Mozarts Geburtstag Amateurs Playing Mozart - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYONE IS doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, very much like our human world. It is a world where men are jealous of women for no reason. Where adolescent boys throb with passions they cannot comprehend. It is a world where the strong try to take advantage of their positions of power, and their inferiors fight back with their cunning and wits. It is a world where good and virtuous women sigh because their husbands have inexplicably fallen out of love with them. It is a world where the noble-hearted ultimately forgive the errors of the lesser mortals with whom they are compelled to live.

That is all very well, and very elegantly put. But there is another side to Mozart, and that is that ordinary amateur musicians like you and me can play his music.

One of the great joys of my life has been to play Mozart string quartets. There are a bunch of them, usually published in two volumes as the Early Quartets and the Late Quartets.

To play a Mozart string quartet is to feel yourself participating, in a palpable way, in the very center of the western experience. First of all, you are playing a violin, the most perfect musical instrument ever conceived and executed. It demonstrates in its form and its sound both the male principle of tautness and tension and the female principle of lushness and pregnant beauty. Then, of course, you are actually playing the music, this remarkable outpouring of a young genius. What music can compare with the power of the Quartet K.465 the “Dissonant,” the mystery of its opening measures, the bleakness of its second movement, the Andante Cantabile?

Next month, we are playing an early Mozart quartet at the concert of the string orchestra I play with, Hildman Strings. In addition to Mozart we’ll be playing Benda, C.P.E. Bach, and premiering a composition by composer Dell Wade.

You could play the violin, you know. You can start any time and any age, and in a couple of years find a sandbox orchestra in which to play, as I did. There are amateur orchestras all over the United States. One of them is waiting for you.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close 0