Comparison Of The Composers: Samuel Barber And Amadeus Mozart

There are 5 eras in the music history consist of Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and 20th Century which have different composers from distinctive era. These composers have their own unique idea to compose the pieces. Based on the essay’s question given, I would like to compare two famous composers who are Samuel Barber from 20th Century era and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the Classical era. The reason that I choose them is their history backgrounds are interesting and attracting me to understand their distinctive ideas on treating the melody, harmony, form and overall concept creating and manipulating sound. It can be said without fear of contradiction that these will make us eye-opening and gain knowledge from them. First and foremost, the famous composer that I want to introduce is Samuel Barber from the 20th Century. The already existence of the composers who espouse the kind of graspable modern music is one of the scores of Samuel Barber. He has been enjoying a considerable return to favor since his death a decade ago. He knew how to write a big, broad melody with the requisite sad-sweet effect which consists of the ingredients that eluded those later accessible seekers in his 1941 Violin Concerto. Besides, Barber’s music is not programmatic in the strict sense even though many of his works make literary allusions. The structural considerations manage Barber’s instrumental writing. Although his instrumental writing is great astringency in harmony, the basic tonality keeps secure. Plus, there is strength in rhythmic lines which without loss of coherence.

Moreover, Barber’s style is neo-Romantic. Even though he composed through a modernist lens, merging some 20th Century techniques, his main inspiration from the Romantic period. He gave the tonal language and forms of the past a new life and vitality. From the view of the overall concept of creating and manipulating sound, it is the tension Barber creates between emotional warmth and restraint that lies at the heart of his musical output. Barber had pointedly avoided the concept of cellist Raya Garbousova (whom he wrote the concerto) with a perfect balance of exquisite poetics and outbursts of virtuosity that “the only way to break one’s heart is to vibrate on the C string”. Apart from that, the Monk and His Cat from Hermit Songs by Samuel Barber is based on texts of Irish monks and hermits. This song features almost no consonant harmonies, but its’ key signature is solidly in F major. For this song, the fifths in the bass are opened to create the medieval atmosphere of the monk. The dissonant augmented unisons indicate the cat, either walking on the piano keys or pouncing on a mouse. Barber can change the meter to obey the pitch of the text freely. Furthermore, the second composer that I want to introduce is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart from the Classical era. Mozart is said to be one of the three greatest composers in western classical music along with Beethoven and Bach. What makes me surprise is he can memorize a 10 minutes piece performed by numerous singers at the same time which has different melodies and wrote the piece down from memory at his hotel. He wrote pieces that utilized memorable melodies, something simple that a concertgoer hum or whistle on the way back from the concert. He also showed incredible abilities to improvise and to establish memorable phrases or themes to which he added numberless clever variations. Mozart had his harmonic style from constant use of chromaticism. He used secondary dominants to intensify harmonic movement frequently. For instance, the dominant is G and the secondary dominant is D if the key is C. He used the secondary dominant to expand the harmonic range of the composition by introducing chromaticism.

Mozart relied more and more on the dissonant value of suspensions to establish harmonic interest in his later works. Besides that, Mozart wrote in every major genre, consists of opera, the solo concerto, symphony, chamber music including string quintet and string quartet, and piano sonata. Although these were not a new form, he improved their emotional reach and technical sophistication. Another point which is worth to mention is Mozart’s idea on overall concept creating and manipulating sound. In the Enlightenment time period, Mozart challenged the Church by creating a new path and style of music which not follow the idea of “divine inspiration”. Before this era, music was purely created for dancing in a higher class or religious worship. Therefore, he was bored with those constraints, he wrote the compositions with dark sounds and the ideas were filled in this era. Apart from that, Mozart would manipulate the tonic-dominant chord progression to enhance the drama of a musical line. Especially in his operas, he used the polarization of the consonant and dissonant intervals to create the tension moments followed by cathartic released within these two chords and he would also shift the centers of the key. To put in a nutshell, these are the difference between Samuel Barber and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on distinctive ideas on treating the melody, harmony, form and overall concept creating and manipulating sound.