R. Strauss's Don Quixote and other 'programme' music

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

[visualnickmos]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

Exactly! I have the same philosphy, here. Too much of "what it's suppose to represent.... blah, blah, blah...." Sometimes I'm sure that over-analysis of what one thinks it's supposed to be, rather than what it actually is, can kill it. It can actually take over from the pure 'musicality' of a piece. That's me done!

[jayne lee wilson]

With Tapiola, a listener can ignore the title, and the text Sibelius placed at the head of it, just as you can ignore the texts Elgar used to describe his Enigma Variations; and enjoy both on an abstract level, of course you can. Or your own response may veer off in any wildly imagistic direction. But in doing so you reduce your understanding on the simplest level of knowing something of the composers' inspiration and imagination - and how that feeds into the sounds themselves.

Would anyone, listening to the Çiurlionis or Debussy tone-poems called The Sea, truly hear them as “pure” or “abstract music”, failing to perceive the very motion of the water and the waves moving through them, in fact urging on the very music itself? Perhaps they would - but wouldn’t that be missing an essential part the work’s identity - of what makes it what it is?

Sibelius, Debussy or Çiurlionis could not have written these pieces without the experiences they, at the very least, reflect or relate to; this doesn't necessarily mean a literal visualising of a given God, forest or sea in creator or listener (yet it can be very localised in some cases) - it is an evocation, a response to how the natural world relates to human presence, activity and creativity - the human attempt to find meaning, “make sense” of it.

***

There is a set of stylistic features common to particular evocations of nature which run throughout musical history, music of storms, seas and rivers being among the most common (think of Smetana's Vltava, and then the prelude to Rheingold).
Or consider the 1st Movement of Roussel’s Symphony No.1 “Poem of the Forest”: there you find a very similar use of the orchestra to conjure up a winter gale to that found towards the end of Tapiola - a kind of musical archetype. (You’ll hear something alike-yet-different in Oceanides and in Bax’s November Woods).
Again, a listener can ignore, or fail to perceive, these things and listen to any given tone-poem as abstract music, or daydream her own unrelated accompanying fantasy; but she can’t deny the role they play - which seems to me very deep, even primal - in the works’ creation, their performance and perceived existence. These natural phenomena - sounds, sensations - speak to us and from us.

***

Imagine Sibelius as The Bard, an ancient oral poet singing about the God of The Forest….
Comes a herdsman..."Oh, I don't know what he's going on about... lovely voice though..."

[Beef Oven!]

With Tapiola, a listener can ignore the title, and the text Sibelius placed at the head of it, just as you can ignore the texts Elgar used to describe his Enigma Variations; and enjoy both on an abstract level, of course you can. Or your own response may veer off in any wildly imagistic direction. But in doing so you reduce your understanding on the simplest level of knowing something of the composers' inspiration and imagination - and how that feeds into the sounds themselves.

Would anyone, listening to the Çiurlionis or Debussy tone-poems called The Sea, truly hear them as “pure” or “abstract music”, failing to perceive the very motion of the water and the waves moving through them, in fact urging on the very music itself? Perhaps they would - but wouldn’t that be missing an essential part the work’s identity - of what makes it what it is?

Sibelius, Debussy or Çiurlionis could not have written these pieces without the experiences they, at the very least, reflect or relate to; this doesn't necessarily mean a literal visualising of a given God, forest or sea in creator or listener (yet in can be very localised in some cases) - it is an evocation, a response to how the natural world relates to human presence, activity and creativity - the human attempt to find meaning, “make sense” of it.

***

There is a set of stylistic features common to particular evocations of nature which run through musical history, music of storms, seas and rivers being among the most common (think of Vltava, and then the prelude to Rheingold).
Or consider the 1st Movement of Roussel’s Symphony No.1 “Poem of the Forest”: there you find a very similar use of the orchestra to conjure up a winter gale to that found towards the end of Tapiola - a kind of musical archetype. (You’ll hear something alike-yet-different in Oceanides and in Bax’s November Woods).
Again, a listener can ignore, or fail to perceive, these things and listen to any given tone-poem as abstract music, or daydream her own unrelated accompanying fantasy; but she can’t deny the role they play - which seems to me very deep, even primal - in the works’ creation, their performance and perceived existence. These natural phenomena - sounds, sensations - speak to us and from us.

***

Imagine Sibelius as The Bard, an ancient oral poet singing about the God of The Forest….
"Oh, I don't know what he's going on about... lovely voice though...

I played La Mer earlier and it was only a quasi-programmatic listen. But with Britten’s Sea Interludes, I find it impossible not to get soaked, chapped lips and frightened (I cannot get sea-sick no matter what).

