Moral Maze - British Places : Better Represented By Classical Music Than Other Forms

[doversoul1]

I'm still trying to understand why you would want to do this.
If music is about anything, surely it's about getting a group of performers together and performing it!

It isn’t that I want to do this. I am trying to find out how it can be done because, from this thread and the one mentioned up-thread by Richard T on Sibelius BaL, that some people are able to depict or see/hear dark forests in Finland or the sea and Eastbourne in the music. Also, there are apparently some decipherable Japanese elements in the Turnage’s prom work. I am very intrigued.

[Lat-Literal]

It isn’t that I want to do this. I am trying to find out how it can be done because, from this thread and the one mentioned up-thread by Richard T on Sibelius BaL, that some people are able to depict or see/hear dark forests in Finland or the sea and Eastbourne in the music. Also, there are apparently some decipherable Japanese elements in the Turnage’s prom work. I am very intrigued.

Surely some of it is being told what is supposed to be. One can either agree with it or disagree depending on how one sees/hears it. This is "Dusk". Its gliding way suggests it could be called "The Ice Skaters" but it isn't and other aspects come into play. We might not be able to be specific in our recollection of how this sort of music tends to evoke nostalgia. But if we haven't just been listening to hip-hop music and have broader references we've seen the films and heard the precise musical sentiment in those. We can place it. Then we need to leap over a gap or two. "Dusk" in a 24 hour period is a fading. In the longer term, it is not a bad representation for the depiction of a cultural past which if it didn't disappear also faded.

Cecil Armstrong Gibbs - Dusk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-xl0bnCUjg

The titles can be completely removed. This is "Summer Valley". There are differences with Delius's "Summer Night on the River" but each is a part of a whole host of mood pieces with the word "Summer" in the title. I am going to produce a piece of music in 2017 in not dissimilar vein and I will call it "Untitled I". People who know the earlier terrain are asked to listen to it and to provide it with a suitable title. The word "Summer" crops up in those titles umpteen times whereas, I don't know, "Factory" is not mentioned at all. Later I shall write a piece called Untitled II. My idea is that it should convey New Zealand. I have decided that it will not have an accordion in it because more often than not that culturally has suggested France.

E J Moeran - Summer Valley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN4BAWTwxp4

[Richard Tarleton]

My idea is that it should convey New Zealand. I have decided that it will not have an accordion in it because more often than not that has suggested France.

This has been an outstanding thread, lat.

[Lat-Literal]

This has been an outstanding thread, lat.

[vinteuil]

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... nope. Lat-lit, after much ponderin', I conclude I don't get what you're on about at all. For me, music doesn't 'represent' anything - it just 'is'.
I don't 'get' Eastbourne, or New Zealand, or the sea, or Finnish forests, or anything else - I 'get' the music.

For me the Velazquez Las Meninas is not in B flat minor, and Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude is not in an orangey-green. A 1990 château ducru-beaucaillou does not remind me of a Haydn quartet, and a foie gras doesn't equate to trumpets.

Why can you not just delight in music 'as it is', without requiring / expecting it to have resonances with unrelated things?


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[Richard Barrett]

I'm still trying to understand why you would want to do this.
If music is about anything, surely it's about getting a group of performers together and performing it!

The word "about" is certainly problematic in this kind of context. Generally I try to avoid it (though I failed here! ) in favour of talking about something like "the ideas embodied in the music". Your position seems to be (unsurprisingly I guess!) similar to Stravinsky's "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all", that is to say anything outside itself. I would say something more like Cardew's "My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world" - that is, it's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm still trying to understand why you would want to do this.
If music is about anything, surely it's about getting a group of performers together and performing it!

W-e-e-e-l-l-l ... There are those of us who like trying to investigate the Music, to discover what makes performers want to gather together to perform it, and why listeners might wish to listen to it repeatedly. In the same way that Hamlet is "about" more than getting a bunch of actors together to perform it, the Eroica has such levels of complexity and richness that it is impossible for any single performance to communicate - sharing ideas and arguing about them can be more productive than hearing a mediocre performance. (And promote discussions and insights a lot more interesting than knowing the Napoleon connection - just as there are [for me] far more interesting things to discover about Tapiola than forests I've never seen, or about La Mer than Japanese woodcuts or ice cream parlours in East Sussex*.)

* - very off-topic, but does anyone know if the Yerolemous still have their rather wonderful ice cream shop on the Eastbourne seafront?

[Richard Barrett]

Why can you not just delight in music 'as it is', without requiring / expecting it to have resonances with unrelated things?

Because it always does have such resonances, whether its creator put them there or not - for a creative musician everything has a connection to music (Mallarmé: "Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre"). As I said in my previous post, you can choose to ignore those dimensions, or think you're ignoring them while nevertheless being aware of say the historical/geographical dimension of the music you're hearing; but the idea of music "as it is" surely involves making arbitrary distinctions as to what rightly belongs to the musical experience and what doesn't. We're all synaesthetic to some extent.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The word "about" is certainly problematic in this kind of context. Generally I try to avoid it (though I failed here! ) in favour of talking about something like "the ideas embodied in the music". Your position seems to be (unsurprisingly I guess!) similar to Stravinsky's "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all", that is to say anything outside itself. I would say something more like Cardew's "My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world" - that is, it's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

Like he said.

[ahinton]

A 1990 château ducru-beaucaillou does not remind me of a Haydn quartet

Nor me, but each is so wonderful!...

