Synthesizers on the other hand do not strike out into the unknown but rather perfect and bring to fulfillment ideas and structures that are already present. Strong examples of these would include J. S. Bach, Mozart and Brahms. There is very little in their music that is radically new, but a great deal that builds on and perfects already existing musical ideas. Sometimes music history writers, with an unconscious bias towards innovators, try and characterize these composers as being of that character in some way. But it is pretty clear that what they did was synthesize, combine and raise to a higher level, material that was already there. Mozart's operas are probably an exception because they really do have something rather new.
What about composers like Igor Stravinsky? He is pretty interesting because while he was a great innovator he also derived a lot from his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and in his neo-classical phase was rather a synthesist as well. Even more interesting is the case of Beethoven. He is always described as the archetypical innovator, greatly increasing the length of the symphony, writing piano sonatas that scale the heights of expressive force and so on. Yes, this is true. But if you look at his career in more detail you notice that he kept turning back to the fundamental base of Classical style. He did not follow his contemporaries into the glitter of instrumental virtuosity and romantic yearnings but instead went back to the fundamental elements of music. His music, with few exceptions (the last movement of the Symphony No. 9 most prominently) engages at an astonishing level of profundity the essence of Classical style. I know I am simply asserting this, but the several books by Charles Rosen on this offer a wealth of illustrative examples. So while Beethoven appears at first glance to be an innovator, I think he is really more of a synthesist.
Claudio Monteverdi is another composer who seems to have traveled both roads. In his earlier life he was a synthesist of the best of Renaissance style, but later on he was one of the most important creators of the musical Baroque (and the opera).
What about someone like Shostakovich? It is interesting to look at him from this angle. His life was so dominated by political and social forces that we don't look at him very often as a pure composer. He was partly an innovator in his creation of a musical language that could function under the strictures of "socialist realism." His music is sometimes described as being conservative: the traditional forms preserved in Soviet aspic. But you could also see it as synthesizing some elements from the past modified to fit present needs. His symphonies owe something to Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner and Sibelius, but they are, at the same time, unmistakably Russian. He also reached back further, to Bach, and wrote the best response to Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier in his own set of preludes and fugues in all the keys. Like Prokofiev he also was inspired by the humor of Haydn, though with a sardonic cast.
This is all just interpretation, of course. Most composers have an innovative side along with a synthesizing side. But one usually predominates.
Some examples: Stravinsky in a synthesizing mode with his ballet Pulcinella based on some Baroque themes:
Shostakovich's preludes and fugues after Bach:
Both these composers look at musical ideas and idioms of the past from a fresh angle, of course.
6 comments:
I've been formulating a similar taxonomy of innovators/revolutionaries and consolidators. The first category fits those who either break from an existing convention or catalyze a new convention through their work. But I've got these dual points as overlapping spheres. For instance, there can be cases in which consolidating the possibilities latent within galant style into clearer and more concise forms (which is my impression of what Haydn did) can be innovative. A lot of the music history I heard in college and after had it that Haydn established the rules that Mozart and Beethoven then transcended. Haydn was not really one to be picky about rules, though.
I was actually just writing about Beethoven's last piano sonata last night. I was explaining how what I love about the opening sonata is how Beethoven shifted all his most intense developmental moments for his themes not into the development section proper but into the transitions of the exposition and recapitulation. But if you look at the order of the themes in the exposition and recapitulation the ordering is pretty strict. My take-away was that Beethoven could pull off the feat of flamboyantly breaching one convention or proprietary expectation in a work because he was often really stringent in keeping some other convention in a countervailing way. He was only, so to speak, breaking ONE really important convention at a time. Or you could gently tweak two or three conventions at a time.
Even though I would agree haydn was an innovator it seems in musical histories Haydn is thought of as somehow establishing the rules. Elaine Sisman wrote about this convention in her monograph on haydn and variation form and it's interesting that such a myth arose when in his life Haydn was not considered some standard-keeper so much as an innovator.
I've been wondering if part of the ennui toward the "great man" music history is defensible in light of a tendency for such a historical approach to focus on innovators at the expense of consolidators, or by attempts to force consolidators to seem innovative. It's possible to be both or to be one by dint of the other ... though I'd venture to say successful consolidators are more likely to thereby become innovators than revolutionaries become standard-bearing consolidators--although there's Schoenberg but the marginal popularity of his subsequent school in the overall scope of concert music makes it seem hard to take seriously the idea that the revolution of 12-tone and serialism was all that successful in changing the game, so to speak.
I think that for a long time the paradigm that favors innovators/revolutionaries over synthesizers/consolidators has reigned in musical historiography. I am due to re-read Taruskin so I will keep that in mind as I do. I'm not sure how strongly he is on the side of the musical revolutionaries as he is the one who demonstrated, among other things, that Stravinsky owed a lot to Rimsky-Korsakov and did not, like Athena, spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus.
Haydn is such an interesting example because he was not, as you say, the mere rule-maker that Mozart and Beethoven transcended. He was a great innovator and inventor of forms and structures and emphatically not the promulgator of rules. Domenico Scarlatti was another. Great composers all tend to be unique individuals influenced by and influencing others, of course. One of my musicology professors used to say that musicologists are interested in the details so a simple taxonomy will likely only get us so far.
Musical conventions are useful in that they give the listener something to hang on to. But any composer worth his salt will put the convention at the service of the musical idea and expression and not the other way around.
Critics of the "great man" meme never manage to explain away composers like Bach or Beethoven, do they?
Have been listening to the Rappresentatione di Giuseppe e i suoi fratelli, the story of Joseph and his brothers, by the composer Elam Rotem. It's from 2014 and in Hebrew but I could be listening to Cavalieri's Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo from 1500 but its not that at all. It's in a third category, the intentional return to the sources of musical tradition without being the gloss of a pre-existing work. I don't doubt that there are 'great men' but history moves forward for the most part on the backs of good ones, perhaps.
Very interesting observation. I thought of some works by Osvaldo Golijov in similar terms. I think that many composers are deeply rooted in tradition. You have to be careful, mind you. After trying myself to reinvigorate some traditional structures, I basically gave up and went back to a more, well, "modern" approach. It turns out I didn't have a lot to contribute to traditional forms. But I may have something to say in a more recent idiom...
Well, 1600. Tsk.
Yes, I should have noticed that Cavalieri's date was wrong. 1550 - 1602.
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