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

[french frank]

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.

It's not a simple case of 'de gustibus' but more how music works for different people. I would accept that the programme was, biographically, important for the composer in providing the inspiration - the music was the response to the scene or action.

But for me, neither does the 'feel' or emotion of the music impinge. When I'm concentrating on it, I 'see' patterns that seem in some way to represent the musical movement, or an instrumentalist playing it: but then I may be 'amusiac spectrum'

[Barbirollians]

I get the point and wonder sometimes for example do many of us hear the sea in the Four Sea Interludes simply because whenever there is a snip of film of the Suffolk Coast and in particular Aldeburgh beach the first interlude is played .

Then again being fortunate enough to have seen the wonderful Peter Grimes on the beach in 2013 that worked spectacularly well because hearing it on the beach it showed how effectively Britten's music evoked what was being experienced especially on the slightly drizzly FRiday night I saw it .

Also some pieces of music hearing it as music for a film or even piece of TV can work extremely well even though they are the opposite of or completely unrelated to the intentions of the composer. I have to admit that the Adagio from Spartacus sounds a lot more like music of the sea than its original intended evocation.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

It's not a simple case of 'de gustibus' but more how music works for different people. I would accept that the programme was, biographically, important for the composer in providing the inspiration - the music was the response to the scene or action.

But for me, neither does the 'feel' or emotion of the music impinge. When I'm concentrating on it, I 'see' patterns that seem in some way to represent the musical movement, or an instrumentalist playing it

Absolutely - after all, it's not as if "landscape" is a "natural" phenomenon: that, too, is a cultural creation, the inner psychological responses to an indifferent collection of geological and geographical circumstances. Our reactions to a landscape are as individual as our reactions to a work of Art - we organize our reactions into emotions, rationalizing these when we're required to "express" or describe those reactions. Pet's response to the natural world (as described when he spoke of the frisson of terror he experiences in a forest on the other Thread) is alien to me - I've never been mugged in a forest, never been hospitalized by a van reversing the wrong way down a One-Way street on a mountain, never had a drunkard pull a knife on me on the Pennine Way, never been knocked down by a cyclist on a pavement on the South Downs Way. It's the Urban that I have to keep an eye on!

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

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).

I get the point and wonder sometimes for example do many of us hear the sea in the Four Sea Interludes simply because whenever there is a snip of film of the Suffolk Coast and in particular Aldeburgh beach the first interlude is played .

Very possibly - but I also think that Britten uses Musical onomatopoeia in those Interludes, deliberately employing the actual sounds associated with the seaside, for his opera - just as he evoked the sound of steam railways in Night Mail. It's like the use of birdsong in Baroque Music - an actua, literal imitation of an external world. With Debussy, there's none of this - he takes the abstract ways that waves are created and transforms them into rhythmic and temporal metaphors that are not ocean-reliant. After all, surely nobody nowadays listens to La Mer and thinks of the sea, do they?

I have to admit that the Adagio from Spartacus sounds a lot more like music of the sea than its original intended evocation.

[Barbirollians]

Very possibly - but I also think that Britten uses Musical onomatopoeia in those Interludes, deliberately employing the actual sounds associated with the seaside, for his opera - just as he evoked the sound of steam railways in Night Mail. It's like the use of birdsong in Baroque Music - an actua, literal imitation of an external world. With Debussy, there's none of this - he takes the abstract ways that waves are created and transforms them into rhythmic and temporal metaphors that are not ocean-reliant. After all, surely nobody nowadays listens to La Mer and thinks of the sea, do they?

Try the Orchestre de Paris/Barbirolll version !

[jayne lee wilson]

Very possibly - but I also think that Britten uses Musical onomatopoeia in those Interludes, deliberately employing the actual sounds associated with the seaside, for his opera - just as he evoked the sound of steam railways in Night Mail. It's like the use of birdsong in Baroque Music - an actua, literal imitation of an external world. With Debussy, there's none of this - he takes the abstract ways that waves are created and transforms them into rhythmic and temporal metaphors that are not ocean-reliant. After all, surely nobody nowadays listens to La Mer and thinks of the sea, do they?

This discussion is going down some very strange paths if "the ways that waves are created" is described as "abstract" (energy passing through water, wind, electrical currents....?); and with dismissive, rhetorical questions like: "nobody nowadays listens to La Mer and thinks of the sea, do they...?"

