BaL 18.01.20 - Beethoven: Symphony no. 1 in C, Op.21

[Goon525]

Thanks to those pointing me at a high res download. For the moment I’ll stick with Qobuz’s at 16/44. I’ve finally managed to listen to the Fischer First, and liked it a lot. Very clean, rhythmically bouncy and with the woodwind naturally to the fore in a chamber group. Maybe it is a little clipped at times, but I didn’t mind. I will have to listen to the whole box now, and see how the ‘bigger’ symphonies make out. I find Chailly the most compelling performer with a full size orchestra, and suspect Fischer may prove a similar hit with smaller forces.

[Master Jacques]

Still if its “biographical reading” you want, here’s a lovely example, balancing listening, evidence and speculation with deft acuity, from a great English Symphonist and Writer:

“One is reminded of the incident when Beethoven, walking (or rather stampeding) in the country and singing (or rather bellowing) was all at once hit by a tremendous idea, with terrifying effect on a herd of cattle - whereupon he was himself driven from the field by an angry herdsman who though him an escaped lunatic. There are plenty of unsubstantiated anecdotes about Beethoven, but the finale of the 8th is suspiciously like internal evidence for this one.”

That's thoughtful of you Jayne, though I'm not the one who does want "biographical readings" of these symphonies. We need to be wary of Simpson's dry sense of humour here, as so often. As a fervent believer in the analytic method I think he was rather having us on, and should not be taken literally, old fox that he was.

I'm rather reminded of RVW's exasperated line about his 6th - and not least Beethovenian - Symphony: "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music". I seem to see Beethoven rapping his desk with his knuckles, German-style, in agreement with that sentiment. But that's my fantasy.

[jayne lee wilson]

The more one stares upon VW’s comment, the more meaningless it appears; like Stravinsky saying that music is powerless to express anything at all, it is far less portentous than it at first seems.
He “just wanted to write a piece of music”… yes, well… so what? This doesn’t prevent it being, or becoming, charged with meaning and emotion, either from the artist’s or the listener’s input.

Perhaps it alludes to their impatience, irritability even (by no means true of all artistic creators), that, once out there in the World, away from their creative control, their works may mean rather more things to more people, than they would like.

But that is an inescapable, and in many ways, wonderful and liberating characteristic of Art. If music really were meaningless, or “just music”, just a sequence of sounds or pitches, a forum such as this would have little reason to exist.

Most of the listeners here would probably say that music means a great deal to them; perhaps as much as anything else has, ever in their lives. But this meaning is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to define.
The meaning is part of its mystery, the mystery part of its meaning: inexhaustible and, like life, inextinguishable.

[Ein Heldenleben]

The more one stares upon VW’s comment, the more meaningless it appears; like Stravinsky saying that music is powerless to express anything at all, it is far less portentous than it at first seems.
He “just wanted to write a piece of music”… yes, well… so what? This doesn’t prevent it being, or becoming, charged with meaning and emotion, either from the artist’s or the listener’s input.

Perhaps it alludes to their impatience, irritability even (by no means true of all artistic creators), that, once out there in the World, away from their creative control, their works may mean rather more things to more people, than they would like.

But that is an inescapable, and in many ways, wonderful and liberating characteristic of Art. If music really were meaningless, or “just music”, just a sequence of sounds or pitches, a forum such as this would have little reason to exist.

Most of the listeners here would probably say that music means a great deal to them; perhaps as much as anything else has, ever in their lives. But this meaning is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to define.
The meaning is part of its mystery, the mystery part of its meaning: inexhaustible and, like life, inextinguishable.

Very often what a creative artist says about their own work should be taken with a massive pinch of salt . They are either laying false trails like Eliot or just wrong like Zola.

[Dave2002]

Most of the listeners here would probably say that music means a great deal to them; perhaps as much as anything else has, ever in their lives. But this meaning is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to define.
The meaning is part of its mystery, the mystery part of its meaning: inexhaustible and, like life, inextinguishable.

I know people who don’t seem to like music enough to be bothered by the lack of it. Sometimes I try to give up, but it has never worked, and I have always come back to it. I don’t know why.

