Interesting question (3); is the motif of Beethoven 5 banal when played out of context? it is, after all, played on only two notes. Almost impossibly simple.

Hi George

1) I understand "overcomposed" to mean a piece/passage containing an unnecessary amount of (accompanying ?) information/too much going on/cluttered - that sort of thing. I've not encountered "undercomposed" - I would guess that the composer so accused would be viewed as not having bothered to sufficiently "clothe" his idea/piece . . .

2) "Emotionally manipulative" ? - does that mean the musical equivalent of a Spielberg film ? Cheap trickery, I would imagine, rather than Richard Strauss. There's quite a bit of that about these days.

3) Yep, I reckon a musical theme can be "banal". How about the memorable theme from Shostakovich 7 ? (ducks behind sofa)

Now watch me get dumped on from a great height.

I'm not sure what George means by "banal in itself" as opposed to just banal.

But I think context is very important. What about Faure's Souvenirs de Bayreuth? Does that make themes from Wagner's Ring sound commonplace?

It has to do with a perceived discrepancy between the effort seemingly put into it, or the degree of elaboration, and the strikingness of the results. I might, for example, say some of Reger is 'overcomposed' because all the surface elaboration tends to produce a rather turgid result at times. The term is an attempt at a musical analogy to 'overwritten'.


I'd say something similar to Richard - manipulative music works to stop the listener thinking, to overwhelm them with an unambiguous result, rather than encouraging them to engage in a more active and subjective mode of listening.


Yes, certainly, but that doesn't need imply that what the composer does with it is banal. The Diabelli theme that Beethoven (and others) wrote variations on surely counts as banal in itself?


'Tropes' are simply recurrent figurations (akin to figures of speech), relatively standardised categories of gesture, harmony, process, etc. There are more specific uses of the term in music - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trope_%28music%29 for a few - I tend to use it in a more generalised sense. 'Sedimentation', in the context of music, is a term taken from Adorno - it simply refers to the process by which various historical phenomena feed the process of artistic production, usually in a submerged manner rather than being explicit on the surface.

Funny you should bring that up - I was just reading the following the other day, which is deeply relevant in the context:

[T]he Bolshevik takeover did not endanger the arts institutions of Tsarist Russia. Works overtly glorifying the Romanov dynasty, like Glinka's A Life for the Tsar, were of course removed from the repertory - until their librettos could be refurbished, anyway - and others were sanitized. (The peasant scene, for example, was dropped from Chaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, though it, too, came back under Stalin.) The difference was the the institutions of the "landlord culture" would be placed at the service of the working class.

The task was undertaken in a spirit of the frankest paternalism. The masses were to be raised to the level of the unquestioned elite culture. They were to be educated in the old bourgeois ways, right down to elementary behavior - don't talk, don't smoke, don't crack nuts, wear a tie "so as to fit more into the atmosphere of beauty." Some remarks by Lunacharsky before a performance of Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila capture the flavor: "To you, workers, will be shown one of the greatest creations, one of the most cherished diamonds in the wondrous crown of Russian art. On a valuable tray you are presented with a goblet of beautiful sparkling wine - drink and enjoy it." Even chamber music, the most aristocratic music of all, was lovingly preserved and presented to the masses. New quartets sprang up, including the Lunacharsky Quartet and the Lenin Quartet. Their performing style was "externalized," as the saying then went - overdramatized, overly demonstrative, ingenuously explicit, didactic. It is the style of playing still recognizable, alas, as "Soviet".

Richard Taruskin - 'Safe Harbors', in Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 88-89.

(lots of issues concerning Soviet music have been raised in various threads - should we have a separate thread discussing that?)

 like to discuss Soviet Art. I did not live during Revolution time. I can only say what my grandmother told me, and she was 5 years old during revolution.
The first years after Revolution were the best years and the worse years. On a good side there was a lot of enthusiasm and expectations with regard to everything (including Arts). There was a part of people that wanted to bring themselves up to bourgeois culture that was not available to them before, and there were dark elements.
Lunacharsky tried his best I suppose. They did play chamber music to workers and workers went to opera.
From this point of view it was the best years, but atrocities and other things were really bad. Many had to flee abroad.
Lunacharsky did not carry much weight in Politburo and had to toil the line like everyone else.

Bolsheviks did a lot for working class from many points of view. Russia was such a backward country (compared to the West). Women had no passports of their own, peasants had no passports. So the first few steps were positive from many points of view.

So that's cleared that one up, eh George ?