Klarinet Archive - Posting 000110.txt from 1997/05

From: "Eliabeth R. Goeke" <goeke@-----.edu>
Subj: Re: Music, performance, and marching bands
Date: Sat, 3 May 1997 23:47:24 -0400

> I always thought the one bit of original music John Williams wrote was
> the Jaws theme. (huge snip)
(a diff author)
> and they are also saying that this idea that he had was so good that it can
> be used as a model for what I'm trying to accomplish.

My input goes as follows: this year I have had to sit through over four
lectures on the topic of 'borrowing' ideas/phrases/tonal progressions from
other composers. To quote my advisor: there are two kind of borrowing,
that done when a composer is young and is trying to learn what kind of
music he will write in the future (example: early Hindemith sounds like a
combination of Bach, Schonberg, and Strauss) and that done when a composer
knows exactly what he wants to do and has the very wide knowledge of music
to be able to pull the object from someone else's work (example: take any
piece of Brahm's and you will find a predecessor piece that contains
similar ideas but were differently used). Williams is just a really
smart cookie and understands his musical heritage very well, so that he
knows exactly what he needs at a given moment. I'm currently writing a
paper about Hindemith's Morder, Hoffnung der Frauen so this just is an
extension on one of the paragraphs...oh, how things come in a full circle.

elizabeth

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Elizabeth Goeke
Middlebury College
goeke@-----.edu
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