[Master Jacques]

Most of the listeners here would probably say that music means a great deal to them; perhaps as much as anything else has, ever in their lives. But this meaning is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to define.
The meaning is part of its mystery, the mystery part of its meaning: inexhaustible and, like life, inextinguishable.

It's interesting that you choose to make RVW and Stravinsky bedfellows on this question. You may think that Stravinsky's similar idea - that music, by Beethoven or anyone else, is incapable of "expressing" anything - is itself "meaningless", to use your word; but alas I'm not sure that your own formulation of music's ineffability gets us any further along.

I don't know why you feel that either of them are saying that music is "meaningless", though. Actually they are agreeing with you, that attaching programmes to everything doesn't help much, e.g. with RVW's 6th being "about" nuclear war. They would argue that their music speaks for itself, without needing bolt-on narratives, or that there is always some sort of emotional "spur" to creativity (a large cheque usually works better for me!) The problem (for Stravinsky) begins when we start casually assuming that music "expresses" something or other, because it doesn't.

For what it's worth (not very much, you will say!) I happen to agree with RVW and Stravinsky fundamentally, despite the associations which certain melodic, harmonic or rhythmic patterns have developed since we threw out polyphony. Deryk Cooke's Language of Music is one of my bibles (much of what he posits is taken from Beethoven, of course) but even he never claims that the musical patterns he isolates "express" emotions or ideas which are "felt" by the composer. Those patterns "represent" emotions or feelings, which is a very different idea.

Most of us "make up stories" about the music we listen to, quite naturally: that's one way to help grasp it. My own about the beginning of the last movement of Beethoven's 1st Symphony involves a mouse, a cat and a piece of cheese (though I would blush to share it with you, or claim that I'd found the "true meaning" of the piece). But starting to believe in those stories is dangerous, when - as you rightly say - meaning is impossible to define. Stravinsky and RVW were right to get annoyed with (some rather good) writers who claimed to know what their music was "about" and wrote about it all too convincingly.

All such interpretation is post-hoc storytelling, no matter how lovely; and the stories need to shift with time. (We don't interpret the "meaning" of Beethoven's late quartets, for example, in anything like the way people interpreted them a century ago.)

This may seem to have strayed from Beethoven - though I don't really think it has, as his music has suffered worse than anyone's from the storytellers. And - with the greatest respect - to say that these artists are coming out with something "meaningless", is too easy a dismissal of a central problem in musical aesthetics. In Heldenleben's phrase, their words do indeed have to be taken "with a massive pinch of salt", but that should give them more savour, rather than less!

[jayne lee wilson]

If VW and IS felt annoyed at their works being narrowly perceived in emotive or programmatic terms, there were far better ways of putting it. VW’s comment sounds tritely dismissive, and Stravinsky’s just a sweeping statement. Is the whole whole quote any clearer? Not very…
“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”
Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1935.

That categorical dismissiveness can’t prevent their Artworks from taking on a life of their own in the perceptions of others, however narrow or subjective. Which is a form of creativity in itself.
“Let it go, let it go…”

***
The quote tended to follow Stravinsky around, so (sounding rather irritated) he had another go:

“The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea “expressed in terms of” music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer’s feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments, 1962

“Music expresses itself”…… ? “The other way around”?
Hmm….

Personally, I don’t usually imagine embodied narratives or visualise stories when listening, it is more a sense of an abstract “emotional narrative” such as darkness to light, triumph to tragedy and resurrection, endlessly varied shades and moods of serenity, sadness, emptiness, ambiguity, irony, or something that “sings and dances, that rejoices in its very existence”. One's response can be both instinctive and reflective.
But even this experience can seem veiled or ghostly. Sounds, vividly present, move in space and time before me; seeming charged with meaning, but sometimes difficult to name, just out of reach, slipping swiftly through my grasp…….. hence my formulation involving meaning and mystery. (And the recurrent temptation to describe….)...

No wonder we keep coming back for more.

[BBMmk2]

If music be the food of love, play on.....

