natural’, an almost archetypal expression of primordial humanity. The other great Russian composer of the 20th century was Dmitri Shostakovich, who continued the older traditions of musical forms such as symphonies and string quartets composed mostly with diatonic harmony, yet his music towers above most other 20th century classical music in artistic majesty, whilst chronicling much of the horror of 20th century history.
Other art forms suffered in similar ways in the 20th century, descending into the chaos of avant-garde experimentalism, perhaps in response to the horror of much of the world events of the time, but also due to the general fracture of humanity after centuries of irrationalism and old world power. As part of the Hyperian revolution, art must be returned to the people, reflecting the natural order of existence, the archetypes of the collective unconscious which all can relate to.
Just imagine Beethoven, profoundly deaf, yet still managing to compose the most wondrous music, some of the greatest artistic achievements of all time. Where did this music come from? How was Beethoven able to hear it? It came from the infinite content of his own mind, which, like the whole universe, is merely an expression of the natural, mathematical order, just as Pythagoras said 2,500 years ago.
Brice Merci – Hyperian
Tags: Music
Music
L-Y-R-I-C-S: FACE OUR TIME
Beyond the shine of bling bling
Your house your car your boat
You camouflage your unsureness not to be enough
Beyond material values
Your house your car your boat
You camouflage your deeply fears
Face-lifting liposuction
Alright I pay my new life
So sick
This way to kill our dreams
Let’s fight this fuckin’ shit
Face our time
This is where we live
For every fucking diamond and every fucking coat
You loosing basic values
Supporting poverty
Because (that’s why) your wealth (we fight)
Was made on human backs
And your achievement your success
Is nothing more than human beings’ blood
We’re spending so much time
To build up our life
On artificial values
Face our time
Your house your car your boat
Your house your car
Fuck you
It’s our frustration and aggression
(fight)
Tags: Music
Hyperian History Of The World (18th Century, Part 3)
Brice Merci
Iniţiator de conversaţii · 1 oră
Hyperian History Of The World (18th Century, Part 3)
The philosophy of the British empiricists in the 18th century as well as that of Immanuel Kant suffered from a lack of mathematics. Leibniz had been more than aware that his philosophy required further mathematical rigour in order to escape from the mire of metaphysical interpretations and attain to the purest of reason. Unfortunately, the 18th century represents the fracture of intellectual pursuits which we still see to its extreme in the academic world today. Leibniz had been a great polymath, excelling in all manner of disciplines and combining them all together in order to further his own understanding of everything. Newton, on the other hand, had been a great mathematician and scientist, but had had little philosophical understanding, thus failing to see the contradiction of combining empiricism with rationalist mathematics. The British empiricists were the opposite of this, great philosophers but with little mathematical knowledge.
This problem is also shown by looking at the mathematicians of the 18th century. Whereas Leibniz had been a great mathematician as well as a great philosopher, who had pioneered new mathematical disciplines in order to express his philosophy mathematically, the mathematicians who followed him and built on his work were great mathematicians but were not philosophers. Therefore, although they provided great mathematical insights which would have helped Leibniz enormously, no philosophers of the time thought to utilise their work.
The greatest mathematician of the 18th century was Leonhard Euler. Euler made major developments in almost all areas of mathematics, from trigonometry and calculus to algebra and geometry. Building on Leibniz’s pioneering work in calculus, Euler made major developments to analysis and power series. He also discovered the base of the natural logarithm, a number which is still known as ‘Euler’s number’, or just ‘e’.
Using this number, Euler explored ways of expressing logarithms with power series and then began to utilise complex exponentiation, utilising the imaginary constant, ‘i’. Through this work, Euler discovered an astonishing result. The power series expressions for exponential functions simplified to expressions which Euler noticed were equal to trigonometric functions. Amazingly, he realised that when ‘e’ was raised to an imaginary power, the result was equal to the sum of the cosine function and the sine function with an imaginary coefficient. His remarkable formula is expressed as: ‘e^ix = cos x + i sin x’.
For mathematicians, this was an exciting result, although they only saw it in terms of the abstract mathematics that they were studying. Philosophers, who ought to have realised the true implications of this formula, were either ignorant or indifferent to these mathematical developments. Leibniz may well have made the connection, but, alas, he was long dead before Euler made this discovery. Yet this formula, and what it revealed, was exactly what Leibniz had been seeking in his pursuit of the mathematics necessary to underpin his philosophy.
Euler knew his discovery was astonishing, yet even he did not realise just to what extent. Unbeknownst to him, Euler had in fact discovered the mathematical expression of the most very basic element of reality, the ‘arche’ of the ancient greeks, the foundation upon which all of reality is built. Unfortunately it would take centuries before this was realised by anyone, after further developments in mathematics and philosophy and the combination of it all together by great, unknown geniuses working behind the scenes.
