Comments on On a Pacific Aisle: Toward a Typology of Juvenilia

The field of music education has changed so much s...

2008-04-07T15:34:00.000-07:00

The field of music education has changed so much since 1850 that any attempt to compare musicians from that time to ours is going to fail. This change is perfectly exemplified in the Ph.D for musicology in American higher education.

I'm not convinced that this dichotomy is as black ...

2008-04-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not convinced that this dichotomy is as black and white as you make it sound. I will, however, admit that there is a certain truth to it, but I think it's subsidiary at best, if only because you're addressing the newest generation of composers. By contrast, the level of artistic development/training of young composers in, say, 1750 was much higher than it is in today's gray cultural sludge. So when we search for those historical parallels, I think the dichotomy breaks down.

To think, the last undergraduate class I taught, who were all music majors, had minimal familiarity with even the Beethoven Symphonies, let alone what keys they were in. If I were teaching in 1850, they'd be able to play them at the keyboard from memory at any transposition.

I'm not saying that young composers are more naive, but the challenges and focuses are most certainly different, perhaps contributing to your theoretical divide, in a way that wasn't present as it was for Mendelssohn, et al.

We hear plenty of Schubert's juvenilia, but he wro...

2008-04-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

We hear plenty of Schubert's juvenilia, but he wrote so many masterpieces as a teenager we don't think of them that way. He was certainly bursting his early bounds in the works written in the year or two before he died.