![Sulho Sipliä (1931). Rawpixel.](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Untitled-design-11.png)
Fingerprints of Musical Genius
How do we know that a musical composition is truly great? Can we distinguish genius, originality, or inspiration, from competent workmanship, skilful pastiche, or outright fraud? The recent Ed Sheeran case, about the sources of his song “Thinking Out Loud”, raised such questions as what is distinctive as against common-practice material, and what the evidence is of intent to pass off another’s work. After all, most Western music consists of just twelve notes, artfully arranged across a small range of rhythms, registers, textures and forms.
The music history “survey” courses of traditional conservatoires introduce the budding musician to these creative distinctions but in a more cultural, aesthetic, sometimes hagiographic, context. The student probes what makes a Beethoven symphony different, perhaps more skilful, than one by Schumann, or a Wagner opera more original, though perhaps not inherently better, than, say, one by Puccini or Verdi.
Highly analytical study of music…
The Editor of Quadrant Music, Alexander Voltz, has won the symphonic section of the prestigious George Enescu International Competition in Bucharest.
Sep 03 2024
1 mins
Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”
Aug 29 2024
15 mins
This is the paradox of the War Against the Past: those who are waging it are, inadvertently, denying themselves the capacity to win. For if your past is evil, if your centuries-old story is defined by bitterness and bad faith, how can you possibly hope to redeem yourself?
Aug 29 2024
11 mins