Sunday, September 10, 2017
Not so automatic
Random thought vaguely related to record collections.
Listening to Tchaikovski's 1812 on radio.
He used recognizable melodies to represent Russia, France, Britain. Similar devices were common in symphonies and rhapsodies by other composers. He clearly assumed that his audience would recognize the foreign tunes. How did his audience know them?
Growing up in the era when records and radio were constant parts of life, I never asked this question. It was automatic. Of course the tunes are recognizable.
Before records, melodies were diffused only by sheet music or by travel. A rich sophisticated audience in Petersburg had probably visited Paris, but bourgeois audiences in Moscow probably hadn't been outside Russia.
Labels: Asked and unanswered
¶ 5:34 AM