[Master Jacques]

If VW and IS felt annoyed at their works being narrowly perceived in emotive or programmatic terms, there were far better ways of putting it. VW’s comment sounds tritely dismissive, and Stravinsky’s just a sweeping statement. Is the whole whole quote any clearer? Not very…
[I]“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”[/FONT]

We may or may not find this "clear" - I find it richly suggestive, and have been thinking about it ever since I read it, and would say that if the statement were more "clear" (in a sort of tabloid sense) it wouldn't have been worth saying in the first place. Nor was RVW's statement "trite", by any means, but touches on questions central to aesthetics. We may (or may not) think we know better, for ourselves, but we cannot dismiss their opinions so easily.

But I'm repeating myself. Jayne, you don't seem willing to give these two composers the credit they deserve for knowing something interesting about the wellspring of their extraordinary art, and trying to put it into words. As the debate started with questions arising from your demand that we should smile along to the Pastoral Symphony, and "all those giggle-and-guffaw-inducing jokes in No.8" (your post #120) we've wandered along a very thorn-strewn path, and so I suggest we leave it at that!

[Ein Heldenleben]

If VW and IS felt annoyed at their works being narrowly perceived in emotive or programmatic terms, there were far better ways of putting it. VW’s comment sounds tritely dismissive, and Stravinsky’s just a sweeping statement. Is the whole whole quote any clearer? Not very…
“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”
Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1935.

That categorical dismissiveness can’t prevent their Artworks from taking on a life of their own in the perceptions of others, however narrow or subjective. Which is a form of creativity in itself.
“Let it go, let it go…”

***
The quote tended to follow Stravinsky around, so (sounding rather irritated) he had another go:

“The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea “expressed in terms of” music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer’s feelings and his notation. It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that it did not deny musical expressivity, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: music expresses itself.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments, 1962

“Music expresses itself”…… ? “The other way around”?
Hmm….

Personally, I don’t usually imagine embodied narratives or visualise stories when listening, it is more a sense of an abstract “emotional narrative” such as darkness to light, triumph to tragedy and resurrection, endlessly varied shades and moods of serenity, sadness, emptiness, ambiguity, irony, or something that “sings and dances, that rejoices in its very existence”. One's response can be both instinctive and reflective.
But even this experience can seem veiled or ghostly. Sounds, vividly present, move in space and time before me; seeming charged with meaning, but sometimes difficult to name, just out of reach, slipping swiftly through my grasp…….. hence my formulation involving meaning and mystery. (And the recurrent temptation to describe….)...

No wonder we keep coming back for more.

That second Stravinsky quote I am not familiar with but it strikes me as an excellent summation. It is possible to construct quite complex narratives to gloss Beethoven symphonies e.g. Forster’s goblins in the Beethoven 5 section of Howard’s End or the many narratives on the Eroica 1st Movement outlined by Scott Burnham in Chapter 1 of Beethoven Hero. But ultimately the real meaning is in the notes and the the relationship between them. There is nothing wrong with a verbal narrative indeed a lot of musicians use them to help to perform. There is a Vengerov masterclass where one fiendishly difficult violin passage is described as a mouse running up the finger board and then chomping the cheese.
But music like all art has an emotional narrative - something that Cooke tried to nail down in The Language Of Music looking largely at specific musical intervals . Where it gets complicated is that Beethoven has been so influential in constructing that language that it is difficult to disentangle cause and effect. Do the large repetitive harmonic blocks (based on the second part of the opening phrase of the Pastoral ) which build to to such a tremendous climax in the development section represent the elemental side of nature , Beethoven’s emotional response to it , or is it just a superb piece of harmonic development : a working out of a pretty mundane (shepherds pipe? ) tune - who knows? But because of the Pastoral’s all pervasiveness when I hear a similar effect in another work I tend to think “Pastoral.”

[Master Jacques]

There is a Vengerov masterclass where one fiendishly difficult violin passage is described as a mouse running up the finger board and then chomping the cheese.

I am glad to discover from you, that Vengerov joins me as another founder-member of the mouse-and-cheese school of musical philosophy!