[LeMartinPecheur]

R. Strauss's Don Quixote and other 'programme' music

Reading this thread and for example Mac's post, but also others, does lead me back to something I often contemplate , which has connections to study of literature, which is about the differing and often unexpressed ways we listen, and respond.
Actually, this work seems a very good place to contemplate potential different approaches, as have been alluded to in the thread. One can start with the words of Sibelius, and explore the idea of tone poem world. Or you might try to look into the mind of Sibelius, and possibly see a psychological drama unfolding. An alternative might be to explore the ideas of the Forest , possibly as a place of safety ,in a geopolitical context, ( Finland's relationship with Russia?) and to try to find what the music reveals about the composer's view of, and place in that context. And of course, there are important relationships with the music that went before Sibelius, and from which he drew his inspiration and technical expertise.

At the risk of going completely OT, I'd suggest that certain Strauss tone poems might be key. In Don Quixote for example, I've never put much effort into memorizing exactly what is being depicted - it works as music or not at all (for the record, with me it does work splendidly, though pictorial 'reality' always intrudes with those bl**dy sheep).

Do others here follow the plot each time they listen?

[Petrushka]

At the risk of going completely OT, I'd suggest that certain Strauss tone poems might be key. In Don Quixote for example, I've never put much effort into memorizing exactly what is being depicted - it works as music or not at all (for the record, with me it does work splendidly, though pictorial 'reality' always intrudes with those bl**dy sheep).

Do others here follow the plot each time they listen?

At the risk of going even more completely off topic, I first learnt Strauss' Don Quixote from the highly detailed analysis in Norman del Mar's splendid biography and so taken with it was I that I even bought the Eulenberg miniature score and marked off all of del Mar's examples and notes in my copy of the score. Knowing exactly what Strauss is portraying in the music adds enormously to the appreciation of the humour in the piece, as witty in many places as anything Haydn did, with some real laugh out loud moments. Yes, of course it works as pure music but I find that I can appreciate it in both forms at the same time. I remember listening to it at a Prom (BPO/Haitink) and breaking out into a grin every time one of those humorous moments came up.

If you can find del Mar's analysis it's well worth it.

[pastoralguy]

For me, that was one of the first advantages I noticed about cd. I'd never been able to work out what was going on in Elgar's 'Falstaff' until I bought the Mackerras cd and it had a track by track analysis of the musical 'action'. I'd always hoped there might be a similar recording of Strauss's 'Don Quixote' since I've never been able to work out what is going on.

[Petrushka]

For me, that was one of the first advantages I noticed about cd. I'd never been able to work out what was going on in Elgar's 'Falstaff' until I bought the Mackerras cd and it had a track by track analysis of the musical 'action'. I'd always hoped there might be a similar recording of Strauss's 'Don Quixote' since I've never been able to work out what is going on.

Perhaps we need a new thread on Don Quixote with the last three or four posts moved?

Falstaff and Don Quixote are quite similar in the way that their respective composers set about the 'musical action' Norman del Mar's analysis was the gateway for me into the Strauss tone poems and I remember much of what he said 43 years after reading the biography. I copied some of them out but not sure if DQ was one of them. I'll dig around and see what I can come up with. Once you know what episodes from the book Strauss is setting and how he realises these episodes in the thematic layout and orchestration you can really appreciate how clever and witty it all is. Notwithstanding the pathos of the ending, Strauss does things (as does Elgar in Falstaff) that really will make you laugh even in a strictly musical sense, such as one case where the tenor tuba (Sancho Panza) has, what looks on paper, to be a straightforward downward scale but when played it isn't.

[Nick Armstrong]

R. Strauss's Don Quixote and other 'programme' music

Perhaps we need a new thread on Don Quixote with the last three or four posts moved?

A new thread to carry this offshoot from the Tapiola BaL discussion...

[jayne lee wilson]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

But these works of Art and Literature have, as far as I'm aware, no stated, direct or associative relation to any musical element or work; most, if not all musical tone-poems or symphonic poems do, essentially, relate to the experiences they evoke or suggest or describe; many musical works, whether specified as tone-poems or not, include evocation of or reference to "extra-musical" phenomena such as the ones I mention in #3 above. So as I said, you might not hear these relations, whether you choose not to, or fail to; but you can't deny their role in the compositional process, and in the music itself. It's not only about the subjective listening experience.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

A new thread to carry this offshoot from the Tapiola BaL discussion...

<phew>! I saw this Thread title, groaned "Oh no! Which idiot started this topic?" - and then saw that I had!!! For a moment, I thought I'd started "sleep-Foruming", and wondered about a modern production of Lucia da Lammermoor.

