Mini-Post Mini-Series Part 3: Mini-Self-Revelations

Mini-Self-Revelations
(...or, what I've learned so far)

1.) I need music with a pulse. Fast, slow, irregular - any type is fine, but my ear and my body really crave some sort of coherent rhythmic structure.

2.) I don't mind harsh dissonances, when used with intention. More important than consonant sonorities is a continuity and logic in the level of dissonance from points A to B to C, etc...

3.) Early minimalism tends to rely on the repetition and modification of very small music units (1-2 beats). As the repeated cell becomes longer and more complex, minimalism gives way to simpler large structures: the repeated phrase, passacaglia, ground bass, strophic song forms, etc. Some moments in Glass' fifth quartet seem to take a few steps away from this local-level repetition to create something grander.

At what point does a minimalist cell become a repeated strophic period? I will attempt to answer this question in my first movement.

S.Q. Daily #15: Mozart No. 19, K.465

S.Q. Daily: A Composer's Listening Journal

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/izzyplante/2151275207/

(Photo by izzyplante, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.)

Day #15: W0lfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465, "Dissonance"

Diving right back into Mozart's Haydn Quartets, we'll look at No. 19/K. 465 ("Dissonance") today, which I'm hearing on Naxos, again courtesy of The Takács Quartet.

I absolutely love the 22-bar introduction from which the quartet gets its nickname. Okay, I really just love the opening 15 bars before the gravity of G Major (the dominant) starts to take over. The harmonic ambiguity and cross-relations in this tonal style are remarkable, even disregarding its early date of composition (1785).

The beginning:
Repeated C's in the cello. Viola Ab, then vn II Eb, completing an Ab first-inversion chord - pretty ambiguous. Then vn I enters on a high A just as the viola moves from Ab to G (the Ab-A cross-relation), forming an A half-diminished 6/5. On the next beat a D 4/2. The next downbeat: B-G-C#-A, a whole-tone cluster? Going to B-G-D-G, a G in first inversion. (The downbeat is really G Major with a suspension and a chromatic lower neighbor tone.)

And that's only the first three measures. Confused? I think that's the point. Just listen to the first 1.5 minutes or so on Youtube.

You can stick around for the rest (four movements total), which seems like pretty typical Mozart... meaning genius, of course. But that first little bit really gets me going.