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

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I don't think bringing in film/television use of established "Classical" Music in which dimensions not intended by the composers come into play helps matters - the "aptness" of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana in Raging Bull or the use of Rossini for a western TV series demonstrates that the Music cannot be "programme-specific" (no pun intended, but I'm glad it's there). If I watch Fantasia I see cherubs and centaurs alongside the Pastoral Symphony - but not when I listen to the Pastoral Symphony: there's far more important, far more interesting things going on in F major.

[jayne lee wilson]

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?

Well, no, of course not.... those film scenes existed or were storyboarded well before the music was chosen, I would say with some inspiration by the director or production assistant (John Culshaw refers to "some unacknowledged genius"). Nothing to say about that? Or the imagistic and physical aptness of their poetical license?

My point is simply that ANY "music accompanying a film scene" changes our perception of it - the Khachaturian has an expansive, arching, tension-and-release rhythm, a rise and fall which (well, for some us, we happy few) does indeed match that of a great three-master riding the troughs and crests; (a fascinatingly similar effect is found in Çiurlionis' The Sea too, whose magnificent first climax brings the image of such a craft setting sail, full of questing hope, irresistibly to mind).

If we hear that Coppelia Waltz over the ship's progress through the waves, the reading of that image, and all our expectations of what is to follow change: the ship's physical presence is diminished; then, perhaps not a fictional historical adventure, more likely a lighthearted contemporary recreation of such a journey, without much danger or passion.
(And I'm amazed that the sheer, intense poetic appropriateness of the Ligeti Lux Aeterna to the 2001 moon-scene seems unappreciated, even unperceived by others here; for me it's one of the most beautiful artistic composites in film and music history: human-alien voices of fear, wonder and emptiness across the lifeless landscape: a stroke of genius in itself.)

If a given listener insists that music is just an abstract tonal process, how could could this be? It wouldn't then matter what you chose would it? Beethoven's movement headings for his Pastoral Symphony would soon fall laughably out of use.
Schoenberg's Music to accompany a film scene might be used for..... Come Dine With Me...
George Benjamin's Ringed by the Flat Horizon..? .... merely a "Concerto for Orchestra".


***
"Onomatopoeia" in such as Baroque birdsong is too easy a distinction here: for me, the sea-rhythms passing through Debussy or Britten or Çiurlionis, the pulsing of river currents running through Wagner or Smetana, are part of the same continuum which produced those storms roaring through Sibelius or Roussel, Beethoven's cadenza for Quail, Cuckoo and Lark chirruping alongside his melodious stream; or Messiaen's recurrent, obsessive concertos for birdsong in the thickets of his orchestration: birds and not-birds, water and not-water, wind and more-than-wind, all at the same time...

If no-one else hears this, fine. Cherish your uniqueness.
But as La Mer begins, a vague, half-recalled, dreamlike image forms in my imagination of a distant grey horizon, almost continuous with a gunmetal sea, flat calm.
Take that away from me and much of my interest - my passion - for the piece, goes with it.

[vinteuil]

If no-one else hears this, fine. Cherish your uniqueness. But as La Mer begins, a vague, half-recalled, dreamlike image forms in my imagination of a distant grey horizon, almost continuous with a gunmetal sea, flat calm. Take that away from me and much of my interest - my passion - for the piece, goes with it.

... no-one would wish to deprive you of this.

But not all of us share your synaesthetic response. Some of us, without 'cherishing our uniqueness' [ ] just relate to music in a different way. I don't have any of the visual reactions to music which you often report, and I don't find significant nourishment in 'following the story' in programme music.

[Richard Barrett]

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

Is it possible to use a wind machine purely abstractly in an orchestral score? Maybe, you'll have to wait and see. I've never taken much notice of the official programmes of Strauss tone poems, or La Mer, and actually I'm very wary about making distinctions between programmatic and non-programmatic music. To grasp a musical structure is, in a sense, to find in it a meaningful quasi-narrative sequence/process. For many composers there's no distinction - think of Mahler, publishing programmatic titles for symphonic movements and then withdrawing them again. Was he intending to withhold important information from listeners? (Too bad - every programme note mentions it anyway.) More likely he had in mind that it would be misleading to insist on a single interpretation of the composition. Strauss was somewhat more literal-minded of course.

[Serial_Apologist]

I don't think bringing in film/television use of established "Classical" Music in which dimensions not intended by the composers come into play helps matters - the "aptness" of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana in Raging Bull or the use of Rossini for a western TV series demonstrates that the Music cannot be "programme-specific" (no pun intended, but I'm glad it's there). If I watch Fantasia I see cherubs and centaurs alongside the Pastoral Symphony - but not when I listen to the Pastoral Symphony: there's far more important, far more interesting things going on in F major.

Listening of a very special kind is on offer there, ferney - my father used to say that Disney's Fantasia ruined Beethoven's Pastoral for him forever, since it always evoked those Babycham images!

He may have been exaggerating a point for effect - (he did that all the time ) - but the old Zen conundrum of a medecine not working if one thinks of a pink elephant when taking it may apply here!

[Serial_Apologist]

... no-one would wish to deprive you of this.

But not all of us share your synaesthetic response. Some of us, without 'cherishing our uniqueness' [ ] just relate to music in a different way. I don't have any of the visual reactions to music which you often report, and I don't find significant nourishment in 'following the story' in programme music.

I expect this is why you are so antipathethic to so much of the music by the English school of "pastoralists", with its deliberate pictorial associations, vints. I guess I find myself halfway between yourself and ferney, in these respects, and jayne: the extra-musical associations either deliberately part of a composer's inspiration, or said to be, or put in by later usage, often do form a part of my musical appreciation of the work in question, or non-appreciation if I feel the composer (or subsequent user of his or her theme) has failed in his or her intention. It's more straightforward from my pov to listen to a work in depth without such apended associations, but whether or not they detract from my in-depth listening experience or augment it, I cannot say.