#alfred einstein

[shelbycarpenter]

[nethervoice]

Alfred Einstein and the Microphone Mystery

Alfred Einstein and the Microphone Mystery

My story begins with a microphone. The Austrian Audio OC18 to be exact.

It’s a microphone I called “an instant classic.” This mic is mostly handmade in Vienna by people who used to work for AKG.

Click here for my impressions.

I’m not the only blogger who fell in love with this new microphone. Do a quick online search, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one bad review. No matter what you throw…

View On WordPress

[mozart-1053]

“One may regard its beginning as a symbol of the spirit of the whole composition: first an easy comfortable unison; then a dialog carried on now by one pair of instruments, now by the other; a turn towards seriousness in minor; then resolution of the tension, but in a canon between first violin and violoncello - an instance of ‘learnedness’ that no one feels to be learned. The quartet is at once strict and easy; and in many enchanting passages it anticipates Schubert...”

[mozart-1053]

One of the best-known works -- so well known that the mastery with which it is fashioned, the 'second' simplicity, the perfection of modulation and voice-leading, lightly introducing polyphony as a final intensification, are no longer perceived.

Alfred Einstein on Ave verum corpus, Mozart: His Character, His Work 

[mozart-1053]

In [Linz Symphony], for the first time in a symphony, he prefaces the first movement with the solemn introduction—[…] heroic beginning and the play of light and shadow that follows, leading from the most tender longing to the most intense agitation.

Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, p.230-231

[mozart-1053]

The key of A minor - and sometimes A major as well - is for Mozart the key of despair.

Alfred Einstein

[harperfinchdesigns]

[mozart-1053]

Mozart was a traditionalist. One does not wholly understand him, his grace, his humor, his daring, if one is not aware of his relation to tradition, if one does not know where he follows it, where he toys with it, and where he departs from it. It was his good fortune, historically as well as personally, that he was still at liberty to move within a given frame, that he employed organic forms, not arbitrarily made ones, forms that had grown naturally, not those violently called into existence. An aria is an aria; a sonata is a sonata; a sonata movement has its definite law, which Mozart would never break. The forms differ according to the performing media; a clavier concerto will never have more or less than three movements, just as a full-grown string quartet or string quintet must have four movements with a minuet, and a divertimento two minuets. Why not make the most of such given conditions, why tear down such barriers, if one can move freely within them? It is only when these given conditions are known and felt that the spirit, the ‘originality’ – and in this sense one may venture to speak of originality in connection with Mozart also – the personality and the daring of Mozart become manifest.

Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, p.140-141