The science of style
How to distinguish one composer from another? Are there musical signatures of harmony, melody or orchestration that can uniquely define them? Are there tricks that are theirs, and theirs alone? What’s really the di erence between Haydn and Mozart in the late-18th century; what marks Vaughan Williams out from Elgar, or the Bee Gees from ABBA? And what explains that feeling of recognition when we hear music for the first time, but know it’s by our favourite composer, songwriter or band?
I can make a potential claim for the horizontality of Mozart as opposed to the verticality of Haydn as part of what makes them distinctive. If you compare the openings of two of their orchestral pieces written in the same key – Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and Haydn’s Symphony No. 95, both in C minor – you find Haydn creating a cavalcade of characters, juxtaposing a loud, chromatic orchestral exclamation with a quiet march, and a questioning, ascending phrase, making a chain of minor-key pearls of di erent sizes and shapes in just a few seconds. In contrast, the opening of Mozart’s concerto unfurls as a chromatically ambiguous snake of a tune that coils itself over the orchestra, making a melody that includes 10 of the 12 available notes of the scale: horizontal sinuousness as opposed to Haydn’s musical blocks.
That’s a thumbnail of a scintilla of the signature di erences between two composers, but what if you could not only find the odd trick, but dive
What’s really the difference between Haydn and Mozart in the late-18th century?
deeply into what makes Bach Bach, or Rachmaninov Rachmaninov? If you could define these alchemical compositional properties, there wouldn’t be anything unique about them: you could write music using their creative signatures – you too could be Beethoven!
A mind-boggling concept, and enough of a thought to fill many human lifetimes. Which is why the composer and computer scientist David Cope has taken the humanity out of the equation with his so ware ‘Emi’, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence. David has made virtual Bach inventions, Mozart symphonies, Chopin Mazurkas and even a 45-minute-long Rachmaninov concerto, in which we feel a thrill of recognition with these composers – yet we’re hearing ersatz musical homunculi rather than music they wrote.
But maybe that supposed authenticity doesn’t matter. A er all, our favourite composers are all recombining the fundamentals of music rather than creating them from scratch. In reality, their signatures are synthetic rather than authentic. The case of David
Cope and Emi shows that our feeling of recognition is an illusion of a relationship between all of us listening and the composers themselves: it’s the signature of our bond between them and us. Which means that it’s not only composers who have signatures – our listening does, too.
Steuart Bedford Born 1939 Conductor
It could quite easily have said ‘Organist’ or ‘Pianist’ next to Steuart Bedford’s name here. The grandson of composer Liza Lehmann, Bedford had every intention of becoming a cathedral organist – indeed, he was an organ scholar at Worcester College, Oxford. As a pianist he excelled, too, performing in concert to some acclaim. But it was conducting that took hold after a first public outing in Oxford in 1964. Just a few years later, he made his professional debut and never looked back. Opera was at the forefront of Bedford’s work, with regular appearances at Garsington and Aldeburgh. And it was Britten who perhaps loomed largest in the conductor’s repertoire, thanks to a quite literal passing of the baton from the composer. Bedford oversaw the production of many of Britten’s works, including the premiere of Death in Venice in 1973. He was artistic director at Aldeburgh from 1974-98. Chick Corea Born 1941 Jazz pianist
A musician of great imagination, Chick Corea’s vision transcended genres and broke new ground in jazz. Encouraged as a youngster by his trumpeter father, Corea was gigging while still at high school. Studies at Columbia University and Juilliard were more of a formality, the pianist eager to get out and do what he loved. By the 1960s he was already working alongside some of the great names in jazz – Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Miles Davis – making a vital and creative contribution to their music-making. Unafraid to do things differently, Corea was happy to experiment and rewrite the rulebook. For him, music was about bringing joy to people and having fun.
Lucian Nethsingha Born 1936 Organist
Generations of choristers will have fond memories of Nethsingha. He served as an organist and choirmaster for some 40 years, firstly at St Michael’s College, Tenbury (1959-73) and then at Exeter Cathedral (1973-99). Born in Sri Lanka, Nethsingha began his studies at Colombo’s St Thomas’s College. A move to England saw him continue studies at the Royal College of Music and King’s College, Cambridge, where he learned from the likes of Herbert Howells and David Willcocks.
Belgian baritone Michel Trempont’s (born 1928) many appearances at Brussels’s La Monnaie opera house made him a household name in his home country. International recognition soon followed after a move to Paris in the 1960s. Trempont performed over 150 roles.
American organist John Weaver (born 1937 ) was a leading figure in his field thanks to many years leading the organ departments of both the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York, where he served as head and then chair.