More seriously, your post really nails a crucial question about Beethoven and "meaning", as outlined in the cause-or-effect, architectural debate of the great Cooke Booke. He comes down pretty much on the side of "effect", and "representation" is surely a much more helpful idea than "expression", when it comes to talking sensibly about the "meaning" of music.

I think Janacek is clear evidence here: there's hardly a pregnant little phrase in his late works which didn't come straight out of his notebooks, as a musical diagram - a representation, that is - of a speech pattern, or in the case of his London zoo visits, animal call patterns. They don't "express" anything. They simply "are". I also think it helps to approach Beethoven this way too, without reference to stories (or even Jayne's evocative abstract "journeys"). For LvB too, as for most post-polyphonic composers, music begins from vocal patterns and is best grasped in conversational - or even operatic - terms.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

But music like all art has an emotional narrative

What I believe Stravinsky meant (and remember, words were his second language) is that Music has "emotional narratives", but that these are evoked from the listener, not "expressed" to him/her: we only experience emotions we already know when we hear Music - someone who hasn't had children could never listen to a piece of Music and come away knowing how it feels to lose a child, to give a somewhat insensitive example. The emotion is in us, and we hear it in the Music - on ways that can (and on the evidence of this Thread, often do) seem bizarre to others.

We react to everything initially at an emotional level (if you're thinking "what a load of bol ... rubbish" as you read this, you're illustrating the point) - a landscape can take my breath away, even reduce (or "increase") me to tears - but the landscape itself isn't "expressing" anything: it's evoking emotions already latent in me - others may look at the same landscape and be totally unmoved, bored even (and boredom is an emotion, of course).

After the emotional rush, the intellectual reflection (for me): why is this Music (/painting/drama/poem/essay by Milton Babbitt) having this effect on me? Which (for me) enhances the experience - develops it, makes it more intense an experience every time. With the Beethoven First, knowledge of the twisting of conventions, the pulling of rugs from under listeners' ears (one gets into all sorts of metaphor twists when examining this Music), the Tonal and rhythmic absurdities ... all these strike me as intentionally humorous; raising at the very least a smile (in concert, out of respect for others' listening) and, more often a quick chuckle (at home, where nobody can keep me talking whilst the nurses come).

[Ein Heldenleben]

Very well put. It would be interesting to play Western classical music those with no experience of it and ask whether Dido’s Lament makes them feel sad , or the finale of Beethoven 1 happy . Problem is you could also play them to Westerners with limited exposure to classical music and get a blank response. I guess most of our musical responses are learnt ones - through lullabies , nursery rhymes - all songs with words that helpfully point us to the appropriate emotion. I’m still puzzling though over why Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau could come to such wildly varying responses over three Beethoven chords . There is a such a thing as over thinking ...

[Master Jacques]

We react to everything initially at an emotional level (if you're thinking "what a load of bol ... rubbish" as you read this, you're illustrating the point)

Which in turn demands the question, where do our emotions come from? Answer: from the mind. Those patterns, once again ... it isn't easy (or accurate, surely) to separate emotion and intellect. None the less an excellent post, thank you.

Cooke helps us of course with such matters as Dido's lament. Our response is conditioned by the intervallic coding, especially the minor third, dropping to the second, in the first phrase. That interval "represents" lamentation from the 16th through to the 21st centuries, in the West, at least. Not elsewhere, or in earlier times. We understand the "expected" response and adopt it.

Sadness comes when we combine that expectation with our understanding of Nahum Tate's words, which make the musical code verbally explicit.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Which in turn demands the question, where do our emotions come from? Answer: from the mind. Those patterns, once again ... it isn't easy (or accurate, surely) to separate emotion and intellect.

Absolutely - experience and memory; those synapses. (That's why it's naive to regard any Music as "universal", to refer to a discussion else-thread. The ability to learn is as near to a "universal" human as we have - but without that early experience, and/or without subsequent introduction to the conventions of a new experience [to put it clumsily] a simple exposure to a cultural artefact can seem like being plonked in the middle of a different universe.)