Garbage MouthYesterday I was able to cruise into the UM Music Library for 20 minutes. I had a specific purpose in mind, as I working on a piece called "in tempore belli" and I was hearing a couple of things in my head that seemed to reflect what i was writing and wanted to review the actual scores: a passage from Haydn's final string quartet (Op. 103) and a bit from Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov." I wasn't able to locate the right passage in Boris it turns out - I copied a section which looked like thr right one, but wasn't.
But I hadn't been through the Boris score in a long time, and I was just marvelling at how unusual it is for a nineteenth century score of any kind - many accidentals, not a lot of expression marks, naked looking textures and rhythmic ideas that look simple on paper, but are not. Mussorgsky has never been looked upon by any reasonable critic as a harbinger of modernism, but his influence is traceable in the works of French Impressionists and I feel the appearance of the scores bear themselves out. Much ink has been spilled about Mussorgsky's apparent lack of ability in composing, but he seems to favor a sort of harmonic netherworld pregnant with augmented and diminished intervals. Do you know how hard it is to harmonize successfully with such tools? Invariably one finds themselves in a thicket of octaves and minor seconds, and the harmony just falls flat. Mussorgsky keeps it going for page after page, even though in some instances he relies on repetition to stretch things out, it's still very well done for a provincial working in a tonal language then only Franz Liszt was familiar with.
Uncle Dave Lewis