Music Banter - View Single Post - The Invention of the 'Great' Composers
View Single Post
Old 12-15-2013, 07:56 AM   #1 (permalink)
Robert Newman
Groupie
 
Join Date: Dec 2013
Posts: 1
Default The Invention of the 'Great' Composers

The music of ‘Bach’ and ‘Handel’, and largely through them the music of virtually all ‘great composers’ from their time onwards (including Vivaldi, Josef Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert etc) comes directly and indirectly from a mathematical method of composition which began to be used centuries earlier by GB Palestrina which was in continual but largely unknown development from his time onwards including in the works attributed to Claudio Monteverdi. More accurately, so-called ‘classical music’ comes from a continually modified process of canonical ‘arrangement’ of existing music which was further developed after the early attempts of Palestrina and Monteverdi which obtained its elements from earlier, already existing music which were gathered from various archival and other sources, these starting to be rearranged and embedded behind the scenes in a ‘factory style’ process to produce in the name of a single ‘great composer’ new and largely hidden variations of that older music by the addition of new harmonic devices and newly introduced phrases, motifs, styles and other elements at the hands of music editors from those works to conceal the origins of that 'new' product, so that these new arrangements are often derived from the work of not one but often a whole series of composers by wholesale editing of new and carefully hidden forms of elements from that music and became before their publication in their 'new clothes' a musical pastiche which, in its finally approved form brought a much needed repertoire of supposedly ‘new’ works which started to be marketed by the still emerging music industry from the 18th century onwards. And specially as the popular idea of ‘great composers’ and their supposed individual achievements became the main commodity of that emerging industry and the very nucleus of its success. Further given credibility by wide and affordable publication of a supposed ‘history of music’ whose details were largely invented by their patrons, managers of culture and musical publishers to perpetuate and give credibility to that history and to further hide from view that process. Over which supposed experts of the ‘science’ of Musicology presides to this very day. There were no 'great' composers. A detailed study of Mozart's life, for example (he being the best documented composer of that 'history of music') confirms the above.

RN
Robert Newman is offline   Reply With Quote