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June 10, 2009

A Child's View of Sonata Form

 Here's a link I didn't manage to post earlier: my review of last week's very nice concert by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Which gave rise to an additional stray thought. Listening to the Dvorak 5th with a kind of open-eared enjoyment (I find that sometimes going to a concert slightly tired lets you encounter the music more honestly), I was suddenly sharply reminded of the way I reacted to sonata form when I was a child, something I haven't thought of for 30 years or more. When I was about 8 or 9 and really liked a musical theme, I found it intensely annoying that the composer felt it necessary to distort it, twist it around, or hide it so that only bits of it peeped out. I would wait for the recapitulation impatiently, rather than appreciating the transformations the theme was undergoing; it seemed like a

Originally from The Classical Beat – Classical Music Forum – washingtonpost.com, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jun 10, 2009 at 11:48 AM

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