Abstract

Music

The article discusses music and common sense with reference to composer Johannes Brahms' musical "Variations on a Theme of Handel." For a composer to set down a theme and then solemnly to put it through ten or a dozen little acrobatic tricks seems a little too naive to be even funny. Here the technical term variation is translated into the more accessible acrobatic trick which common sense can judge to be too naive, etc. The conventions that constitute musical procedure are not dictated by common sense or regulated by it. Common sense would perhaps hold that after a theme had acquired a wardrobe in the development section of a sonata-allegro movement, it should not be trotted out naked again but actually themes are restated in original form without, by that fact alone, spoiling things. What determined the placing of the theme in this context, and what still determines whether or not it shall be so placed, was not logical but purely musical fitness, which is in fact what governs all musical practice.