Sean, I’ll attempt it…..Originally Posted by SeanHannifin
What does it mean... to "understand"? If someone doesn't like a piece of music, it's because he doesn't understand it? I'm not quite sure how you "understand" a piece of music, or a composer.
When most people I know listen to Mozart the listen to the catchy tunes. Although Beethoven could write catchy tunes, for the most part that wasn’t the most important thing to him.
The average person can also hear the beat and rhythms. People today, though they may not realize it, like Beethoven because all of his syncopations are closer to modern popular music than a lot of composers. Mozart also used a lot of syncopation compared to some others of his time.
People might also hear a little bit of the harmony – at least they think they do. At least they will hear the building tension and drama in a piece by Beethoven or Mozart. They may not know anything about functional harmony, but they experience it.
They may also no nothing about orchestration, but they can hear if some combinations are pleasant and others grating.
Anything beyond that is far above most listeners.
There is also large scale structures. Beethoven’s music was usually very highly structured, but many of his contemporaries and a lot of the Romantic composers missed it or came up with some type of idealized structure while missing the point of what the structure was doing (in Mozart and Beethoven it often had to do with contrasting key areas – usually tonic versus dominant (or a substitute)). Most listeners are clueless to large scale structures, yet to really enjoy Mozart or Beethoven for more than background music you need to be aware of it.
Then there is motivic development. In a piece of music by Mozart, all of themes are somehow interrelated, which is part of what gives his music such great cohesion. With Beethoven, it usually starts with a germ of an idea and grows out from there. Without understanding each step it is often difficult to see how the themes are all interrelated, yet they are. With Beethoven, particularly in the later works, the themes are interrelated even between movements.
Beethoven also went beyond the typical harmony of the day, sometimes modulating in ways that surprised his contemporaries. Sometimes he went to distant keys without much of a modulation at all. He also used relationships (like modulating by thirds instead of fifths) that were uncommon in his day. A lot of contemporaries had no clue how he did it. It doesn’t sound shocking today because we’ve heard Wagner and Stravinsky and Schoenberg.
I know I am not saying it well, but there is huge amount to the music of Beethoven (as there is to your favorite, Mozart) that goes far beyond what most so called music lovers can hear. And yet, as I said before, when you do hear it, it makes the music that much better, that much more understandable.
A lot of Beethoven’s contemporaries did not hear it. It often sounded random (Beethoven’s music is anything but random!) and unconnected (OK, I should have said “Beethoven’s music is anything but random and unconnected!”). These people didn’t know why Beethoven used harmony the way he did (today it makes perfect sense) and thought it sounded harsh and dissonant. They preferred the Romantic way of adding dissonance – some of Beethoven’s contemporaries used dissonance to “smooth the joints” or for the effect while Beethoven used it as part of his structure.
That is what I mean by they didn’t understand it. Some, such as Hummel, admitted their ignorance – Hummel was no slouch – taught by Mozart, Haydn, Salieri, Clementi, etc he was a great composer in his own right, but he did not understand Beethoven’s symphonies and said so. He refused to write any himself knowing history would be unkind to any attempt. Many people believe he gave up his violin concerto for the same reason – he had put it aside for a little while, in the mean time Beethoven released his violin concerto and Hummel put his away, almost finished, forever.
Of course some did understand it and either didn’t like it or went a different path. Spohr most likely understood what Beethoven was doing – he championed him his whole life – but he wrote in a very different style, one much closer to the Romantics.
Sorry for being long winded…..
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Maybe that's the problem?
I still have more of a response to make after I go eat dinner, but thanks for the post! 
). I have to work hard on my music. I spend a lot of time figuring out what others have done before me so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I write music. I need to understand Mozart so I can understand Beethoven so I can understand Wagner so I can understand Mahler so I can understand Schoenberg so I can etc. No, I’m not spending my whole life studying and not doing, but when I tried writing straight from the heart it came out as garbage - I need this understanding.
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