But back in the 18th Century the world was still very much awakening into a much more scientific outlook on things, with these developments in mathematics greatly assisting scientists in their empirical attempts to explain the world around them. If only the philosophers had made similar use of mathematics…
This mathematical shift in human thought of the time was also felt in other areas, most interestingly in music. In the previous century, baroque composers such as Monteverdi had taken music to new heights of creativity, peaking in opera, yet the 18th century would see music taken much higher. It had been known since Pythagoras that music was a very mathematical discipline and the rules of harmony that had been established over the centuries could almost be said to obey mathematical laws, as if a composer could, in theory, compose beautifully harmonious music simply by making mathematical calculations.
This mathematical approach to music reached its zenith in the late baroque in the first half of the 18th century, chiefly in the work of its key composers, the Italian Antonio Vivaldi, and the Germans, Georg Frideric Handel and, greatest of all, Johann Sebastian Bach. Handel, who ended up based in London, wrote many operas and other concert works, yet his specialism was the sacred Oratorio, a format in which Handel was able to combine operatic solos, complex, contrapuntal orchestral passages and huge, glorious choruses.
Handel’s ideas were best realised in his monumental oratorio ‘Messiah’. Although ostensibly a christian work celebrating Jesus Christ, this was really a transcendent work, one whose biblical text is arranged in such a way as to abstract the christian message so that it can easily be reinterpreted in a spiritually uplifting way, with the concept of the ‘messiah’ being viewed as a divine state which we can all attain, and which Handel gives us a glimpse of in musical form. After composing the famous ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, the work’s emotional high point, Handel was found in his study in an almost trance-like state and, once roused, he gestured at the score and stated, “I thought I saw the face of god!”
While Handel became the most famous composer in Europe, his great contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach was a much more esoteric composer, keeping himself shut up in his little german church playing the organ and composing a huge body of amazingly complex works. His compositions took the art of harmony and counterpoint to perhaps their greatest heights. Whilst most composers occasionally composed two melodies playing together to give a little colour to the music, Bach took counterpoint to extremes, often having, three, four, five, even six melodies all playing at the same time yet without losing the sense of perfect harmony. Listening to some of Bach’s contrapuntal works is almost like listening to the sound of beautiful mathematical equations in operation.
But, like Handel, Bach also composed large-scale sacred works. His greatest oratorio, the St Matthew Passion, is an intense, deeply powerful work in which Bach throws everything he has into the mix, creating a musical extravaganza even more complex and varied than any opera of the time. This work was surpassed in his later, greatest masterpiece, the Mass in B minor, completed shortly before his death in 1750. Alas, Bach, who perhaps had the most complete grasp of musical theory of any composer of all time, surely one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time, was not very popular during his life and it took several centuries for his greatness to be appreciated and for him to be placed in the highest pantheon of composers, where he truly belongs.
Bach and Handel brought the long Baroque age of music to a close. Following their complex and heavily ornamented music, composers began to streamline their music, creating a wonderfully elegant style which we know today as the ‘classical’ period. In this period, opera was reformed by the works of Christoph Gluck and many of the great musical forms, such as the concerto, the string quartet, and especially the symphony, were perfected by Austrian composer Franz Josef Haydn.
Haydn’s beautiful compositions were seeing him well on his way to becoming the most famous composer since Handel, but then his genius was soon eclipsed by a mere child, a prodigy who would take the musical world by storm unlike anyone else had ever done or has ever done since, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart was perhaps the most naturally gifted musician of all time. He began to play the piano at the age of three and was composing melodies at five. His father began parading him around Europe giving concerts to the astonishment of all who saw him. At eight he wrote a symphony and at fifteen, a full opera. Mozart soon became famous all over Europe as a composer as well as a performer, becoming the greatest virtuoso pianist of the time. After settling in Vienna in 1782, Mozart took his composing to its greatest heights with his great operas, The Marriage Of Figaro, Don Giovanni and the wonderfully esoteric The Magic Flute. He also composed grand symphonies, eclipsing Haydn’s work in that genre and his piano concertos would draw huge crowds who were amazed by Mozart’s elegant composition as well as his stunning ability to improvise on the themes of the works.
In 1791, Mozart was commissioned by a mysterious unknown source to compose a Requiem mass. After having scored a little over half of the work, Mozart tragically died at the age of just thirty five, leaving one of his students to complete the great Requiem, perhaps the greatest choral work since Bach. In his short life Mozart composed a huge amount of music, seemingly able to churn out beautiful compositions without really trying. When he did try, however, his music achieved true glory, with levels of beauty and elegance never matched by anyone else, a huge amount of passion and also a great sense of humour. Mozart eclipsed every one of his contemporaries, even the great Haydn, who reemerged only after Mozart’s death to compose his greatest work, the oratorio The Creation.
The music of the great composers of the 18th century is the perfect soundtrack to the enlightenment values of the time and the scientific and mathematical advances that were being made resulting in some of the greatest artistic creativity since the renaissance. Yet towards the end of the century, political events would occur which would cause a great shift in human consciousness, resulting in a new age of passionate and romantic creativity. Music had become a powerful force in the world, which was able to bask in the transcendent glory of the genius of Handel, Bach, Haydn and Mozart.
/https://www.facebook.com/equazionedirac/videos/371012500231604/
