Recreation; Re: Creation

I've been in the Bahamas, on vacation, and I've also been intoxicated with a piece I'm writing, the slow movement of a prospective symphony. It's emerging as a pop ballad, with classic doowop harmony; cheesy, some might say, but isn't it supposed to be? And all scored for a Haydn-size orchestra, two oboes, bassoon, two horns, and strings. Quite a trick, I might say, scoring a pop ballad for those instruments. Where's the rhythm section? (Though that's not the biggest problem -- cello and double bass, playing pizzicato, can make a lot of rhythm. What's hard is adapting the lightness, the transparency of a small classical orchestra to music that, first, isn't often light or transparent, and, second, is normally built from several sonic layers, which the instruments I'm using can't easily create.)

But speaking of Haydn, there's something I forgot in my post on his Creation. If, as I suggested, we perform it with an understanding that Adam and Eve really are the climax -- because, in Haydn's conception, God needed conscious beings to see the glory of His work -- then one crucial moment is the duet and chorus near the start of Part Three, sung by the two first humans. It conveys both the freshness of Eden and -- with its measured pace and especially with the awed timpani that begin about two minutes in -- the majesty of what's happening. Without any special fuss, the conductor should make the awe audible.

And my Creation post spurred this from my music critic colleague Marion Lignana Rosenberg:

That's delightfully rebutted in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, a book by my favorite musicologist (and certainly the most joyful I've ever read), Susan McClary, whom you can read about here and here. Susan shows that musical structure is historically conditioned, just like clothes, literary styles, and philosophical ideas (my comparisons, not hers). And why wouldn't it be? Don't composers breathe and bleed like everybody else? Susan's discussion is in no way reductive. Music, after she examines it, doesn't dissolve into its cultural meaning. Just the reverse -- it seems more vital (and more musical) than ever.