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«--back
I
could say more ... and being a professor, naturally I will ...
The diversely talented jazz pianist Chick Corea illustrates
in a wonderful way how musicians may connect with history. He
writes of the way he came to know Mozart's music, through the
pianist Friedrich Gulda at the 1982 Munich piano festival:
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On
our first meeting--on stage in front of the festival audience--after
a half-hour of duet improvisation, Gulda played alone for
awhile. He began with a stormy improvised section, and then
launched into a beautiful melodic section, which was obviously
a composed piece of music. The music took me by surprise,
and in the free playing context I couldn't tell whose composition
this was--I thought in fact that it might have been a contemporary
composer using a very melodic and romantic approach. I naively
asked Gulda afterwards who wrote that wonderful music, and
he said in a matter-of-fact way, "Why, that's Mozart!"
I was transformed and inspired. I asked him to show me more
about Mozart and so a month later Gulda invited me to perform
the Mozart double piano concerto in E-flat with himself,
Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in
a special Mozart week in Amsterdam. With that experience,
my love for Mozart's music began and has continued to grow
through the years. (liner notes, corea.concerto,
Sony Classical, SK 61799)
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Corea
then went on to write his own piano concerto, informed by Mozart's
conception of the genre but incorporating his own delicious
jazz idiom as well. (It's a great recording! Get it at Tower
Records, cat. no. SK 61799.)
In my own research I've been fascinated by composers' interactions
with the musical past. My main focus has been the stile antico,
the use of an "old fashioned" style employed by many
composers--from the Baroque era right up through the twentieth
century. (I wrote the New Grove Dictionary article on
"stile antico"; read it on-line at grovemusic.com
or see it in the flesh at duPont
Library.) The origins of the stile antico lie in
the seventeenth century--the
era of the miraculous Monteverdi which also bore witness to
the births of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi--though composers were
not conscious of this kind of historical approach until later.
Still, some seventeenth-century
accounts are relevant to the issue. Continued
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