Classical Principle Weekly
January 31, 2023
How to Generate True Simplicity: Part 1–Chords
Please Note: This episode is accompanied by a video. More than usual, we invite you to watch the video to enjoy the full benefit of the ideas discussed in this episode.
There are times when simplicity is essential in art, as in life. What makes it great or not, lies in how you generate and develop it.
Where does it coming from, and where does it lead us? Do you begin from the bottom up, by collecting, classifying, and compiling phenomena, without ideas, hoping they might result in something meaningful? Or, do you begin from the top down, with developed conceptions of the actual universe in which we live, and distill phenomena from those idea—something elementary, but beautiful, that uplifts people.
Are musical chords built from the bottom up, as static fixed vertical piles of notes, succeeding each other like beads on a necklace? Or are chords determined by the beautiful horizontal motion of independent vocal lines, where each voice is crucial, and the chords thus far more transient and fleeting, since the moving voices are the substantives, not the static chords?
The scene from Raphael’s famous “School of Athens” painting depicting Plato and Aristotle in heated debate, gives us a clue. Plato points upward, with a copy of his “Timaeus”, which discusses the principles of how God created the universe according to ideas, and a conception of "the Good." Aristotle points down to the ground, with a copy of his “Ethics”, which denies the existence of universal ideas, and Plato's conception of "The Good."
In his “Prelude in C Major” to the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Johann Sebastian Bach gave the world a great gift of something simple, yet determined from the top-down, as an example of "The Good." No other part of the WTC can be played so easily by an amateur. This prelude can be mastered by a beginner. In Plato's approach, the microcosm embodies the macrocosm. That is exactly Bach’s approach—a small work like this, when done well, is a miniature universe. We offer a performance by a young man who, in this case, has not yet lost his sense of awe for the prelude.
Conversely, Carl Czerny had the advantage of being a student of Beethoven, but seems to have learned little from him. He was a fan of velocity, built on simple chords and scales, and imparted that ideal to his pupil, Franz Liszt. Here is his very simple “Etude in C major, Op. 261, No. 81”. True, it is a very easy piece, meant to develop the crossing of hands, but all of Czerny's works suffer from the bottom up approach of building on self-evident chords and scales.
In the video below, we hope to create for you a first approximation of what physics calls a “phase space”, inspired by time lapse photography. Please watch the video, since in this case, words alone are insufficient.
We hope you enjoy the video 🙂.
https://drive.google.com/…/1u85VspmcVUBxI-159br3Tfr52…/view…