4 ms·

I always thought the reason Brahms stands out among his contemporaries is that he's the first post-Beethoven symphonist who actually came close to Beethoven's l

I always thought the reason Brahms stands out among his contemporaries is that he's the first post-Beethoven symphonist who actually came close to Beethoven's level. But I've never been a big fan of the early Romantic era compositions.

jancsika 6y ago
One overlooked reason his music stands out is because Beethoven's technique is tractable and is still taught as a kind of "divide-and-conquer" technique to composition students. Students can write a coherent piece in essentially any style by building up phrases and sections from small groups of notes that are easy to control. So they enumerate through a few techniques of lining up these little units and listen to the result. Then they go back to listen to Beethoven and Brahms and immediately gain a deeper appreciation of just how completely those composers mastered these techniques to create dramatic musical structures. Rinse and repeat through the generations. This is one of the reasons why Brahms is considered a "composer's composer." Now, what process is used to teach a composition student to write music that, say, use techniques responsible for what happens in the first minute of the first movement of Schubert's B Minor Symphony, D. 759? It's one of the great beginnings to a symphony, but it isn't really written leveraging the techniques I described above. And while you can analyze it to figure out why it specifically comes off the way it does, there's no easy "divide-and-conquer" technique to abstract out and apply to other settings/styles. That means there are fewer composers writing toy versions of moments like that to build up a deeper understanding of these other techniques. And there are many other musical techniques like this which do not lend themselves to pedagogy. Mozart is full of stuff like this, where the technique is essentially, "First, learn all the music. Next..." :)

jancsika 6y ago

One overlooked reason his music stands out is because Beethoven's technique is tractable and is still taught as a kind of "divide-and-conquer" technique to composition students. Students can write a coherent piece in essentially any style by building up phrases and sections from small groups of notes that are easy to control. So they enumerate through a few techniques of lining up these little units and listen to the result. Then they go back to listen to Beethoven and Brahms and immediately gain a deeper appreciation of just how completely those composers mastered these techniques to create dramatic musical structures. Rinse and repeat through the generations. This is one of the reasons why Brahms is considered a "composer's composer." Now, what process is used to teach a composition student to write music that, say, use techniques responsible for what happens in the first minute of the first movement of Schubert's B Minor Symphony, D. 759? It's one of the great beginnings to a symphony, but it isn't really written leveraging the techniques I described above. And while you can analyze it to figure out why it specifically comes off the way it does, there's no easy "divide-and-conquer" technique to abstract out and apply to other settings/styles. That means there are fewer composers writing toy versions of moments like that to build up a deeper understanding of these other techniques. And there are many other musical techniques like this which do not lend themselves to pedagogy. Mozart is full of stuff like this, where the technique is essentially, "First, learn all the music. Next..." :)