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Perfect form?

7K views 89 replies 20 participants last post by  Woodduck 
#1 ·
I hear this thrown around, especially by music critics describing Mozart, and usually not with Beethoven. I feel there are many other composers that had achieved perfect form in various works. Is it just jargon to elevate one's favourite composer over another? What say you?

Personally I feel there is no 'perfect' form in that sense those critics mean it. It's all give and take. What one work one thinks is perfect, another could think something else is more perfect (in proportion, dramatic arc, as I take it). I used to feel Beethoven went strayed too far and is too expansive, but other times I feel it's just right.

Or else in a more objective, technical sense, perfect form means a composer follows the form perfectly without deviation, which doesn't prove one's a genius.
 
#2 · (Edited)
If the repetitions were more varied or replaced by something as good or better, but different, Beethoven's 5th would be "perfect form" to me.

There are more arguable things to me in his other symphonies and in the symphonies of Mendelssohn.

Then comes all the rest, but of course Mozart, Bruckner, and Haydn (and Bach!) are all also strong, as are other works of the aforementioned two.

So I would say that there is a fairly large body of music with very strong form, but "perfect form" is an elusive beast. I can't say I've ever encountered it.

Although... I do recall vividly that when I first saw the piano sheet of Mendelssohn's Wedding March, and immediately recognized the flawless melodic logic of it, it was the happiest moment I've ever had while reading music. Every element was related to the previous ones and executed as well as it gets. No wonder it's probably the single most well-known tune in the West.
 
#3 ·
Perfection, especially as used in the phrase "perfection of form," is a really low bar. Hundreds of movements in sonata form are formally perfect. So are most binary dance movements. And perfect rondos are a dime a dozen. If one doesn't aim higher than mere perfection, I'm probably not going to be interested.
 
#6 · (Edited)
Some formally ingenious works are full of violent juxtapositions and have little natural flow. Some markedly asymmetrical forms work wonderfully well. Do you always think in these little truisms that sound like cliches of late 19thc criticism?
Watch the Bernstein lecture, he demonstrates with an orchestra.

Of course it's intuitive writing once everything is mastered, including one's own emotions, that leads to perfect form. There is no mathematical shortcut.
 
#7 · (Edited)
To me form is synonymous with quality, that is, the interpretation you take away from a whole work, getting over the obstacles and onto seeing the big picture or whole impression. Form is the whole. Once you've heard a work, form can leave its impression. It's often correlated to length as well, ie. how big and symmetrical can you make a mountain, or how worthwhile and aesthetically balanced can you make a journey. Greater form can be achieved with greater length, but it's also more difficult.

The best work / form imo is probably within The Ring of Nibelungen.

Watch the Bernstein lecture, he demonstrates with an orchestra.
This lecture in of itself is an example of bad form :p
 
#8 ·
Perfect form is a) arguable as to what it is, b) unattainable for the most part, c) no guarantee of quality.

If you read historical music criticism and theory, the meaning of perfection changed rapidly. Examples that are often given are the G minor symphony of Mozart - no. 40. Schenkerian analysis reveals it's perfection. How many works by anyone ever have reached that level? Take the symphonies of Robert Volkman. Flawless, textbook perfect forms - and deadly dull without inspiration or value.

On the other extreme, there are works that are constantly berated for having poor form, but that hasn't stopped audiences and performers from loving them. The Tchaikovsky 1st piano concerto is a common example. So are the Mahler symphonies.
 
#11 · (Edited)
[ 1. Is it just jargon to elevate one's favourite composer over another? What say you?
2. Or else in a more objective, technical sense, perfect form means a composer follows the form perfectly without deviation, which doesn't prove one's a genius. ]

I'm reminded of quotes by Ravel and Sibelius. The one by Ravel seems to imply case 1, whereas the one by Sibelius seems to imply case 2.

