On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Peter Dorman wrote: > well known for it. But viewing the strings as the proletarians of the > ensemble is just strange. The violin, after all, was seen as the most > expressive of all instruments with the longest history of virtuoso > performance. Eh? Class identity isn't necessarily tied to a specific instrument, it's the thematic material which determines the thing. The violin can represent the subject, but it can also be massed together to form this thunderous roar of collective affirmation or negation. My point is that the development of the musical material is itself historical: e.g. where the equilibriating horns in Mozart's Emperor Symphony, for example, are distinct and separate from the strings, Beethoven combines them together, creating unheard-of tone-complexes which shimmer with the might and power of the Napoleonic levee en masse. By Wagner's era, of course, the musical organization takes a more ominous cast, and the subtleties of Beethoven's themes get lost amidst ever more arrogant, brazenly imperialistic sound-palettes, which dispose over their musical material like the Iron Chancellor over the Prussian burueacracy. Adorno's point would be that you need to keep both levels in mind, the social and the musical, before we can say we're really saying anything about the work of art (possibly in the same way that, say, the economics discussed on this list needs the spur of the social and political, in order to say anything significant; the reverse is also true, of course). -- Dennis
