What mistake?

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>]

I don't want to start a brawl here, but here's my two Litas for the piano and
organ works of Charles Ives. I was instantly captivated the first time I heard
it. I think it would be small-minded and parochial of me to suggest that perhaps
Ives doesn't travel well to Europe. I think rather's it's an individual-mind
thing -- Jazz certainly travelled very well to Europe; in fact many of America's
most brilliant jazz artists found happier welcomes in Europe than in America.

How odd that someone might say that Mozart is a 40-year-old-plus taste. I'm
reminded of Victor Borge's remark: "When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for
ten years." Certainly there are in Mozart's music the most profound and mature
emotional themes -- but if Schaffer got it half-right (and he's quite a fine
musical scholar), Mozart, who died at 35, had the personality and habits of a
college fraternity boy, and an awful lot of his work is infused with the
lightest, most youthful, humorous ideas. Our modern use of the word "classical"
dulls us to the fact that to himself and his contemporaries, Mozart was in the
pop composer business; many of his compositions were designed to be technically
easy to play, because home parlor play was how you got your tunes to Number One
with a Bullet on the pop charts. (If only OUR pop composers had his talent!) He
even wrote his own lyrics to his pop songs -- which, for reasons I won't go into
here, his publisher desperately erased instantly. (A few sets survive as fodder
for his psychiatrically-minded biographers.)

And like Gould, Mozart was drawn strongly to the most modern technology -- he
fell instantly in love with Benjamin Franklin's Glass Harp and wrote quite a
large body of music for it. He helped make the GH the rage of his time -- much
like the electric guitar in ours -- but very few people play it today because
the crystal glass lead, in solution contact with the fingertips, is too toxic to
make a career of it. But there are a few lovely CDs of Mozart's Glass Harp
music.

Bob Merkin
Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/

BONG wrote:

> I guess I've come to a blind alley in piano music. I started from Chopin,
> like many, and then unfortunately (fortunately?) switched to Bach. It turned
> out I had ended up with two composers... Now I seem to be unable to listen
> to anyone except Bach and most of Chopin. I was told one had to be in his
> forties to really appreciate Mozart and the prospect of getting stuck to two
> composers for more than twenty years does not gladden me at all. Could you
> give me any advice?
>
> Juozas Rimas
> Lithuania