"He (Ravel) told the pianist Marguerite Long, who premiered it (Concerto in G Major), that he composed the exquisite slow movement "'two measures at a time,' with the assistance of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet."
Mozart was his favorite composer-Mozart "remains the most perfect of all," he remarked, repeating this evaluation in one way or another over the years."
< Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends, by Mary McAuliffe, Page 144 >

"Sibelius himself remarked that: 'To my mind a Mozart Allegro is the most perfect model for a symphonic movement. Think of its wonderful unity and homogeneity! It is like an uninterrupted flowing, where nothing stands out and nothing encroaches upon the rest.' This description also suits the first movement of his own Third Symphony very well."
< Sibelius, By Andrew Barnett, Page 183 >

"perfect" is one of those terms that are overused these days, so it is too vague to be meaningful in serious discussions. I think whoever uses the term should be specific what precisely he means by it. I think, in the common usage of the term in the case of Mozart, the term can mean both positive and negative connotations: "Mozart has craftsmanship, but nothing in his music really stands out". I don't think Sibelius used the expression "nothing stands out", to describe Mozart negatively. But sometimes, depending on the context and how it's used by people in other cases, the phrase can be perceived as having a negative connotation.

There's actually a lot of ingenuity and interesting elements in Mozart's form, take K. 491, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._24_(Mozart)

"The orchestral exposition, 99 measures long, presents two groups of thematic material, one primary and one secondary, both in the tonic of C minor. The orchestra opens the principal theme in unison, but not powerfully: the dynamic marking is piano. The theme is tonally ambiguous, not asserting the home key of C minor until its final cadence in the thirteenth measure. It is also highly chromatic: in its 13 measures, it utilises all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.
The solo exposition follows its orchestral counterpart, and it is here that convention is discarded from the outset: the piano does not enter with the principal theme. Instead, it has an 18-measure solo passage. It is only after this passage that the principal theme appears, carried by the orchestra. The piano then picks up the theme from its seventh measure. Another departure from convention is that the solo exposition does not re-state the secondary theme from the orchestral exposition. Instead, a succession of new secondary thematic material appears. Musicologist Donald Tovey considered this introduction of new material to be "utterly subversive of the doctrine that the function of the opening tutti [the orchestral exposition] was to predict what the solo had to say."
One hundred measures into the solo exposition, which is now in the relative major of E♭, the piano plays a cadential trill, leading the orchestra from the dominant seventh to the tonic. This suggests to the listener that the solo exposition has reached an end, but Mozart instead gives the woodwinds a new theme. The exposition continues for another 60 or so measures, before another cadential trill brings about the real conclusion, prompting a ritornello that connects the exposition with the development. The pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen argues that Mozart thus created a "double exposition". Rosen also suggests that this explains why Mozart made substantial elongations to the orchestral exposition during the composition process; he needed a longer orchestral exposition to balance its "double" solo counterpart."

"The third movement features a theme in C minor followed by eight variations upon it. Hutchings considered it "both Mozart's finest essay in variation form and also his best concerto finale."
"Variations II to VI are what Girdlestone and Hutchings independently describe as "double" variations. Within each variation, each of the eight-measure phrases from the theme is further varied upon its repeat (AXAYBXBY). Variations IV and VI are in major keys. Tovey refers to the former (in A♭) as "cheerful" and the latter (in C) as "graceful". Between the two major-key variations, Variation V returns to C minor; Girdlestone describes this variation as "one of the most moving"."

 
#12 · (Edited)
"In the first movement of the G minor Quintet, excerpts from the principal subject serve as serial bases for various formations at the second subject stage, including extended retrograde versions. The minuet is a serial orgy. The three-note row B flat-C sharp-D operates again vertically as well as horizontally and derives, moreover, from the first and second subjects of the opening movement"
< Strict Serial Technique in Classical Music, By Hans Keller, Page 16 >

The expression (in parallel major) of "happy sadness" or "sad happiness" of the minuet trio "being continued" in the final movement:
[ 13:04 ]
[ 28:16 ]




"The idea used in the first movement of an advancing momentum brought to a sudden
stop is again explored."
(Elizabeth Dalton, 2016)
[ 0:20 ]
[ 7:50 ]
[ 27:00 ]
[ 30:00 ]



part-writing and suspensions involving slurred half-notes and chromatic eighth-note figures:
[ 4:15 ]
[ 28:06 ]



ascending chromatic figures accompanied by descending figures composed of longer note values:
[ 4:44 ]
[ 26:20 ]



-----

 
G
#18 ·
IMO, 'Perfection' clearly means 'cannot be improved upon'.

