There are so many cultural events, so many lectures, so much I learn every day, so many activities that it’s hard to keep them straight and impossible to report them all to you, my dear readers. Bush is here today and a bunch of my colleagues are going down to protest. The city is crawling with cops and you have to bring your passport with you everywhere in case you are stopped and frisked. I was planning to join the protest; we all have Mozart masks and were going to wear them and carry signs with sayings like “It’s sonata just war” (I made that one up) but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go see Idomeneo tonight. One of my colleagues, Pete the teacher from Atlanta who also plays violin at the Santa Fe Opera (and worked with Stewart Kershaw once) had an extra ticket and although it is somewhat expensive he promised to tell me all about Leopold’s letters to Mozart and why Mozart didn’t write any violin concertos after 1775. This will be interesting for me because I have been reading some of the letters from the early 1780s where Mozart is telling his father about his bad relationship with the Archbishop, and his father is clearly admonishing him, although we don’t have the actual letters from Leopold, just Mozart’s responses to them. I am going to the Freud museum tomorrow, and will attempt a little study of the father-son relationship from that perspective, although it has been done a million times. I have a slightly new angle, I think, which I will share with you later (this will keep you coming back to my blog). I might even "write" Leopold's letter from May 1781.

I told Pete I would talk to him more about the subject of this morning’s lecture, which was a blast from the past for me, let me tell you: Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man. This was given by a German professor from the states, I think just as an excuse to come over here, since Mozart certainly would not have been familiar with either Kant or Schiller. (Although I suppose if we are studying the Enlightenment milieu anything goes, right?) But it was fun to hear him ask questions about the purpose and “end” of art, the same questions which I addressed in that famous piece of work, “Creativity and the End of Art.” Heh heh. So today anyway I was somewhat of an “expert” on the topic and can hold forth in an impressive way later to Pete, whose musical expertise leaves me breathless with intimidation at times. But that’s what’s so great about this seminar; it gives us all a chance to learn about one another’s areas of expertise and fill in the gaps in our own education. And of course Mozart relates to everything!

Pete is also interested in the way classical forms of rhetoric may be reflected in the Sonata form, and also in the music of Bach. I guess he was working with a conductor named Kenneth Montgomery (of whom he spoke highly) who said something to the effect that if you could understand classical rhetoric as taught in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries you would be able to gain a fuller understanding of the structure of Bach and Mozart. Bach took the musica poetica and fashioned the equivalent in sound, but evidently in some of his oratorios he follows the classical form of an “argument” in his music exactly. I don’t know too much about this topic except that there are the five canons of rhetoric, which I will attempt to make correspond to music in a kind of tenuous and schlock way as follows:

1) Invention, or topic (which would correspond to the musical theme or melody)
2) Arrangement (which would be the way the theme is introduced then elaborated, modulated, and repeated)
3) Style (which would presumably be the choice of instruments)
4) Memorization (which might not apply unless I guess you were memorizing a piece of music, or perhaps might be somehow applied to the way the theme is repeated later, although I realize I said this was part of invention)
5) Delivery (which would be like how fast or loud or whatever you would play the piece)

That's just off the top of my head. Of course I don't really know what that conductor was talking about. I love to make things up and sound smart.

But now for something completely different. How about playing a little game? Mozart, in his KV 516, make up a little Musicalisches Wurfelspiel, or musical dice game. He had something like 176 different possible musical measures in a hat, and would have someone pull them out for him at random, then write them down. There is a website where you can do the same thing, although not with Mozart’s actual music. Click on the new link to play the game and write your own minuet. Since there are 176 choices and 16 measures there are literally billions of possible combinations. You can even print it out and play it! I haven't tried it myself so let me know if you are successful.

I asked this morning’s lecturer, who is an expert on Freemasonry, who or what “FU” is, and he looked at me like I had gone nuts. He didn’t even know what I was referring to. Imagine not knowing about the great Fu! One of my colleagues (a brilliant math and German teacher named Barb, the one who told me about the Wurfelspiel website) said she saw the name FU on a Masonic apron they had on display at the Mozart exhibit in the Albertina museum (which I haven’t been to yet). She said maybe it was just a Masonic name from the German root Fu (should be an umlaut but I don't know how to make one), which is where the word “Fuhrer” comes from, to guide. So a sort of deist concept of an all-seeing, all-guiding God. That’s one guess. My guess was that it has something to do with a Chinese god. Mahlon? Can you help us out?