HPSCHD-L Archives

Harpsichords and Related Topics

HPSCHD-L@LIST.UIOWA.EDU

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
Owen Daly <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Harpsichords and Related Topics <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 8 Oct 2006 11:45:54 -0700
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (35 lines)
Beth cites Burney:


>Try reading Charles Burney's comments on John Bull,
>sometime--something to the effect that Bull's pieces couldn't possibly
>have been meant for actual performance, because they're too difficult.
>
>Beth


This reminds me of, really, about the only thing that really grabbed 
me and shook me about Burney's 'Current State' travelogue, which I 
finally got around to reading a few months ago.

Somewhere in there is the most astonishing aside. Burney reflects 
upon dissonance and even something going further than just the level 
of dissonance necessary to prepare resolutions in baroque and (later) 
classical music. He goes as far as to suggest that he's thinking of a 
dissonance as radical as that in modernist 20th-century music or even 
further into something like aleatic cacophony. He actually says 
something like this paraphrase:  'Who knows but that in a hundred 
years or more from now people will have reached the point that they 
can use, appreciate and enjoy pure cacophony, dissonance and noise as 
legimitate and even necessary parts of real music?" He goes on to 
suggest that he finds this prospect exhilarating and a stimulus to 
his imagination, rather than as something to be feared or rejected as 
the "end of civilization as we know it."

Does anyone remember this passage? It is almost spooky in its 
prescience, and in the way it suggests that Burney's imagination may 
have been broader than that of many of his otherwise more talented 
contemporaries.

Owen

ATOM RSS1 RSS2