If Mozart really wrote the 'perfect' piano sonata, who says so, what are their criteria, and has everyone since just wasted their time trying to do better?

IMO, all rhetorical questions aimed at those wielding rhetorical hyperbole (is that a tautology?)

I'm very happy for people to claim such things, in their excited response to a marvellous piece of music, as long as they recognise that, IMO, it is only an exuberance of rhetorical form. Not an objectively verifiable and unassailable statement of fact.
 
#30 · (Edited)
Originally Posted by 1996D:
Wagner's form can be very poor because of his overambition. The common criticism that his works are a sea of dullness with occasional great moments is valid, but his music has many more issues than that.
Originally Posted by annaw:
I don't think that analysing musical form of a 15-hour-long opera is similar to analysing that of Beethoven string quartets.
Annaw has it right. The fact that Wagner writes uninterrupted stretches of music that encompass entire acts of operas, acts lasting an hour or more, seems to tempt some people to make irrelevant remarks about those stretches based on a notion that they are abstract musical structures. They are not. They are dramatic structures, using music as an expressive language akin to the use of poetry in a verse drama. It needs to be said, however, that Wagner's long spans are full of cannily contrived forms, defined by thematic and key relationships, which may not be apparent to the casual listener, and these forms create a subjectively felt coherence which contribute immeasurably to the dramatic coherence of the whole. Verdi spoke admiringly of the "immense structure" of Tristan's second act, and he was speaking of its musical structure.

How dull or absorbing one finds one of Wagner's musico-dramatic acts is not a question with an objective answer valid for all listeners. It should suffice to know that many people find them absorbing indeed. "Perfection" of musical form is not a reasonable standard to apply to an opera (not even to Mozart's, in case any Mozarteans are feeling complacent right now), but a great opera can achieve a sense of ultimate rightness which, for those who appreciate him, Wagner attains quite often. There is many an act in his operas, and some entire operas, from which I would not wish a single note removed or altered.

Is it safe, I wonder, to inquire of 1996D what Wagner's "more issues" might be?
 
#32 · (Edited)
I hear this thrown around, especially by music critics describing Mozart, and usually not with Beethoven. I feel there are many other composers that had achieved perfect form in various works. Is it just jargon to elevate one's favourite composer over another? What say you?

Personally I feel there is no 'perfect' form in that sense those critics mean it. It's all give and take. What one work one thinks is perfect, another could think something else is more perfect (in proportion, dramatic arc, as I take it). I used to feel Beethoven went strayed too far and is too expansive, but other times I feel it's just right.

Or else in a more objective, technical sense, perfect form means a composer follows the form perfectly without deviation, which doesn't prove one's a genius.
The most perfect form is no form. A sense of things just happening. That's one of the great discoveries of music, particularly British music, over the past few years, that the delirium of formlessness can very well expand the listener's consciousness, better than planned, structured music. Here's an example.

 
#33 ·
You're pulling our legs, aren't you? Is this some sort of koan?

I don't see how a lack of form "expands consciousness." What does that phrase mean to you? I've always thought that art existed for the purpose of enlarging one's reality, and it does so by selectively presenting to the mind a vast array of forms that represent and evoke things, raising our perception of phenomena to a higher plane. That's potentially quite an expansion of consciousness; we become conscious of more than we were before, seeing things in a new way made possible only by another mind sharing its conceptions with us.

What do people making random sounds have to offer consciousness?
 
#36 · (Edited)
Or else in a more objective, technical sense, perfect form means a composer follows the form perfectly without deviation, which doesn't prove one's a genius.
here's something for us to think about:



The highest voted comments on this video:
"No one will ever know if you make a mistake that's for sure."
"If you make a mistake on this sonata, it's called "improvisation""

Does this work prove the composer as a genius of perfection?
 
#37 · (Edited)
Is it just jargon to elevate one's favourite composer over another?
I once talked about Mozart's extraordinary sense to place "stock phrases" in the right context. With later stuff like Debussy's Images, for example, even if a few notes are added or taken out, the piece will probably still sound fine. (I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing here) You can't really achieve the same with Mozart. "Perfection" may not be the best term to describe this thing about Mozart, but it's something that is an inherent property of his aesthetics. I think people can't come up with a better term, so they just stick to saying "perfection".

