On the nature of music.

[Enrique]

Watching a painter make a drawing in a piece of paper in a restaurant,
I could not help the following thoughts to flow. The picture on
the napkin is a piece of reality, not interchangeable with any other
piece of reality. It exists there, on the napkin, and nowhere else.
If you scratch its surface a bit, you alter its identity.
A triangle, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. It cannot be twisted, deformed
or altered in any way. Take the beginning of the Fifth Symphony. It
can be described so: three shorts, one long and a descending major third.
Plus octave reduplication and orchestration and dynamics. If we make abstraction
of the orchestration, the whole work, as it exists on the paper, is nothing
more than a set of mathematical relations. Time relations, pitch relations and
dynamics relations (ff is twice forte than f which is twice p which is twice pp).

So music is nearer the triangle than the painter's work. The Fifth exists
everywhere, for there are millions of copies
all over the world and if I carry it under my arm in the street and it
rains and the score becomes wet, the work remains unaltered for the same
reason. Therefore it is ubiquitous and perennial.

There is however the tendency to consider music as execution. That is,
music comes to life when we hear it. This point of view characterizes
music as an ephemeral thing. This work begins when the conductor raises
his arm and finishes when the musicians leave their seats. I think it
poses a number or problems. For then there are as many Fifths as
performances there have been. But the more serious objection is this:
when was the Fifth Symphony created? Answer: when Beethoven wrote it.
What did Beethoven write? Answer: a score. What is then the Fifth Symphony?
Answer: it is a score. Do whatever you like with it.
Take it as a recipe, take it as an oracle whom we interrogate to
inquire the Master's will, but what is enduring and will live forever
are those notes written in a piece of paper, because it is an ideal object, one that
exists neither in space nor in time, the same as the triangle.

[Peter]

Except of course the painting is also reproduced in millions of prints. Regarding music it also exists in our head - we can imagine and think a work through from memory without the score or a performance.

[Michael]

Music is the strangest of the arts. I have had too many arguments down the years about it and it always does my head in!
It has no physical existance - the score or the CD are only approximations. It exists only in passing time. In a live performance (which for many centuries was all there could be) each note lasts for a fleeting second or so and then is gone forever. (In the case of Boulez, thankfully.)
To take a randon example, a strong case could be made for Beethoven's Seventh Symphony not existing at all.

[Enrique]

It has no physical existance - the score or the CD are only approximations. It exists only in passing time. In a live performance (which for many centuries was all there could be) each note lasts for a fleeting second or so and then is gone forever. (In the case of Boulez, thankfully.)

You say the score is an approximation. OK. An approximation to what? You won't find any standard except the score itself.

To take a randon example, a strong case could be made for Beethoven's Seventh Symphony not existing at all.

If I strike a tuning fork, its sound could be said not to exist either before or after the few seconds it was vibrating. But the note A, which is an ideal object, and by ideal I mean those objects not existing in space nor in time, exists. I think the only way to make the Seventh to exist is to say: its score is the symphony.

[Chris]

It gets into a question of terminology. I think a score may be said to be an approximation of music, if one defines music in such a way that it refers to sound. But I think a musical composition is indeed defined completely by its score. Beethoven's Seventh Symphony may be an idea, not a physical object, but it is entirely defined by the score.

[Enrique]

Agreed.

[Peter]

It comes down to the relationship between the individual and the work of art whatever genre - after all Dickens's 'Great Expectations' or Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' don't exist either unless you personally are reading them.

[Sorrano]

It comes down to the relationship between the individual and the work of art whatever genre - after all Dickens's 'Great Expectations' or Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' don't exist either unless you personally are reading them.

And even then, differing inflections on phrases and words renders meanings and connotations from one reading to another completely different.

[Quijote]

With reference to Enrique's posting #1 above, I would add (without advancing the argument any further, perhaps nudging it in another direction) Adorno's comment where he says (roughly paraphrased, and concerning LvB's 5th Symphony) that we only 'understand' the opening bars of the 1st movement once we have heard the last few measures of it. That of course would strike us as unreasonable, for who but a trained musician could possibly hear it in that way? But given the 'temporal' nature of music, does it not resonate with a certain truth?