[Pulcinella]

The word "about" is certainly problematic in this kind of context. Generally I try to avoid it (though I failed here! ) in favour of talking about something like "the ideas embodied in the music". Your position seems to be (unsurprisingly I guess!) similar to Stravinsky's "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all", that is to say anything outside itself. I would say something more like Cardew's "My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world" - that is, it's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

I like the idea of 'connection', Richard.
And I'm not totally with Stravinsky: after all, Petrushka is about a puppet in love with a ballerina, and most would agree that the music expresses (for example) the chase in the third tableau and the fun of the fair in the fourth very well.

I don't think we've touched on ballet music in this thread: if we are considering music without words (OK, Pulcinella has vocal bits!), (non-abstract) ballet music tends to be telling a story, so is indeed 'about' something (so I've just demolished my own argument about music not having to be 'about' anything).
This Pulcinella is about to have a cup of tea!

[vinteuil]

Because it always does have such resonances, whether its creator put them there or not - for a creative musician everything has a connection to music (Mallarmé: "Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre"). As I said in my previous post, you can choose to ignore those dimensions, or think you're ignoring them while nevertheless being aware of say the historical/geographical dimension of the music you're hearing; but the idea of music "as it is" surely involves making arbitrary distinctions as to what rightly belongs to the musical experience and what doesn't. We're all synaesthetic to some extent.

... o, I have associations all right - me a disciple of John Locke and Tristram Shandy and Proust - but while I may associate the viol music of Gibbons with an Algerian oasis and Couperin's Les Nations with a Madras club - bicoz that's where I heard them, endlessly - I don't feel my very pertick'ler personal associations as having anything to do with the music.

And whether a composer had in mind the orange groves of Florida or the delights of poor old Eastbourne - does this really get into the music in an interesting way?

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[Lat-Literal]

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... nope. Lat-lit, after much ponderin', I conclude I don't get what you're on about at all. For me, music doesn't 'represent' anything - it just 'is'.
I don't 'get' Eastbourne, or New Zealand, or the sea, or Finnish forests, or anything else - I 'get' the music.

For me the Velazquez Las Meninas is not in B flat minor, and Wordsworth's 1805 Prelude is not in an orangey-green. A 1990 chateau ducru-beaucaillou does not remind me of a Haydn quartet, and a foie gras doesn't equate to trumpets.

Why can you not just delight in music 'as it is', without requiring / expecting it to have resonances with unrelated things?


.

And you will not be a fan of Oz Clarke and Jilly Goolden. I would accept that what is being described probably mainly pertains to the late 1800s onwards. But I am also a little sceptical about the polar opposite which would deny any associations. I just don't believe that the counterpoint in Bach every bit as much as twelve tone technique and math rock is appreciated with the mathematics involved wholly thrown aside. Nor do I think that Haydn is appreciated without the associations of London, popularism and celebrity once those things are known.

Re Wordsworth, I think I would see something akin to colour actually and certainly it is there in other poetry. There are dark words and there are light words. Clearly there are shades in juxtapositions. However great the precision in verse, its main intention is surely to provide at the very least a haze, otherwise one would just look at what was being described directly on without someone else's interpretation. Focussed, objective approaches - the "I appreciate it purely for what it is" - is a momentary blocking out of everything else whereas running everything else through a partial, different lens is a momentary semi-blocking or more. That does mean there are differences. Perhaps the former is more honest. The latter can have the pretence of wider accommodation. But I am not sure why that should necessarily be inferior. In each case, there is a negotiation of how to deal/cope with external influence via art.

Alfred Noyes - The Barrel-Organ - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...e-barrel-organ

[ahinton]

The word "about" is certainly problematic in this kind of context. Generally I try to avoid it (though I failed here! ) in favour of talking about something like "the ideas embodied in the music". Your position seems to be (unsurprisingly I guess!) similar to Stravinsky's "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all", that is to say anything outside itself. I would say something more like Cardew's "My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world" - that is, it's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

I've long thought that Stravinsky's bon(!) mot about music and what it can and cannot do is at best misleading; far better whoever it was that said of it that it can express everything but name nothing. Sorabji wrote about this along the lines that, whilst some natural phenomenon might spark off a train of thought in the composer's head, that is not analogous to "expressing" whatever it was that gave rise to that train of thought in ways gthat every listgener would perceive, not least because "no stream ever sounded like that". Whilst such deeper "appreciation and understanding of the music" brought about by having some knowledge of what might have spurred its composer to write it as he/she did is undeniable, it arises from a realisation of what caused those thoughts to enter the composer's creative consciousness; La Mer is such a powerful work that it can still be deeply appreciated and understood without this presupposition although, as you write, "often the title is a pointer in that direction". That said, the kinds of "nickname" that people other than the composer sometimes append to musical works can often do the opposite and be unenlightening; Chopin has been an especial victim of this, what with "his" "Raindrop" prelude, "Æolian Harp" and "Ocean" études and the like - and why his étude Op. 10/12 ever came to be called the "Revolutionary" study when each and every one of the études Op. 10 is "revolutionary" in its own way is quite beyond me!

[Richard Barrett]

I don't feel my very pertick'ler personal associations as having anything to do with the music.

But they do! This is a sense in which the listening part of the musical experience can be as creative as any other. Listening is always potentially a form of (re)composition, to the exact extent that it isn't a matter of passive reception.