11 - On biology

Summary

By the late eighteenth century instrumental music had developed the ability to distinguish between the living and the dead. In fact, the mechanical became the butt of a great deal of Classical joking. Instrumental music managed to have the last laugh at an old ideology that had brandished it as a ‘mechanical doll’. It depicted such ticktocking machines as something to be tinkered with, using the elasticity of their own tonal momentum to pull the precision of the movement around; sometimes it even smashed the mechanism to pieces, as with the unexpected hammer blows in Haydn's ‘Surprise’ Symphony. The surprise of the symphony is in the human hand that comes to tamper with the self-wound motions that the music signifies with its clockwork tune. Conscious life had seeped into the score, and the mechanical was merely a play of signs for the organic (see example 12).

Or take, as another example, the minuet in the C major Quartet, Op. 54 No. 2; this piece was actually incorporated into a musical clock at Esterháza, but it must have been a very odd clock since the music sounds like a madman trying to struggle out of a symmetrical straitjacket of regular four-square phrases. Each phrase wreathes restlessly in and out of keys, cadencing clumsily and twisting chromatically this way and that within a very tight intervallic space.