I've little to add to my OP - the suggestion that a piece of Music can "work" if you treat it as a sort of "Music for an Imaginary Film" simply doesn't work for - nor appeal to - me. Nor does being required to hear the colours that Messiaen stated were an essential part of some of his works. There are far more essential, far more important, things I find in the Music. I said in an earlier post on the BaL Tapiola Thread that I'd never been in a Finnish forest - so if Sibelius' intentions in writing the work were chiefly to communicate the experience of the Finnish forest on the human imagination, then listeners would have to first journey through one in order to fully experience the piece. Otherwise, we have to rely on our own individual memories of whatever our own "forest experience" might be - which, I would imagine, is something very far from Sibelius' own.

Whatever brings a listener to a work of Art is to be honoured and respected and treasured - so to anyone who enjoys the smell of the mountain air at the top of the Alpine Symphony. But what instantly grabbed me the first time I heard Tapiola over forty years ago was the energies of B minor working with and against other keys and modalities, and the movement of simultaneous rates of pulse; and these are things that have become more extraordinary over the years and with each successive encounter with the work. For me, what takes me closest to the composer's inmost thought processes it isn't a jaunt through the local park (nor even a climb up Ingleborough, or a swim in Lake Buttermere) is a seven-year study of species counterpoint!

[Nick Armstrong]

[Richard Tarleton]

Would anyone, listening to the Çiurlionis or Debussy tone-poems called The Sea, truly hear them as “pure” or “abstract music”, failing to perceive the very motion of the water and the waves moving through them, in fact urging on the very music itself? Perhaps they would - but wouldn’t that be missing an essential part the work’s identity - of what makes it what it is?

This prompts a question or two in my mind jayne - is this to suggest that someone who has never seen the sea or experienced its moods - lived their entire life in Stoke on Trent - can't appreciate La Mer? And which sea did Debussy have in mind - anyone's mental image of sea is informed by their experience of it (North Sea quite different from Mediterranean, Irish Sea, and again from Atlantic rollers on Ireland's west coast, to look no further....) My appreciation of 4 Sea Interludes helped enormously by knowing Aldeburgh well, I can hear the shingle rolling on the beach in my mind's ear, but plenty of people listening to it don't - is their appreciation of it lessened? (Perhaps). And what do blind people make of all this visualising stuff? A book I've thought of reading, and may now do, is On Blindness, by Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan. In The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, talking about our apprehension of an apple, Magee lists all the ways in which we interact with it....

But every single one of the operations I have listed is dependent on our having the particular perceiving apparatus we have, and yields its information in forms which cannot exist separately from that apparatus, namely in terms of visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and aural data, and the concepts derived ultimately from these, and the operations with those concepts which constitute thought....

(A case in point thinking of Beef's post, re 4 Sea Interludes, which I identify with - an important part of my experience of the sea is the smell - smells - of the sea, and shore. A close relative has no sense of smell - thus her perception and experience of the sea different in one important respect from mine)

I've tried following the notes to the Strauss tone poems (among my very favourite orchestral music) using the cues on the CD player, and find that the process of listening, looking and reading sets up a knot of tension in my brain, and I cease to listen to or enjoy the music. The only way I can cope is to read them in advance, without the music. The general idea is enough. But then I have read Don Quixote, been to La Mancha, seen the windmills.....

[Sir Velo]

I'd always hoped there might be a similar recording of Strauss's 'Don Quixote' since I've never been able to work out what is going on.

Surely the wind machine's a bit of a giveaway?

Wiki gives a fairly useful if basic synopsis. An indication of how good a performance is whether the sheep bleating themselves into a frenzy in the second variation manages to raise a smile. It does, for me, on the classic Tortelier/Kempe recording and on the Issserlis recording with Hickox (the Virgin CD also gives reasonable track listing info as well IIRC).

On the whole, though, a work has to stand on its own musically. It can raise the odd image in the listener, but if it relies purely on description for its effect it will fail to satisfy multiple hearings I would suggest.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

It's obvious that hearing the extra-Musical connotations is vastly important to the Musical experience for many listeners - but, for me, reading such comments is as bizarre as somebody referring to Austen's unexpected modulation to the flattened submediant between chapters five and six of Emma, or describing the steam rising from the tugboat in The Fighting Temeraire as being a Neapolitan Sixth. It's just not the way I hear Music (or read literature, or look at visual Art) - beyond me.

It reminds me f the lecture notes jotted down by a Durham University music student a few years ago. The philosophical guff that the lecturer had read into the music had my eyes rolling, but the student trusted everything that came out of the said lecturer's mouth. I'm sure the source was insightful, but to impose it on others as fact does seem misguided.