h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This caught my attention:

" ... concerto no.9 in E Flat (K271) is a watershed in his career ... Especially noticeable is the new scale and ..."

Wow, I didn't know Mozart was into odd scales - pentatonic? Whole tone? But if its in E major ... oh, never mind ...

P.S. The title of this conversation is a line from the movie "Amadeus", spoken by the emporer who is watching dancers dance in silence (due to his own stupid rules).

sure it is absolutely eternally modern filling one up with music

Mozart's music is certainly timeless, and he is one of the great composers.

But I doubt that he ever dabbled in non-standard scales, i.e. other than major and minor. The 20th century had more than its share of such "progress", including even microtonality. I think many listeners breathed a sigh of relief when that faded ...

Thanks for the comments, and the outrageous pun! Ouch!

Andrew -

Thank you for the nice entry, Mozart is smiling, I'm sure ... somewhere. (Rock critic Lester Bangs said - from beyond the grave, reportedly - that all the crap about "Rock and Roll Heaven" was wrong - the greats went straight to hell. So maybe Amadeus is down there with Jimi et al ... "Doncha know they got a helluva band ...")

I have taken a few piano lessons, and concluded I am hopeless. But one of my favorite pieces is a single sheet of music for solo piano, titled "Theme and Variation", by Mozart. (I have mentioned this before, here, somewhere ...) I think the "miniatures" are at least as telling about composers as the ... (how do you spell the plural of Concerto?)

That one sheet of music is, IMHO, brilliant.