Mozart: Symphony 36

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI5Yx_zdTMc&p=B7B56535289D7826&playnext=1&index=19

“Linz,” third and fourth movements

On this date in 1783 Mozart’s Symphony 36, “Linz,” premiered in Linz, Austria.

Frye in “Expanding Eyes”:

I am by no means the first critic to regard music as the typical art, the one where the impact of structure is not weakened, as it has been in painting and still is in literature, by false issues derived from representation.  For centuries the theory of music included a good deal of cosmological speculation, and the symmetrical grammar of classical music, with its circle of fifths, its twelve-tone chromatic and seven-tone diatonic scales, its duple and triple rhythms, its concords and cadences and formulaic progressions, makes it something of a mandala of the ear.  We hear the resonance of this mandala of musical possibilities in every piece of music we listen to.  Occasionally we feel that what we are listening to epitomizes, so to speak, our whole musical experience with special clarity: our profoundest response to the B Minor Mass or the Jupiter Symphony is not “this is beautiful music,” but something more like “this is the voice of music”; this is what music is all about.  (CW 27, 407)

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