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Font Music Rectangle Parallel Sheet music

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"Mozart's music is particularly difficult to perform. His clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard." -Gabriel Fauré
 
#42 · (Edited)
Rihm's Jagden und Formen - hunting and making forms.



How it evolves is not necessarily determined in advance, like a set of rails. When you hunt for something no one need say - first do this, then do that. You start out, observe what happens, and then respond intuitively to decide the next step.

A hunt is a sort of improvisation.

The form of the hunt is the hunt. The form of the music is the quest for its own form.

These ideas are well established in classical music, going back all the way to Debussy's Jeux.
 
#43 · (Edited)
http://www.kim-cohen.com/Assets/CourseAssets/Texts/Adorno_Vers une musique informelle.pdf

And here's Adorno's essay Vers une musique informelle , he means

a type of music which has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way. At the same time, although such music should be completely free ofanything irreducibly alien to itself or superimposed on it, it should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of external laws. Moreover, wherever this can be achieved without running the risk of a new form of oppression, such an emancipation should also strive to do away with the system of musical co-ordinates which have crystallized out in the innermost recesses of the musical substance itself.
 
#45 ·
And here's Adorno's essay Vers une musique informelle , he means:

"a type of music which has discarded all forms which are external or abstract or which confront it in an inflexible way. At the same time, although such music should be completely free ofanything irreducibly alien to itself or superimposed on it, it should nevertheless constitute itself in an objectively compelling way, in the musical substance itself, and not in terms of external laws. Moreover, wherever this can be achieved without running the risk of a new form of oppression, such an emancipation should also strive to do away with the system of musical co-ordinates which have crystallized out in the innermost recesses of the musical substance itself."
An abuse of thought and language so profound is impossible to read without laughing.
 
#76 · (Edited)
I suppose there are two main meanings that are given to this expression. One is the notion of perfect organization of thematic material. Bernstein, for example, said that what made Beethoven one of the greatest composers of all time was his sense of form, his ability to tell what the next note ought to be.

The other concept of perfect form is the idea that some forms are inherently better (or even more "natural") than others, and that anything that can be classified as a fantasia or work in free form is beneath serious listeners and "Top 10" lists.
 
#77 ·
The other concept of perfect form is the idea that some forms are inherently better (or even more "natural") than others, and that anything that can be classified as a fantasia or work in free form is beneath serious listeners and "Top 10" lists.
I don't think most knowledgeable listeners feel this way considering the stature of the preludes of Bach, Chopin and Debussy, or Brahms op. 116-119 etc.
 
#79 · (Edited)
More I think about it, I feel there is no such thing as perfect form except in the lowest and clearest sense as in following a set form without deviation which doesn't really tell anything about quality or inventiveness. Another thing is tighter form is not necessarily better than looser, or more expansive form and vice versa.

But the big 3 did have tighter form than the later Romantics. Rachmaninov is an example of expansive form which caused Copland to say "The prospect of having to sit through one of his extended symphonies or piano concertos tends quite frankly to depress me. All those notes ... and to what end?" But I don't see what most people prefer as being the paramount test of quality (or else pop will always win out).

Another view that Mandryka brought up was that perfect form is no form. Since no form at all would make music incomprehensible by nature, I would generalize it to mean the more freedom in form the more perfect in some way. Here is an example of something with a lot of freedom with minimal form. From 1:45 to 3:30 it is clearly held together loosely with the anchoring rhythm in the Xylorimba, even when the rhythms in the other instruments go with a different meter that propagates over time. The serialists did have form (in one form or another :D), just not that recognizable in the traditional sense. But once you sense that form or anchoring principle, the freedom they are able to achieve with that form can't be attained by traditional tighter forms, while it can also be improvised (no longer strict serial, which a lot of contemporary music does). But I'm not saying it's better in any way.

 
#82 · (Edited)
What about process music? You can't get a better example of perfect form than this:
Sure, it has very clear rhythmic forms. But what do you mean by perfect? A simple unchanging drum beat can have perfect form.

What about free improvisation? Something like this (I love this stuff!)
It definitely has form, and not really that free. She's mimicking transient response waveforms. I used to do that myself to annoy my sister :D
 
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