Would "the sea", as phenomena, experience, image, memory or poetical impression, be a more vivid presence if the Debussy-jaded listener attends to to the identically-named but less familiar works by Glazunov, or Çiurlionis, for example?

A metaphor is an imaginative link to a given object, action, phenomena. To a given reality. If you say that Debussy's "rhythmical and temporal metaphors are not ocean-reliant" where do these metaphors come from, and what do they relate to?

I've nothing much more to add, and I don't want to repeat myself after all I've offered above. All musical response is inescapably subjective.
But what always interests me more is the genesis of such works, the way natural phenomena can inspire sounds, and the many examples of common characteristics in those works which evoke them.

[Maclintick]

Our reactions to a landscape are as individual as our reactions to a work of Art - we organize our reactions into emotions, rationalizing these when we're required to "express" or describe those reactions.

Reactions which I misguidedly attempted to describe on the Tapiola thread, purely personal ones derived from my experience of the music, unmediated by the narrative of the prefatory quatrain or Sibelius’s statements regarding it. Of course, one can enjoy Tapiola or La Mer lacking any knowledge of their sylvan or maritime associations, just as it may be desirable to listen to Jeux without images of tennis-balls plopping into one’s head, but in the former case, as JLW says, one’s appreciation may lack a dimension intended by the composer.

It’s conceivable, though, that composers may not always be 100% reliable witnesses, or above throwing in a programmatic red herring as an enticement to a piece lacking obvious extra-musical associations. Sibelius himself doesn’t seem to have been entirely blameless in this regard, if we believe the remarks he is alleged to have made to the 3rd Symphony’s dedicatee Granville Bantock, that its opening was an impressionistic vignette of fog banks on the English Channel . Anything less miasmic or vaporous than the lean classicism of this rhythmically vital allegro moderato, surging forward in a confident C major on unison cello & basses, is hard to imagine (please, boarders — convince me otherwise !) - & I’ve always found Stravinsky’s quoted portrayal of goose-stepping Nazis in what I’d previously enjoyed as the balletically energetic con moto of his Symphony in Three Movements as unhelpful.

A footnote on emotional reactions to art. Alan Bennett recalled a public Q&A session in which he’d admitted being moved to tears by music & asked the audience if any of them had been overcome by lachrymosity when contemplating a great painting, adding that this was something he personally could never envisage experiencing, & was taken aback when a forest of hands shot up. “ Hmmm” he thought “There’s something something I’m not ‘getting’, here” & with characteristic ruefulness began to imagine he’d suffered all his life from an undiagnosed blind spot in his responsiveness to painting.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... but ... as JLW says, one’s appreciation may lack a dimension intended by the composer.

Well, it may, I suppose; but it's the least important aspect of a piece of Music (I would say - because it is the least "Musical" aspect), and may well cause listeners focussing on it to miss much more interesting dimensions. Berlioz' First Symphony in C major is, I think, a much greater work than the same piece with the second-rate Hammer Horror movie programme and the title Symphonie Fantastique added.

You mention great paintings. By coincidence, I was recently considering Turner's Fighting Temeraire - how the painter's original intentions were to communicate his excitement at the scientific and technological advances in the first half of the Nineteenth Century; but how modern viewers can also see it as a symbol of the pitilessness of those "advances" - of technology wiping out history/"heritage", of mechanization displacing sentiment; of the New destroying the old. Things that have come into recent viewers' consciousness with the technological developments of the Twentieth Century, giving the painting a valid iconic dimension and significance beyond what the Artist could have foreseen, and even in contradiction to his intentions.

[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?

I was curious to know which sea Debussy was inspired by....this from Wiki

...as an adult composing "La mer," he rarely visited the sea, spending most of his time far away from large bodies of water. Debussy drew inspiration from art, "preferring the seascapes available in painting and literature..." to the physical sea. This influence lends the piece its unusual nature.

I gather he completed it at Eastbourne, a stretch of coast I know particularly well, but I would never have made the connection.

I learnt on Sunday that Sibelius's Oceanides had the Greek end of the Mediterranean in mind, I'd never have guessed. Listening to it, it sounds like....Sibelius.

It may be that some programmes help the composition process more than the listener?

