Nearly Identical (for at least a couple of seconds...)!
Strange bedfellows these. Try out the opening seconds of Sibelius' masterful Sixth and compare it with the opening seconds of the final movement of Zemlinsky's masterful Die Seejungfrau.
It would be fun to go through the annals of written music to find all the identical music that has been composed unawares. This phenomenon, two people writing the same music without knowing it is by no means given a good example in my above comparison (as it's only a bar of music and is not voiced the same way-but is in the same key and has the same descending string figure); I for one find that the overwhelming feeling I get when I love a particular piece of music, or a book, or even just a melody or a paragraph, is that "I know this from somewhere." It is less a moment of revelation and more of one of self-recognition, that somewhere, the seeds for every single thing, every thought feeling and piece of knowledge are inside waiting for something to call it back into being. In this sense, we all are capable of writing the same music, the same novel, painting the same portrait, saying the same words and thinking the same thoughts.
Strange bedfellows these. Try out the opening seconds of Sibelius' masterful Sixth and compare it with the opening seconds of the final movement of Zemlinsky's masterful Die Seejungfrau.
It would be fun to go through the annals of written music to find all the identical music that has been composed unawares. This phenomenon, two people writing the same music without knowing it is by no means given a good example in my above comparison (as it's only a bar of music and is not voiced the same way-but is in the same key and has the same descending string figure); I for one find that the overwhelming feeling I get when I love a particular piece of music, or a book, or even just a melody or a paragraph, is that "I know this from somewhere." It is less a moment of revelation and more of one of self-recognition, that somewhere, the seeds for every single thing, every thought feeling and piece of knowledge are inside waiting for something to call it back into being. In this sense, we all are capable of writing the same music, the same novel, painting the same portrait, saying the same words and thinking the same thoughts.
posted by PWS at 9:23 PM
1 Comments:
Yikes. That's totally spooky. How did I not notice before?
Die Seejungfrau is 1902-03, and Sibelius 6th is 1923. But the quotation is too tiny to have been a direct borrowing (I think)...still, one can't help but wonder. They're both rather marine pieces too, at least to my ears (well, all of Sibelius sounds watery to me, except the 4th, which is pure ice).
Die Seejungfrau is good, but Sibelius 6th is absolutely fantastic, one of those towering masterworks. The only thing by him I like better is the 7th. Oh Jean! Why did you burn #8?
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