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Theoretical Fundamentals


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THEORETICAL FUNDAMENTALS

UNIVERSAL
MUSIC THEORY 1

I.
THE PROCESS OF
CREATING MUSIC

The World of
Enlivened Silence

The Origin of the
Art of Sound

Responsible Authorship

The Firmament of Music

Creative Music Listening

Writing Down the Score

The Conventional
Practice of Notation

The Error of the Interpreter

The Language of Truth

 

Peter Hübner
Founder of the
Micro Music Laboratories

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  PART   I            
  THE PROCESS OF CREATING MUSIC            
         
 
The Language of Truth


   
 
Eter­nal truths cer­tainly remain eter­nal truths; the char­ac­ters, how­ever, by which they are ex­pres­sed are sub­ject to change in the course of time. And in a time chang­ing as rap­idly as ours some writ­ings – not the truth they con­tain, but the de­scrip­tion of it – van­ish much faster than we be­lieve.
Thus, the in­ner mean­ing of clas­si­cal scores is un­der­stood much less than any ex­pert might real­ize.

 
Mortality of Writing – Immortality of Truth
 
 
Just as the let­ter a to­day is writ­ten on a typewriter in only one way, but pro­nounced quite dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent syllables, like­wise, at the time of the clas­sics, for ex­ample, a one-accented d (d’) for a vio­lin was writ­ten down in only one way but, be­cause of the richer mu­si­cal ex­pres­sion of that time, it was played quite dif­fer­ently, de­pend­ing on its con­text in the com­po­si­tion.

 
The Musical Language
 
 
In those days the pur­pose of the or­ches­tral re­hearsal (and to some ex­tent of the no­ta­tion) was mainly to cor­rect pos­si­ble de­via­tions from the pre­vailing prac­tice of per­form­ing mu­sic. This has turned into to­day’s or­ches­tral re­hearsal with its des­per­ate effort to trans­form the liv­ing lan­guage of clas­si­cal mu­sic into “typewrit­ten char­ac­ters.” The re­sult is a dying in­ter­est in this mu­sic among the gen­eral pub­lic.

 
The Rehearsal in the Course of Time
 
 
In the tra­di­tional form of no­ta­tion the com­poser pro­vided the skilled per­for­mer with the mini­mum of in­for­ma­tion re­quired to pro­duce the de­sired mu­si­cal re­sult. The play­ing in­struc­tions of the clas­si­cal com­pos­ers had, at their time, rather the char­ac­ter of “mem­ory aids.”
This we can deduct from the com­plex­ity of the in­ner logic of these com­po­si­tions; for it is most un­likely that these great mu­si­cal crea­tors in­tended to ex­press such an im­mense, in­ner com­po­si­tional di­ver­sity with such an unimagi­na­tive play as is the prac­tice to­day.

 
Memory Aids
 
 
Thus, un­like the mu­si­cian of to­day, the mu­si­cian of the clas­si­cal pe­riod must have had, as a rou­tine, a de­gree of virtuosity at his com­mand which ist in­com­pre­hen­si­ble to the ana­lyti­cally think­ing mu­si­cian of to­day. Quotation

 
Virtuosity
 
 
There­fore, given to­day’s rou­tine of per­form­ance, a com­po­si­tion of Beethoven lit­er­ally be­comes de­prived of its life, and the in­stru­men­talist of the clas­si­cal time would have firmly re­jected such an alienated tech­nique of read­ing a score which leads to such petrification.

 
Alienated Technique of Score Reading
 
 
In this kind of ana­lyti­cal score read­ing he would have found the means and the way in­terchanged.
How­ever, such an alienation is natu­ral in the course of time.

   
 
Thus, with re­gard to the true pur­pose of mu­sic, for us mu­si­cians to­day the re­ward­ing task arises to ex­press the truth anew with the means of our time, in our own fa­mil­iar “col­lo­quial” lan­guage.

 
Conveying Most Ancient Truths
 
 
And par­ticu­larly be­cause of to­day’s pre­domi­nantly ana­lyti­cal method of de­scrip­tion, the tech­nol­ogy of our cen­tury, and the field of elec­tronics in par­ticu­lar, pre­sents a timely and abundant po­ten­tial for the for­ma­tion of an ex­tremely lively mu­si­cal lan­guage, and there­fore for the suc­cess­ful con­vey­ance of most an­cient truths.

 
Applying Today’s Analytical Method of Description
 
     
     
                                 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                     
                                     
  With kind permission of AAR EDITION INTERNATIONAL
© 1998 –  MICRO MUSIC LABORATORIES



           
     
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