Understanding Music

[Petrushka]

Radio 3 used to broadcast some excellent programmes from Antony Hopkins and Stephen Johnson amongst others where they took a work to pieces and put it together again. I remember fascinating programmes on Stravinsky's Petrushka and Debussy's La Mer and would love to hear them again. I've known and loved both works for many years but both of those programmes made me understand and appreciate them more as well as a tiny fragment of the sheer genius involved in their composition.

I don't greatly understand musical analysis but I find it enthralling to read books such as Norman del Mar's volume on Mahler's 6th Symphony and wish there were more examples of the same as they greatly increase understanding and appreciation. When reading and listening to such analysis I do often wonder whether the composer was truly aware of precisely what they were doing because the level of genius revealed is simply staggering.

[cloughie]

As I understand it, when composers discuss music among themselves, they tend to talk about technique. So maybe Holst was just saying he didn't get how the piece was put together. In any case, although Holst and RVW were close friends, their musics were not at all alike.

“It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it’s right. I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant.” RVW on his own Symphony 4 - so maybe he'd have difficulty explaining "Flos" to Holst. I have to say that after around 60 years of serious interest in listening to music from my teen years to now, do I love music - yes! Do I understand it? - I really don't know! Do I need to understand it? - probably not, but maybe I'd like to!
Yes Petrushka I agree with you about Antony Hopkins I remember him talking about Mahler 1!

[visualnickmos]

I am in agreement with Natter's original post; on reading it, I found it was a pretty accurate echo of my thoughts on the subject.

What I am picking up on reading the whole thread (so far) is that we appear to have our own individual nuances and 'understandings' of the very word "understand" itself! I don't need to go into a near-infinite list of possible interpretations. You will know what I'm talking about!

Therefore when someone says they don't 'understand' music, or a piece of music, a composer, a genre, etc - the word covers a huge range of possible doubts, and in itself doesn't actually convey anything particularly salient. The cake analogy is perfect.

A very intersting thread.

[Dave2002]

I read another article this morning about a different topic, in which a substitution word "trick" was suggested. This is well known, but basically change one word in a sentence or phrase, and see if it still makes sense. Look at the result, and form some sort of judgement. I have even known some authors adopt the same process to "scholarly" articles - perhaps to boost their output rating, though it's not totally futile to try substituting words in order to extract new meanings and understandings.

The article in question was this one https://getpocket.com/explore/item/t...s-of-mind-time in which the suggestion was to substitute "evolution" for "consciousness".

In the context of this thread, consider "understand X", where X may be "music", but could be "art", or "politics", or "Fred Smith", or Latin, or :"the history of the Roman Empire".

Does this throw more light on the X or on the nature and significance of the word "understand"?

[french frank]

Do you see any pictures in your minds eye? A place, an action. Classical music can paint pictures, it can depict a busy bee, a galoping horse, war, a peacefull sunny day in the countryside, dripping cathedrals of ice, menace

I'd say that's another way of "understanding music" which isn't what (I guess) most people bother to try and do with a piece of pop music. You could say that's trying to "understand" something the composer intended, and it doesn't really matter whether you're right about that. If following a story and imagining a picture increases your enjoyment and involvement as a listener - great. And I suspect that if you don't consciously think about such things, they lurk in your subconscious, surfacing now and then. What you're doing is getting more deeply into the music. A composer, a music graduate, an instrumentalist will certainly approach a piece in a different way: one works with what one has.

[LMcD]

You can love a person and yet not fully understand them. Isn't it the same with music?

I would say so, although I have found that my understanding of, in particular, small-scale musical works is greatly increased when I can watch them being performed, simply because I can then work out what's 'going on' in a way that isn't always possible when just listening.
Antony Hopkins's 'Talking About Music' ran from 1954 to 1992. A particular episode which, for some reason, I remember featured Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto and César Franck's Symphonic Variations. I guess 'The Listening Service' might be trying to do the same sort of thing, but sadly the presenter of the latter lacks AH's lack of self-awareness and self-importance.

[Pulcinella]

I've dug out the Hopkins book, and started to look through it again; but I am confused already (page 11)!

Talking about (making an analogy with) speech, he says:
melody coveys the expressive content of the thought (I love you)
harmony underlines the expressive content (I love you passionately)
rhythm simply represents the sequence of syllables with which the thought is expressed

But he then goes on to say:
accents correspond to verbal stress or hard consonants; the organisation of rhythm into units may be rigidly metrical, as it is in strict verse forms, or free as in blank verse or prose.

