Dear Al, thank you for your very stimulating posting. This is the perennial problem, is it not : how to ‘talk’ about music? As Elvis Costello once said, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. However silly this comment strikes us, there is a nugget of truth in it, and you have very courageously taken up the relay in your posting. My first reaction to Costello’s point would be : why not, as it all passes through the ‘filter’ we call the brain, though this is a diversion.
As a trained musician I am quite used to ‘explaining’ musical processes (note the use of this term!) in analytical-harmonic-structural terms, though this formalist approach does rather fatigue me these days. Musical “meaning” is not the ultimate preserve of trained (and somewhat ‘dry’) specialists – music is a human endeavour, thank God (or thank the deity of your choice), and is as open as a poem. In other words, musicians need an audience and an audience needs musicians. To put it differently : music is a two-way street. How we ‘negotiate’ this street is the key to our argument.
My objection (this is too strong a term really, perhaps I mean ‘reluctance’ ) to describing B’s Ninth as evoking ‘despair’, ‘struggle’ and so on is that it strikes me as so much ‘received opinion’. I am not particularly an advocate of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), but I concede that in carelessly accepting and using terminology that one has not thought through oneself does lead one into repeating apparent axioms. So many people talk about the ‘despair’ they hear in this symphony; so many people talk about the ‘spiritual element’ in this or that work. I often find myself asking : where is this despair? How is it manifested in concrete terms? Who says so? Why? How? When? And so on ... That music, as you say, invokes feelings is a given, but as you have quite aptly pointed out, one person’s feelings (or spirituality) is not the same as another person’s.
Can we ever talk about music without being descriptive, without using adjectives (and their comparatives / superlatives)? I am not yet able to answer the point that Al raises, but feel that part of the problem lies in the fact that ‘types of music’ come with their own ways of thinking about music; this is surely the case with classical music where ways of thinking about it (and propagated by schools and universities) reflect the way music was perceived in 19th century Europe.
We must talk again about this, Al1432. You have raised some fascinating issues that need to be addressed more coherently than I have done tonight.
As a trained musician I am quite used to ‘explaining’ musical processes (note the use of this term!) in analytical-harmonic-structural terms, though this formalist approach does rather fatigue me these days. Musical “meaning” is not the ultimate preserve of trained (and somewhat ‘dry’) specialists – music is a human endeavour, thank God (or thank the deity of your choice), and is as open as a poem. In other words, musicians need an audience and an audience needs musicians. To put it differently : music is a two-way street. How we ‘negotiate’ this street is the key to our argument.
My objection (this is too strong a term really, perhaps I mean ‘reluctance’ ) to describing B’s Ninth as evoking ‘despair’, ‘struggle’ and so on is that it strikes me as so much ‘received opinion’. I am not particularly an advocate of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), but I concede that in carelessly accepting and using terminology that one has not thought through oneself does lead one into repeating apparent axioms. So many people talk about the ‘despair’ they hear in this symphony; so many people talk about the ‘spiritual element’ in this or that work. I often find myself asking : where is this despair? How is it manifested in concrete terms? Who says so? Why? How? When? And so on ... That music, as you say, invokes feelings is a given, but as you have quite aptly pointed out, one person’s feelings (or spirituality) is not the same as another person’s.
Can we ever talk about music without being descriptive, without using adjectives (and their comparatives / superlatives)? I am not yet able to answer the point that Al raises, but feel that part of the problem lies in the fact that ‘types of music’ come with their own ways of thinking about music; this is surely the case with classical music where ways of thinking about it (and propagated by schools and universities) reflect the way music was perceived in 19th century Europe.
We must talk again about this, Al1432. You have raised some fascinating issues that need to be addressed more coherently than I have done tonight.
) I observed the following: Modulations from B-flat to D and back again (up and down a 3rd), B-flat to G (down a 3rd), G to E-flat (down a 3rd), E-flat to C-flat (down a 3rd), and frequent parallel 3rds and 6ths (inverted 3rd). The slow movement of a symphony was typically the 2nd in a classical symphony; Beethoven put it as the 3rd. They symphony is the 9th, and 9 is 3 squared.
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