Musical Structure

[french frank]

There's a great deal to be gained by at least trying to participate in the structure,

I'd dearly like to think I wasn't the only one who doesn't grasp the meaning. For me 'Participate in the structure' is like Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'. I'd better leave this to more advanced minds than mine

[teamsaint]

I'd dearly like to think I wasn't the only one who doesn't grasp the meaning. For me 'Participate in the structure' is like Chomsky's 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously'. I'd better leave this to more advanced minds than mine

I'm just using RBs elegant words, and thinking , perhaps wrongly,that he is pointing towards a range of active critical approaches to music, of a sort that we don't often hear ( about), in places like radio 3.
( Perhaps it's all on late at night.....)

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Isn't (at least partly) the difference between trying to "follow" a structure that - rightly or wrongly - a listener expects to be there, and actively discovering/experiencing for oneself how the various events cohere? (Or, perhaps - for some works - creatively "in-cohere"?)

[teamsaint]

Actually, at a simple level, and not suggesting that the detail is simple, we can see a level of participation in the structure in the very animated discussions on here, for example around Bruckner editions, or the order of movements in Mahler 6. We think , we listen to others , we reevaluate, we participate because we come to some kind of critical judgement, we listen differently and more actively.

But there's a whole world of different ways to rethink our approach to art. Isn't there? And this is a creative process.

Jane Austen springs to mind as art that lends itself really well to willful, active , different approaches.
I've been thinking for a while that something like some of the Mozart Wind Divertimenti might be fruitful too.

Edit: and for me, Mass settings always beg important questions of how we are participating, what we bring to the musical( or other) experience.

[greenilex]

Your Mass point is fascinating.

Does the religious experience arise from the familiar ritual structure, or vice versa...or the symbolic Eucharistic meal, or the story told in a particular music? Or just memories of early childhood?

Anyway, a discussion for another thread....maybe?

[Serial_Apologist]

Your Mass point is fascinating.

Does the religious experience arise from the familiar ritual structure, or vice versa...or the symbolic Eucharistic meal, or the story told in a particular music? Or just memories of early childhood?

Anyway, a discussion for another thread....maybe?

Maurice Ohana the franco-Spanish composer suggested that the monks singing plainchant understood the combination of modes, tessitura, Latin text and architectural acoustic as inducing the "transcendent" qualities of the ancient mass reverberantly, akin to Buddhist chanting I guess - having put the idea to a Catholic priest who tended to agree - so this would have carried forward into the polyphonic era. Another thread perhaps, rather than one ostensibly devoted to form, whatever we mean by it.

[french frank]

Isn't (at least partly) the difference between trying to "follow" a structure that - rightly or wrongly - a listener expects to be there,

It wasn't how I was using 'follow'. It was more like listening to what someone was explaining to you - without having any expectation of where they were going. You might interject at some point, as a light dawns: 'Yes, I follow that.' It is your active attention that permits you to 'follow' what the speaker/artist has said/created, but I wouldn't have called that 'participation'. 'Creatively "in-cohere"? I might be able to go along with that as regards some (less important?) aspects of a musical work. But structure? It's possibly useful to discuss what creates 'structure' in a musical work. Is there something very general - "structure" - which applies equally to a Haydn string quartet, a Brahms symphony and a contemporary electronic composition? Are we concerned with techniques rather than just 'com-position'?

[teamsaint]

Participation comes about , in part at least, because we reimpose our understanding of structure back onto a/the work.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Participation comes about , in part at least, because we reimpose our understanding of structure back onto a/the work.

- or have that "understanding" modified by an encounter with a work ("participation" being a two-way process).

But this also applies in the case of frenchie's use of "follow" (as = "understanding", rather than "being led by"), too.

[Serial_Apologist]

It wasn't how I was using 'follow'. It was more like listening to what someone was explaining to you - without having any expectation of where they were going. You might interject at some point, as a light dawns: 'Yes, I follow that.' It is your active attention that permits you to 'follow' what the speaker/artist has said/created, but I wouldn't have called that 'participation'. 'Creatively "in-cohere"? I might be able to go along with that as regards some (less important?) aspects of a musical work. But structure? It's possibly useful to discuss what creates 'structure' in a musical work. Is there something very general - "structure" - which applies equally to a Haydn string quartet, a Brahms symphony and a contemporary electronic composition? Are we concerned with techniques rather than just 'com-position'?

You've been reading those old Mr Grew postings again, ff!

Wouldn't one define compositional structure as a framework for the composer to work in? Whether a pre-conceived model such as fugue, or one evolved as the composer composes his way through the evolving work? Edmund Rubbra was noted for never having preconceived his music, following the Taoist principle of accepting whatever his mind came up with as it went along; yet few people seem to have "accused" his music of being unsymphonic because it lacked form. The improvising musician can spontaneously build form, introducing secondary and tertiary themes or motifs then referring back to earlier ideas to embellish, contrast or combine them with subsequent ideas: Keith Tippett's 1980s solo "Mujician" albums on the German FMP label from the 1980s being remarkable examples.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Wouldn't one define compositional structure as a framework for the composer to work in? Whether a pre-conceived model such as fugue, or one evolved as the composer composes his way through the evolving work?

I don't follow how "a framework for a composer to work in" can also be "evolved as the composer [works his/her] way through the evolving work". Doesn't a "framework ... to work in" imply that it is something that has already been thought out/prepared before composing starts, whereas an "evolving work" suggests that a structure is being invented/developed during the process of composition itself?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

a "framework ... to work in" imply that it is something that has already been thought out/prepared before composing starts

In other words, "structure"/"form" as a noun - something that already is (and which the interested listener "has" to try and follow).

whereas an "evolving work" suggests that a structure is being invented/developed during the process of composition itself?

In other words, "structure"/"form" as a verb - something the composer does whilst working (and which the interested listener does each time s/he hears a performance of the finished work).

[vinteuil]

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... as for pictorial art - I like Klee's "The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work" * [Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch] : yes, the viewer is 'free' to look at the painting however they will - but the artist will actually have created the structural paths which will lead the viewer...


* Sometimes quoted as "The beholder's eye, which moves like an animal grazing, follows paths prepared for it in the picture". Perecquians will recognize this as a quotation at the beginning of 'La Vie mode d' emploi'. Unlike Richd: Barrett supra [# 51], I do not think the reader of that work will be aware of the structural constraints that shape it - certainly not all of them. (Scholarly articles are still being written revealing quite how complex the structure is.)




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[Serial_Apologist]

In other words, "structure"/"form" as a noun - something that already is (and which the interested listener "has" to try and follow).


In other words, "structure"/"form" as a verb - something the composer does whilst working (and which the interested listener does each time s/he hears a performance of the finished work).

I would think it possible to evolve a structure/form as one went along - rather like making over a property one is moving into, or has moved into a part of, by degrees, or in stages. Just to be awkward one could say the structure/form is incomplete, in the case of Borodin 3, but that doesn't stop it being a structure/form. It seems to me there are pre-conceived forms, post-conceived forms, and imputed forms.

[vinteuil]

In other words, "structure"/"form" as a verb - something the composer does whilst working (and which the interested listener does each time s/he hears a performance of the finished work).

... my concern with this formulation is that it avoids an essential difference : for the composer, the work in posse is still pliable. For the ultimate listener, it is 'fixed' by the interpretation given it by the performers. For the performers the work still has a degree of that pliability ; so too perhaps for someone reading the score. But a performance crystallizes it ...


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