[Maclintick]

You mention great paintings. By coincidence, I was recently considering Turner's Fighting Temeraire - how the painter's original intentions were to communicate his excitement at the scientific and technological advances in the first half of the Nineteenth Century; but how modern viewers can also see it as a symbol of the pitilessness of those "advances" - of technology wiping out history/"heritage", of mechanization displacing sentiment; of the New destroying the old. Things that have come into recent viewers' consciousness with the technological developments of the Twentieth Century, giving the painting a valid iconic dimension and significance beyond what the Artist could have foreseen, and even in contradiction to his intentions.

Yes, except that the theme of industrial mechanisation destroying traditional occupations was of equal or greater contemporary relevance in Turner's lifetime than it was/is in the 20th & 21st centuries -- post Cartwright's loom, Luddites hanged or transported to Australia -- so I'm not at all sure whether Turner's audience wouldn't have "got" Fighting Temeraire as representing the pitilessness of "progress". This particular theme & its converse, that of industrialisation turning workers into mere cogs in the machine, among those explored in the Science Museum's "Robots" exhibition -- opening today, coincidentally.

[vinteuil]

I

I learnt on Sunday that Sibelius's Oceanides had the Greek end of the Mediterranean in mind, I'd never have guessed. Listening to it, it sounds like....Sibelius.

... and of course the Morning Scene in Grieg's Peer Gynt - wiki puts it nicely :

"The piece depicts the rising of the sun during act 4, scene 4, of Ibsen's play, which finds the eponymous hero stranded in the Moroccan desert after his companions took his yacht and abandoned him there while he slept. The scene begins with the following description:

A grove of palms and acacias at dawn. Peer Gynt is up a tree, protecting himself with a broken-off branch from a swarm of apes.

As the Peer Gynt suites take their pieces out of the original context of the play, "Morning Mood" is not widely known in its original setting, and images of Grieg's Scandinavian origins more frequently spring to the minds of its listeners than those of the desert it was written to depict... "

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, except that the theme of industrial mechanisation destroying traditional occupations was of equal or greater contemporary relevance in Turner's lifetime than it was/is in the 20th & 21st centuries -- post Cartwright's loom, Luddites hanged or transported to Australia -- so I'm not at all sure whether Turner's audience wouldn't have "got" Fighting Temeraire as representing the pitilessness of "progress". This particular theme & its converse, that of industrialisation turning workers into mere cogs in the machine, among those explored in the Science Museum's "Robots" exhibition -- opening today, coincidentally.

That is an excellent point - and gives further "substance" to the idea that what "dimensions" in a work may have been "intended" by a creative artist do not have to be essential to that work's reception by the audience/viewer/reader. I feel that Richard Tarleton encapsulates my own feeling when he says It may be that some programmes help the composition process more than the listener?

[jayne lee wilson]

Try another angle:
Music used for images it wasn't written for or inspired by.

Khachaturian's adagio from Spartacus: of its use for The Onedin Line, John Culshaw wrote "the music - which somehow did fit the image of an old sailing ship on the high seas..."

Ligeti's Lux Aeterna: in "2001: A Space Odyssey", this is used to accompany the Moonbus as it carries the scientists low over the moon's surface to the crater where the black monolith has been excavated.

Would anyone here deny their aptness? If you feel that the music is apt to these images, poetically or otherwise, why might that be?
If you substituted the waltz from Coppelia for the Khachaturian over the ship's image, how would that affect your perception of it?

[doversoul1]

Try another angle:
Music used for images it wasn't written for or inspired by.

Khachaturian's adagio from Spartacus: of its use for The Onedin Line, John Culshaw wrote "the music - which somehow did fit the image of an old sailing ship on the high seas..."

Ligeti's Lux Aeterna: in "2001: A Space Odyssey", this is used to accompany the Moonbus as it carries the scientists low over the moon's surface to the crater where the black monolith has been excavated.

Would anyone here deny their aptness? If you feel that the music is apt to these images, poetically or otherwise, why might that be?
If you substituted the waltz from Coppelia for the Khachaturian over the ship's image, how would that affect your perception of it?

Would anyone have imagined these scenes before the chosen works were used to accompany them (the scenes)? If you feel they didn’t, why might that be?

If the waltz from Coppelia had been used in the first place, might anyone have wished for the Khachaturian?

[Beef Oven!]

Would anyone have imagined these scenes before the chosen works were used to accompany them (the scenes)? If you feel they didn’t, why might that be?

If the waltz from Coppelia had been used in the first place, might anyone have wished for the Khachaturian?

Agreed