All Entries in the "Sir Donald" Category
For Instance, The Choir Need Neither Receive Or Deserve A Flogging
Sir Donald on performance practice
The conditions under which poor Bach worked were neither metropolitan nor otherwise oputlent. He furnished his church cantatas week by week, as the parson furnished his Sunday sermon; and a trustworthy tradition tells us that the performances were generally atrocious and that a subsequent flogging for the ringleaders of the [...]
Come Here, You Old Fuddy Duddy, You
From Sir Donald Tovey’s 1936 book entitled Normality and Freedom.
“Bach, to the few critics who knew of him otherwise than as a brilliant organist, was always hopelessly out of date. When he was nineteen he played figured chorales to Reinken, a man ninety years of age, who exclaimed: “My son!, I thought this [...]
Collecting Statistics Of The Wild Oat Crops
After a brief hiatus, the indefatigable Sir Donald Tovey is back.
At this time of day, it ought hardly to be necessary to point out that our criterion must not be that of the criminologists who, at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrated to their own satisfaction that they could not distinguish genius from [...]
The Contents Of An Ostrich’s Or Even A Hen’s Gizzard
A discussion in which Sir Donald takes a long walk into the Land of Tangential Analogies and compares music to amoebic digestion and various poultry gizzards.
Every work of art, from the most absolute of music to the most pantomimic of operas, selects its material in much teh same way as the amoeba selects its food; [...]
As Abhorrent As The Worship Of The Golden Calf
Sir Donald’s backhanded defense of opera.
Doubtless there are some people to whom the use of music for illlustrating other things is as abhorrent as the worship of the golden calf was to the law-giver of Israel; but if you wish to break all the commandments of aesthetic philosophy at once you will infer that, because [...]
Conscientiously Blind To A Real Aesthetic
Does technical knowledge of music help or hinder a listener’s experience? Sir Donald weighs in:
I was once severely rebuked by a friend when I pointed out a specially beautiful example of “double counterpoint in the twelfth” in an orchestral work. My friend dryly said that there was no beauty in such a merely [...]
Ruminating on Second Hand Theories
From Sir Donald Tovey’s 1934 lecture entitled Musical Form and Matter
Neither the humble lover nor the master of pure musical form need entertain any tolerance for theories that deny the supremacy of absolute music. But all history and experience go to prove that the absoluteness of music is a result; that this result remains [...]
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