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Hello Reader,

I've got Mozart on my mind most days. It's strange: my graduate work focused exclusively on composers from the 20th and 21st centuries. But since then, I've veered more and more towards the music of older composers.

Some performers are headed the opposite direction. They only knew the music of old composers but find themselves focussed more and more on the music of living composers.

Nowadays, the classical music world, like much of our society, is engaging in discussions of representation, and how, historically, women, and non-European composers did not feature in the art form at all.

I'm all for broadening the canonical repertoire. I'm all for discovering masterworks of under-represented people who, against all odds, created masterpieces (Amy Beach is one such composer I've been particularly interested in). I'm also all for nurturing new works that could join that canon.

I'm also all for maintaining the canon that already exists. I don't think you can go into the future if you aren't tied to the past. It's easy to get lost without the perspective and wisdom of the ages.

I wrote about that a couple years ago as I was starting to learn the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas cycle. The summer before, my wife and I had visited Austria, my favorite of any European destination. History is all around you when you visit a place like that. There's something about Vienna that it just makes sense that great composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms all ended up living there. Reflecting on that Austrian visit, I wrote

This music has survived for so many generations for good reason, and I must try to do it justice. There is a certain amount of social capital involved by joining the tradition of performing classical music. So many beautiful artistic ideas have been cultivated with these scores and I have a responsibility to do justice to this artistry.

And maybe see you tomorrow at my next Facebook Live, performing Mozart's Piano Sonata #2 in F major, K 280.

All the best,

Jeff.