Mozart Violin Sonata in D, K 306 performed by Isaac Stern

I know of this performance from a collection of Stern's output and includes a wonderful performance of Brahms String Quintet in G Op. 111 ( mislabeled as a Quartet). The Mozart is wonderfully performed, but I want to call you attention to the first movement, a sonata form, for its extensive modulation in the development section, it is quite extensive even for Mozart, more like what Beethoven would do, and is not just a Circle of Fifths modulation as in the A-minor Piano Sonata K. 310 whose first movement is perhaps the most concisely perfect Sonata form movement I have ever heard, but like the fugue, no one example no matter how well crafted can be the last word, as the above-mentioned development shows. Mozart does not recapitulate in the expected way at the end of this modulation even though it starts on V and arrives back at I as we would expect, but the next thing we hear is the transitional material of the exposition, transposed as we would expect for for the false transition, followed by the expected rhyme of the second key, followed by the opening theme only in the coda. That theme is fanfare-like and so it easily adapted for the closing cadence where to fits perfectly with the original closing material of the exposition, of course rhymed in the tonic. So the order of the material is reversed in the recapitulation and the reason is the great beauty of the transition and the way the sections of the movement begin and end the same way. This is a good example of how the material dictates a change to the form and the common practice to upset these expectations so as to keep the listeners from nodding off.

Something else to point out about this performance is that all the repeats in Mozart's music are played out. This can be an eye-opening experience if there are double endings in the score and if the repeats are not played, you rarely hear the return back to the beginning of of the movement. This is the case for Beethoven's "Eroica" for example. But in this Mozart there are no double endings, still, there is good reason to play the repeats and it is interesting to think why they were written in the first place and why they often are not played in recordings. First, the repeats in Mozart are for the entire exposition and development plus recapitulation in sonata forms. This is true for symphony as well as chamber works. The reason for these is that listeners did not have benefit of recordings and so needed the repeats to "get it", to hear the exposition twice to listen to the premise of the movement, as it were, and to hear twice the puzzle of how the development and recap are going to wrench the rhyming of the ideas of the premise. There is also the need to emphasize the distance, the point furthest removed in the development whether convayed by a distant harmonic excursion or complex counterpoint, the case more often in Beethoven's developments. Also, keep in mind that listeners differ so much in their tonal memory that what they can't remember of pitch must be marked by stylistic markers. The most musical of listeners will readily hear the harmony and the points of arrival in the harmonic form, but the textural devices will help everybody know where they are in the form. Mozart's audiences would have been well versed in these devices and would be in on the joke.

It is the time constraints on recording media up to the invention of the audio CD that most often preculded playing repeats in recorded performances. Now that performers more often play repeats we can appreciate what the experience of the composer's audience must have been and why the repeats were needed. I had written about this earlier in my other blog describing a performance of Beethoven's Quartet in E-minor Op. 59 #2.

One last comment about Mozart's Violin Sonatas, noting that Albert Einstein played the violin part with his brother Alfred who was a noted Mozart researcher, would it be that there are recordings? There might be some disagreement about how many of these works are attributed
to W. A. Mozart. Is it 35 or closer to 15? I have a three volume set of Lea Pocket Scores that cite the larger number, yet many collections only include more like the lower number. Even the Kochel index may not help if some works attributed to Mozart have been shown to be spurious.

I can't help myself

After seeing several recent books on brain plasticity, brain trauma, and musical abilities, I can understand how one can become so sensitive to music, to have abilities that are beyond what is common in other people. I seem to have a very good memory insofar as I seem to be able to remember entire large works of music and have been able to do this all my life.

It is not all that uncommon that people recall music, indeed, music seems to be tied to memory for most people to some extant. My parents seemed musical. Both liked music and it was played all the time, but neither studied music in any formal way. I seemed to have developed a preoccupation with music at quite an early age, and after having read Oliver Sach's book "Musicophilia" in which he emphasized those cases he knew as a neuroscientist where trauma had caused people with no developed acuity towards music to become suddenly obsessed with it, I have been wondering how my history has to do with the inclination. I seem to fit into the group where visual handicap leaves a large part of the temporal and visual cortex underused. I lost vision in my left eye at an early age and my acuity in the right one is only about a third normal. I am far from legally blind and any first year anatomy student knows that tracts from each eye lead to both lobes of the visual cortex. Still my musical acuity seems to be developed as it often is in blind people and I may have unused processor bandwidth, to barrow the metaphor from computers, that gets used in recalling music.

I have heard of musicians who have a better memory than I do, and I realize that I have been cheating somewhat in looking at scores and remembering the music that way. This inclines one to think more musicalogically, but often the impetus to analysis is driven by its memonic value. When I first started using pocket scores to help my memory as a high school student, I didn't have as good tonal memory as I do now. I couldn't sight sing parts, as I do now, and I didn't know much theory or even how to read transposed parts and odd clefs, like C-clef. I still struggle to read voice parts in the old clefs, as in the Bach Geselschaft edition, but what I was getting around to say is that performers have to read from the individual part. They have to count the rests and do not get the benefit of seeing all the other parts of the score. It takes great discipline to count and play a part correctly, all the more for chamber performers where there is no conductor. Still, someone has to have an overview, to see the forest for the trees. Of course a century or more ago, performance was the main access people had to music. You either learned to make music yourself or you did without. Now, recorded sound makes it possible for people like me to do everything in reverse, to learn about music from the top down, from a rich sample of music played on the radio years ago, and to dive into the details.

And it goes without saying that there are strong emotional ties in this passion. The people who know about modality in the way people think will say that there are most people who key on spoken or written word, hence the large number of people who find pleasure in reading; who find emotional depth in books and ideas. For me those hooks have always been musical and with particular pieces that carry connotation and history for me. Aesthetics seems to be based on subconscious archetypes of cycle that leads to forms. Memory is an essential part of the ability to perceive aesthetically and so you can't spoon-feed music appreciation by talking about form and style to people who have no memory for music. And you can't entice them with academic discussions of sonata-rondo form unless they have an emotional attachment to music that uses that form.

In some sense to write about music is always like preaching to the faithful; it doesn't really mean anything unless you have some essential abilities and experience. I might talk about particular pieces I know, even spur you to go listen to them, but I am talking myself blue in the face unless you have some basic capabilities, not the least of which is a developed memory.