I wonder if anyone else is enjoying this week's series as much as I am.
Samuel Wesley bridged three major aesthetic musical periods - the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic - it's hard to think of anyone else who did likewise. Yet in some ways his music was rather old fashioned for its times. The same could probably be said for CPE Bach's early commitment to continuing the perfection of his old man's commitment to contrapuntal formality, except that CPE was possibly proving a point; and in any case his own music, from his early symphonies, was stylistically of the new age.
I am always struck by the rapidity with which that switch unfolded - music that sounded for all the world like JS Bach or Handel had composed it almost immediately superseded by music already sounding just like Mozart, who in actuality had only just then hatched. That's another topic, of course, but Sam Wes's devotion to Bachian workouts that sound indistinguishable to these ignorant ears from Joe Seb's, commendable insofar that they kept a form alive that some felt to have been exhausted, thereby preparing for its adaptability within sonata form thinking. Not that it ever really died, if we listen to almost any Haydn or Mozart string quartet - but, rather like advanced ideas in Shostakovitch string quartets a century and a half later, it had to be kept under wraps and carefully disguised so as to sound like melodies with simple chordal accompaniments in so as not to upset the ruling classes... well, until we get to the later Mozart and Haydn symphonies, that is.
But in Wesley's case I am reminded of a remark once written (which if I could be bothered is probably somewhere on my booksehlves) to the effect that English composers had always, going all the way back to Purcell and even the Elizabethans, managed to find ways to continue mining ideas considered by their time outmoded, to find therein riches thought to be exhausted.
They're playing Rule Britannia now - just think, that would once have been thought "modern music"!
Samuel Wesley bridged three major aesthetic musical periods - the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic - it's hard to think of anyone else who did likewise. Yet in some ways his music was rather old fashioned for its times. The same could probably be said for CPE Bach's early commitment to continuing the perfection of his old man's commitment to contrapuntal formality, except that CPE was possibly proving a point; and in any case his own music, from his early symphonies, was stylistically of the new age.
I am always struck by the rapidity with which that switch unfolded - music that sounded for all the world like JS Bach or Handel had composed it almost immediately superseded by music already sounding just like Mozart, who in actuality had only just then hatched. That's another topic, of course, but Sam Wes's devotion to Bachian workouts that sound indistinguishable to these ignorant ears from Joe Seb's, commendable insofar that they kept a form alive that some felt to have been exhausted, thereby preparing for its adaptability within sonata form thinking. Not that it ever really died, if we listen to almost any Haydn or Mozart string quartet - but, rather like advanced ideas in Shostakovitch string quartets a century and a half later, it had to be kept under wraps and carefully disguised so as to sound like melodies with simple chordal accompaniments in so as not to upset the ruling classes... well, until we get to the later Mozart and Haydn symphonies, that is.
But in Wesley's case I am reminded of a remark once written (which if I could be bothered is probably somewhere on my booksehlves) to the effect that English composers had always, going all the way back to Purcell and even the Elizabethans, managed to find ways to continue mining ideas considered by their time outmoded, to find therein riches thought to be exhausted.
They're playing Rule Britannia now - just think, that would once have been thought "modern music"!