Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2005-07-16 23:52
But playing *is* hearing. At least, musicianship is hearing.
>But, just as we don't make 'ing' more than 'go' when we speak, we don't play the second of the two minims louder than the first -- in the classical style, that is.>
Offhand, I can't think of an example of the "wrong" phrasing in Mozart or Beethoven, that's true ; but some of the pre-classical composers and wrote that way, and I don't think their music suffers for it. The only reason G. F. Handel (one of my fifty or so favorite composers) would avoid stressing the second minim would be to add even more syllables with an even odder stress: "I-yi-yi-yi-yi'm go-ee-oh-ee-wo-ee-oh-ee-OH!-ING! here!" Then he'd take it up a fifth and sing it all over again, with the phrase all split up, so that the basses boom, "Go! Go! Go-go-go-ee-oh-ee! Go! -- Go go GO!" while the sopranos sing the whole phrase. Then he'd take it down a third and fugue it.
I don't think the differences between English and German, sometimes cited as the reason why Handel wrote so many notes per syllable, can possibly account for this practice. That explanation doesn't make any sense. He knew how many syllables the English words had. I think he deliberately wound out those extra syllables to delay his endings and to keep his audience in a state of suspense / anticipation / heightened alertness. But if his chord structures were so simple that we anticipated too easily, then we'd dismiss his music as "sewing machine Baroque." He was a genius at keeping his music just complicated enough to keep musicians interested without alienating the non-musicians.
I think a lot of the humor in P. D. Q. Bach comes from taking that ending-anticipation too far. Where Handel would add his syllables and then proceed with harmony and counterpoint along fairly conventional lines, Shickele jumps around the circle of fifths unconventionally while adding a few more syllables to every key change, and when the singers run out of breath, he throws in a coda. Often he never does work his way back to the tonic and sometimes he just crashes to a stop with some big splat of adjacent minor seconds. This mess sounds funny (instead of just sounding bad) because we know where we were expecting to go instead.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
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