Thoughts on Sound Movement and Meaning
Roger Reynolds · Perspectives of New Music · 1978
Drastic change in the importance of a particular musical characteristic has not been uncommon in Western music. What is at one stage incidental often becomes, with time, central to expression, even structural. By way of example I will only mention, not trace, the rapid development over little more than half a century of the control of ensemble dynamic, from the rudimentary, block-like contrasting of loudnesses -often an almost arbitrary result of projective capacities or of the numbers of available instruments-to the extended control of crescendi and diminuendi by the Mannheim Orchestra, and hence to the unprecedentedly subtle specification of dynamic nuance achieved by Beethoven in his last decade. Burney, writing in his History of Music about the impact of Mannheim symphonists in performance, notes .. . it has long seemed to me as if the variety, taste, spirit, and new effects produced by contrast and the use of crescendo and diminuendo in these symphonies, had been of more service to instrumental music in a few years, then all the dull and servile imitations of Corelli, Geminiani, and Handel, had been in half a century. Would that innovation in our time had such crusty defenders. In the area of instrumentation (or timbre) a similar succession of stages occurred, although it was protracted by the necessity of waiting for more than a century while the mechanical development of instru-