Word: musicas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...across a remark the other day in the "Pro Musica" column of the Radcliffe News which seemed to me typical of a fairly widespread misconception about Mozart. The writer of "Pro Musica" discussed at some length the E-flat Symphony, and then went on to say: ". . . where a Mozart rises above his environment and ignores, a Berlioz would have sought to picture it in its most sordid details. It is a never-ending tribute, we feel, to the greatness of Mozart that he could continue composition of 'happy' music even when he himself was most 'unhappy.'" Such a statement...
...with this rather obvious point in mind we examine the excerpt quoted above from the "Pro Musica," we are forced to the conclusion that Mozart's music is thoroughly superficial, that it resembles notlring so much as cheap confectionery. If, while he was really "unhappy," Mozart should have continued to compose "happy" music, he was being false to himself both as man and artist; false to his most penetrating, and, in sooth, his most sacred feelings. But Mozart does not ignore his environment; the environment is absorbed, digested, into the totality of his artistic experience. In Berlioz...
...work of the devil. This discord is the augmented fourth (example: C and F sharp on the piano), was called the tritone because it spans three whole tones. The tritone was banned in sacred music, thus giving rise to a maxim: Mi contra fa est diabolus in musica (The tritone is the devil in music). When the sirens, beginning on a sweet major third or fifth, slip up and down into the bloodcurdling tritone, it sounds that way to Londoners...