This blog is about bringing together the study of Mozart intertext with web 2.0 trends. I want to develop a dynamic, collaborative project which pushes the boundaries of both.
The eventual ideal is this: Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way of exploring contexts of Mozart’s music in a fluid and interactive way?
Imagine if you were presented with a universe of musical ideas – audible and notated - in Mozart’s musical context, related to each other by human interpretation, contextualised in each other, open for debate? The figure of Mozart is used to give us the perspective of a human actor in his context, but the web could be widened and de-centred in a larger, alternate version of the Classical intertext, for example.
This would provide a space for the exploration and discussion of the language of Mozart’s music, and a resource for music students and lovers of music to immerse themselves in Mozart’s musical context, to learn about how his music works by learning, at all levels, the premises of his expression.
Here, I’ll be exploring ways in which person-based linking, wiki-style collaboration and interactivity- the human-ness of web 2.0 - is ideally suited to the topic of intertext.
Intertext is always, immediately, human action requiring human interpretation.
When studying musical allusion, for example, you wouldn’t get very far if you only paid attention to note-for-note resemblance between pieces – the kind of resemblance a computer can note. It takes a person to interpret an allusion. What I’m talking about is a basic poststructuralist take on music. This means that I also want to avoid making authoritative or definitive statements, but rather present history flexibly, diachronically and critically.
For now, here’s a little gift from the Mozart-Tower: an mp3 of Mozart’s second piano concerto, K.39, Andante staccato, modelled on a sonata by Schubart.