Perhaps I'm not 'understanding' what he means, but isn't the structure of a line of blank verse (iambic pentameter) rigid? Maybe he doesn't really mean 'blank verse'?

[french frank]

Perhaps I'm not 'understanding' what he means, but isn't the structure of a line of blank verse (iambic pentameter) rigid? Maybe he doesn't really mean 'blank verse'?

Isn't there a difference between long and short eg iambs, and stressed and unstressed. So in Shakesperean blank verse the stresses don't fall on the same syllables in each line?

Nów is the wínter of our dïscontént
Made glórious súmmer by this sún of Yórk
And áll the clóuds that lówered upon this hóuse
In the déep bósom of the ócean búried.

Rhythm and metre aren't the same things.

[Belgrove]

With regard to Pulcinella’s drawing to attention Hopkins’ analogies with parts of speech, Bernstein’s Harvard series of lectures launches through connecting progressively more complex musical elements to phonology, syntax and semantics (through extensive discussions with Noam Chomsky):

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6DY3I6m2_i8B3Wb3rxPNxXEPavny4QdD

The lectures form a wonderful course on how to parse music, and appreciate (or understand?) it’s construction and how/why it works. It’s staggering to think these were made without the (apparent) aid of an autocue, they are so fluent and devoid of vocal ticks. The first lecture contains the finest explanation of the chromatic scale that I’ve come across.

[Pulcinella]

Isn't there a difference between long and short eg iambs, and stressed and unstressed. So in Shakesperean blank verse the stresses don't fall on the same syllables in each line?

Nów is the wínter of our dïscontént
Made glórious súmmer by this sún of Yórk
And áll the clóuds that lówered upon this hóuse
In the déep bósom of the ócean búried.

Rhythm and metre aren't the same things.

Thanks

[Joseph K]

Isn't there a difference between long and short eg iambs, and stressed and unstressed. So in Shakesperean blank verse the stresses don't fall on the same syllables in each line?

Nów is the wínter of our dïscontént
Made glórious súmmer by this sún of Yórk
And áll the clóuds that lówered upon this hóuse
In the déep bósom of the ócean búried.

Rhythm and metre aren't the same things.

Blank verse means unrhymed. The passage you quote could still be interpreted as iambic pentametre, but with various substitutions (including some like the anapest, that are trisyllabic).

[Richard Barrett]

I do not know Susan Youens's book on that Shubert music but it sounds like she is describing her understanding of how and why the piece was composed.

I don't understand how someone can think they have such a precise idea of what a book is about just from its title!

Understanding a piece of music isn't just something you either do or don't have, it's a process that can continue throughout one's experience of hearing the piece, maybe studying the score or the music's context, maybe playing or singing it, maybe just finding new and deeper layers of structure and meaning as one's acquaintance continues. One way to characterise the understanding of a piece of music is to say it's the way you achieve (or not) of thinking about it which goes beyond finding it pleasant/interesting/moving/etc. or not.

[french frank]

The passage you quote could still be interpreted as iambic pentametre,

Which would regularly be five iambs, each iamb a short followed by a long. But rhythmic variation is achieved by varying the position of the stress, so that in the first line it doesn't make sense to stress the second syllable: Now ís rather than the first Nów is. It's like children intoning Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum ignoring the sense of the line. I think that might be what Hopkins meant.

[Joseph K]

Which would regularly be five iambs, each iamb a short followed by a long. But rhythmic variation is achieved by varying the position of the stress, so that in the first line it doesn't make sense to stress the second syllable: Now ís rather than the first Nów is. It's like children intoning Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum ignoring the sense of the line. I think that might be what Hopkins meant.

I think, simply put, Hopkins is wrong to say blank verse is 'free'. It's not - it's iambic pentametre, and iambic pentametre can contain substitutions like the trochee or anapest, or a feminine ending. Or it can contain reductions e.g. can be acephalous. There is lots that can be done with it ...

[Pulcinella]

Which would regularly be five iambs, each iamb a short followed by a long. But rhythmic variation is achieved by varying the position of the stress, so that in the first line it doesn't make sense to stress the second syllable: Now ís rather than the first Nów is. It's like children intoning Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum Tee Tum ignoring the sense of the line. I think that might be what Hopkins meant.

I think, simply put, Hopkins is wrong to say blank verse is 'free'. It's not - it's iambic pentametre, and iambic pentametre can contain substitutions like the trochee or anapest, or a feminine ending. Or it can contain reductions e.g. can be acephalous. There is lots that can be done with it ...

Doesn't Hopkins really mean what is known as 'sprung rhythm' (my partner tells me!)?
Thanks both: I didn't mean to divert the thread.