[Sorrano]

With reference to Enrique's posting #1 above, I would add (without advancing the argument any further, perhaps nudging it in another direction) Adorno's comment where he says (roughly paraphrased, and concerning LvB's 5th Symphony) that we only 'understand' the opening bars of the 1st movement once we have heard the last few measures of it. That of course would strike us as unreasonable, for who but a trained musician could possibly hear it in that way? But given the 'temporal' nature of music, does it not resonate with a certain truth?

There was a novel I read (Alistair MacLean) that starts with a phrase something like "...a dusty man in a dusty office....." The book ends with pretty much the same phrase, if I remember correctly, or something very similar. The true context of the opening phrase is only understood properly when the novel has been completely read and I think the same is true of the 5th Symphony. There is a lot of impact, both in literature and in music to the opening phrases of a given work which is not fully comprehended until the last phrase is perceived. I do not think your statement to be unreasonable but that even a layman to either art will acknowledge that it is a given that the opening bars/phrases will have much deeper meaning with the closing of the same.

[Enrique]

I think Adono's remark is specially true of the Fifth's first movement given is high degree of unity. But really what I wanted to underline in post #1 is that the painter's work is a piece of matter, and as such time inexorably deteriorates it. But how could you deteriorate Beethoven's fifth symphony? That is, music lives in a world beyond matter.

[Peter]

That is, music lives in a world beyond matter.

What about literature?

[Peter]

There was a novel I read (Alistair MacLean) that starts with a phrase something like "...a dusty man in a dusty office....." The book ends with pretty much the same phrase, if I remember correctly, or something very similar. The true context of the opening phrase is only understood properly when the novel has been completely read and I think the same is true of the 5th Symphony. There is a lot of impact, both in literature and in music to the opening phrases of a given work which is not fully comprehended until the last phrase is perceived. I do not think your statement to be unreasonable but that even a layman to either art will acknowledge that it is a given that the opening bars/phrases will have much deeper meaning with the closing of the same.

Wilde's 'The importance of being Earnest' is another example.

[Quijote]

I think Adono's remark is specially true of the Fifth's first movement given is high degree of unity. But really what I wanted to underline in post #1 is that the painter's work is a piece of matter, and as such time inexorably deteriorates it. But how could you deteriorate Beethoven's fifth symphony? That is, music lives in a world beyond matter.

Yes, painting and sculptures and so on will eventually over time deteriorate but as mentioned above, at least we have the possibility to preserve an 'image' digitally or even take castings of the original sculpture to preserve its original form.
Your question highlighted above is very interesting, and I would like to suggest that in fact there is a sort of 'deterioration' over time, though this 'deterioration' is of another order: original impact and 'meaning'. For example, I listen sometimes to the music of Pérotin; it has for me something so historically distant (which is true, relatively speaking of course) that I find it hard to engage with other than 'academically', even acousmatically, if you see what I mean; in other terms, it has ceased to "speak to me".
The same applies - albeit to a far lesser degree - with LvB 5 or the Eroica: I cannot possibly recreate as I listen to these symphonies the original impact that they surely had on B's contemporaries. Has not something been lost over the centuries since their first performances? I am further reminded of Warren Kirkendale's essay "New Roads to Old Ideas in Beethoven's Missa solemnis" that points out how we may have lost track of certain musical imagery used by B in this work. Adorno refers to it as an "alienated masterpiece". A sort of deterioration, then? Not a material one, clearly, but perhaps something equally important : a work's 'meaning'.

[Sorrano]

Deterioration, in our case has been enhanced by multiple medias, for example, usage of a famous passage in one of the symphonies to punctuate an advertisement. Obviously, this was not Beethoven's intention, nor that of any of his contemporaries, yet we have that culture that "borrows" fragments out of context for whatever purpose and dilutes any real meaning from our consciousness of that work.

(Sorry to ramble as I am at work and subject to distraction. But whether it is work from which I am distracted for from the distraction itself is another matter.)