There was something in Caliban's remarks about having been able to approach parts of Mahler's 6th symphony while finding other parts not to his liking, and then, through repeated hearings of the work, being enbled in his mind to cohere all the parts of the work into a single whole, chimed with my own experience. At one time I would have thought in terms of either understanding or not understanding particular pieces of music. Some of Bartok's pieces exemplified this - I would always enounter blockages to what I thought of as my understanding of the Second Piano Concerto a few minutes into the work, when the music veered off from musical means of expression I was familiar with from my listening up to that point which lent authority to the music, as if to say, well, the music makes sense up to that point, and it is up to me to work out what is happening in the music in order for me to like, or at least, appreciate it. Once I had surmounted my difficulties beyond the transition point to greater harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, it was almost as if my subsequent greater liking for the piece was contingent on my having got to grips with it; and I happen to think this kind of challenge has always constituted a large part of what it is about certain periods of music, composers or particular works: the easier the music is to take on board, the less it interests me.
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I'm going to make a few assumptions here: that the listener (whoever they were) was listening at a fairly superficial level to what appeared to be a fairly charming, simple piece of music. Then it got "complex" with harmonic shifts and the like and ended up being a piece that clearly required far greater attention than the listener had assumed it would need. Am I right?Originally posted by NatBalance View PostComment
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I like music for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is that sense of a journey, of a distance covered and wonders revealed. The return of the Aria in Bach Goldberg Variations, or the last restatement by Beethoven of the opening phrase of the second movement of the Op.111 Piano Sonata are just two examples of where the composer seems to be summing up and saying ' Look at where we have been'.
One of the pieces that moved me as a teen discovering music was the first movement of Bartok Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta, where the opening themes appear so fleeting, unstable, then gradually coalesce and deliver a gut punch. I have been having some anxieties lately (rather common in 2020) and was having trouble sleeping and one night that Music just popped into my head. It so perfectly encapsulates the feeling of vague, undefined dread that can turn into outright panic or terror...Comment
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Indeed Richard - and it's more than matched, for me, by that terrifying climax in the third movement. My observation would be that horror film composers have a lot to thank Bartok for!Originally posted by richardfinegold View PostComment
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I was chatting to a friend yesterday who had just bought the latest BBC MM as it had a couple of reviews in that he wanted to see (he's a Byrd specialist, but also a great admirer of Bliss and Rubbra), and he admitted to being daunted by the prospect of listening to the cover CD of three Bartok works (Two Pictures, SQ5, Out of doors).Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
I told him to be brave and have a go!Comment
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Kubrick of course used the Bartók piece without bothering to get someone to writ a second-hand version.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
The sense of a journey is surely yet another facet of "understanding music". Very many kinds of musical form involve some kind of more or less recognisable recapitulation that simultaneously returns the listener to the point of departure while more or less explicitly indicating that it's no longer the same place as it had been before the journey began. To the point where (as in the Fauré example maybe, which I must get around to hearing) when such a thing is absent its absence is noted.Comment
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No - it’s not charming and simple. Something odd seems to happen right from the start.Originally posted by Sir Velo View PostComment
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According to Stephen Pinker, in his book The sense of style, which I'm reading alongside Hopkins' Understanding music, Richard Feynman [an American physicist] once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means that you don't."Comment
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Attributed to Feynman is the quote, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." Another slant on the meaning of 'understand', not quite the same as when applied to music? Stephen Pinker noted, if I remember, as being on Private Passions and not including a single piece of classical music among his choices?Originally posted by Pulcinella View PostIt isn't given us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world.Comment
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Feynman was a fine bongos player.Originally posted by french frank View Post
Oh, and had one of the finest minds of the 20th Century.
For me, Pinker's writings fell into the "weighed in the balance and found wanting" list, long ago. I reckon Steven Rose has his number.Comment
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Indeed.Originally posted by Bryn View Post
Pinker, in The Blank Slate: “Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and, in the $200,000 painting featured in the recent comedy Art, a blank white canvas. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose. In poetry, the use of rhyme, meter, verse structure, and clarity were frequently abandoned. In music, conventional rhythm and melody were set aside in favor of atonal, serial, dissonant, and twelve-tone compositions.” Like a kind of scientific Roger Scruton.Comment
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From reading the post that precipitated this excursion, I'm not sure if the Fauré work referred to is the first piano quartet or quintet, neither of which I have heard, so I guess the solution is to dig out recordings of both to see if I agree with your assessment, Dave. Fauré was quite progressive and sophisticated in his harmonic thinking, finding routes through harmonic progressions, some of which were in common with other French composers of his time such as Franck and Saint-Saens, others which were not. He seems to have been interested in investigating the possibilities of enharmonic movement using old modes in close conjunction with conventional diatonic transitions - thereby anticipating successors in this field including Satie, Ravel, Debussy, Koechlin, Falla, Vaughan Williams and Holst - but doing it in accordance with his very personal own ideas, which became more and more eccentric in terms of unexpected twists in the austerer late music. I understand Schoenberg had a way of directing harmony exercises by getting his pupils to elaborate as many possible outcomes towards harmonic resolution, as exemplified in his own music, where it made use of diatonic procedures, and my guess is that he would have been interested in Fauré's practices.Originally posted by Dave2002 View PostComment
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Originally posted by french frank View PostOriginally posted by Richard Barrett View PostOh dear!Originally posted by Bryn View PostFeynman was a fine bongos player.
Oh, and had one of the finest minds of the 20th Century.
For me, Pinker's writings fell into the "weighed in the balance and found wanting" list, long ago. I reckon Steven Rose has his number.
I'm finding his book extremely well written and informative, and am enjoying it.Comment
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Sorry, I forgot to include the relevant link, https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pin...r_rose_p2.htmlOriginally posted by Pulcinella View PostComment
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