Machina ex musico : The Composer, the Concerto, its Form and Congeries of Sounds
With this self-reflexive text, itself shaped like a concerto, John Rea theorizes that, from the very end of the 18th century, the history of the concerto form exhibits two distinct but overlapping traditions originating in the same source, the approximately fifty concertos by Mozart. Rea retraces the route of these two compositional streams portrayed as the French model and the German model. Both streams descend separately over time by way of pools and cascades only to be joined together again in the latter 20th century. Rea also suggests that, in different ways, the two models simulate the dramaturgical technique of staging a re-enactment of the human will in action. During the latter 19th century, however, each stream comes to be troubled by an undercurrent, the re-enactment of the evolution of the machine. Audible for the first time within mechanistic virtuoso performances also typical of the concerto, this re-enactment becomes much more tangible and sonorous later on due to the very use of machines.