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LETTERS TO 'THE EDITOR Dear Sir: Martin Kantor and Henry Pinsker [1] have attempted to penetrate the unconscious mind of Anton Dvorak through the detection of one "recurrent phrase" in several of his works. It is my purpose to dispute certain assumptions, methods, and conclusions of these authors without being overly thorough. Any musician should be able to take up where I leave off. Starting at the beginning, I note that these authors presume that Dvorak shared their certainly inimitable tastes. The theme in question is "not particularly interesting ." I am reminded of travelers' tales: "Indian music is all the same"; or even of musicians' tales: "Iberian music is monotonous." Whether a particular theme is uninteresting might be a question to be asked of records left by Dvorak's contemporaries . In the end it matters little for a great composer if a theme happens to be "interesting" in isolation. The interest of the subject of a Bach fugue lies in the possibilities and relations to which it gives rise, not in its "musical content." Indeed, there are some powerful fugue subjects which can hardly be called melodic . Dvorak's not very interesting theme becomes more interesting when we discover that the "basic fragment" stitched together from isolated pieces of Dvorak's music is (if one neglects a couple of passing tones also suppressed by the authors) a powerful ancient hymn tune, "Surrexit Christus Hodie," used by Heinrich Biber in his tenth "Rosenkrantz-Sonate" as the cantus firmis for a highly effective passacaglia. Whether a theme is "interesting" depends on what is built from it. The "basic fragment" is never actually completed in any of the examples given by Martin and Pinsker, and I could question at least eight of their 12 citations, which show important deviations from their supposed model. If the reader is really convinced that trivial details like rhytlim, repeated notes, tonality, tempo, harmonic and contrapuntal environment, and omitted or extra notes can be ignored , we shall have much explaining to do for such composers as Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Stravinski, and so on, who certainly do use many themes in contexts which are most definitely repetitious but still genial. Kantor and Pinsker state that "composers . . . always strive for novelty, avoiding reuse of the same subject in numerous compositions. Dvorak's repetition of the same fragment in many major works, then, stands out as a deviation from the norm of eminent composers." Now, there were already at least 20 masses on the old tune "L'homme armé" at the time Palestrina used it to compose two more, both masterworks in spite of the subject. If one browses through the works of Bach, dozens of examples fitting Kantor and Pinsker's criteria for abnormal repetition may be found. For instance, one might lump the following together because they begin with and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1974 | 295 use repeatedly the four-note fragment do mi sol do (ignoring tonality, etc, but not allowing extra passing notes): Brandenburg Concerto no. 5; Preludes in C, E, f, and G from book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier; Prelude in c# from book 2; Fugue in e (book 1); and Fugue in f (book 2). There are dozens of other examples of this "fragment." Now, it is a long jump from die almost martial vigor of the first example to the precious melancholy of the c# Prelude. These four notes have for centuries carried the gamut of musical expression on their stems, quite as much as die three notes seized by Kantor and Pinsker. The logic of the idée fixe is double-edged. "Analyst" is a game any number can play. For example, if I should say that the authors' perception of the "basic fragment" in diverse works only vaguely suggests it is indicative of a preoccupation with it and with psychopathology, which if it could be traced, would probably be explained by some "significant event in dieir emotional lives," these authors could say with some satisfaction that my own failure to perceive as repetitions the music of Dvorak is sure evidence of a psychopathology resembling Dvorak's, which, if it could be traced—and so on, ad infinitum...

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