Music appreciation/enjoyment and technical knowledge

[Petrushka]

I love music. I listen to it actively, often to the point of being truly immersed in it. Yet, I have no formal musical training - probably unlike most of the members of this forum. I sang at school, solo and as part of a choir, but that's all the experience I have of musical performance. So, I've often wondered how much more I might enjoy music if I had more technical knowledge.

I suppose I respond to music more on an emotional than an intellectual level, but that could just be because my lack of knowledge limits me in that way. Admittedly, I have acquired a certain amount of knowledge over the years, just from reading about music. And I think that has enhanced my appreciation and enjoyment to a degree - which sounds like I'm answering my own question! But I still wonder how much more I would get out of music if I had the time and the inclination to expand my knowledge significantly. My guess is that I would appreciate it more without necessarily enjoying it that much more.

Given that most members of this forum have probably worked very hard over the years to develop their musical knowledge, I'd be interested in views on the impact that's had on your appreciation and enjoyment.

This could have been written by me! I did sort of learn the piano when I was about 9 or 10 but wasn't really interested and I was in our local parish church choir for about 10 years but apart from that have no formal musical training at all. I vividly remember getting the score of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll from the College library in 1970 and have one or two scores on my shelves but find the notes get in the way of enjoyment of listening so no longer bother with them. Any analytical knowledge I've gleaned over the years has been from R3, especially those talks by the likes of Deryck Cooke in the early 1970's.

While mostly interested in music on an emotional level, I'm fascinated by how composers transform their themes, especially Wagner in the Ring. I find it breathtakingly ingenious that every single theme in the Ring can be traced back to the very opening, a procedure also followed by Elgar, for example, in his 1st Symphony. I am constantly pulled up short when I notice a new transformation in a Bruckner or Mahler symphony and this after having heard the works very many times over 40 odd years.

I'm mostly interested in the big orchestral repertoire but have recently started to rediscover the anthems, motets etc from my time in the choir. Choral Evensong is a constant delight and an island of calm in a mad world. Still discovering, still buying far too many CD's, so little time.......

[mercia]

To continue with that analogy: if you take a strong hand lens with you, you will see amazing things - but you don't have to be a botanist to buy a hand lens.

how true - I like that. Actually I was wrong, the botanist probably won't see more, but just happen to know all the Latin names of what he does see.
can one enjoy poetry without knowing what an iambic pentameter is ? must be yes.

[BBMmk2]

Although i have had training, etc, for me music is music(if that makes sense), and listen to it as such, as that is how I listen to it.

[MrGongGong]

Knowing and articulating are not the same thing at all.
and (sorry) it all depends on what you want music for ....... if (as with HG recently) you make a definition of what you think music is for then you can easily point to things that don't fit your definition as less successful. Much of the time music is much simpler than we would imagine BUT not always.
"Scores" are not necessarily always the best way of "understanding" I would recommend the flappy things on the side of the head

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... it all depends on what you want music for .......

[salymap]

I don't think of myself as a musician. I studied theory and piano as a teenager but soon got tired of my lessons when I discovered orchestral music and rehearsals. Most orchestral players I met as a music librarian were proficient at their particular instrument,but had lives outside music and didn't go in for deep analysis of the work they were playing, but it was an essential part of their lives.
In publishing I was impressed by the editors' ability to play on the piano a reduction from the orchestral scores sent us. I knew justabout enough to check new proofs [no computers then] but still got a lotof pleasure from hearing the finished work.

I didn't meet all those deep analyses etc that the critics indulge in, in any of my jobs. Musicians were too busy producing the real living thing for their public.

I've learned a lot fromthis forum- mostly how little I know. But, like others I prefer music to retain a certain amount of its mystery.

[MrGongGong]

I didn't meet all that deep analyses etc that the critics indulge in, in any of my jobs. Musicians were too busy producing the real living thing for their public.
:

I've yet to read a "deep analysis" from a critic
but read many from musicologists

[salymap]

I've yet to read a "deep analysis" from a critic
but read many from musicologists

Don't most critics think they are musicologists and vice versa ? Those who can play, those who can't etc etc

[MrGongGong]

I think many critics think they are musicologists but i'm not sure that many musicologists think that they are critics ......
I do think that we can learn a lot from musicology though, often from the musicologies of musics that are sometimes unrelated to the music we are primarily interested in ....... if that makes sense ?

One of the Universities I sometimes work at teaches all its first year undergraduates ethnomusicological techniques, not to make them into ethnomusicologists but to give them tools with which to think about the music that they play and create.

[teamsaint]

wasted on kids, Ethnomusicology


(jealousy is a bad thing, I know).

I like singing along to ELO's greatest hits in the car sometimes. At those moments, that is what music is for.

[BBMmk2]

Indeed teamsaint,m in as much is doesnt really what genre you have on in thye car!

[teamsaint]

Indeed teamsaint,m in as much is doesnt really what genre you have on in thye car!

quite.
although, re sound, I find solo piano works better than orchestral.

[Bryn]

quite.
although, re sound, I find solo piano works better than orchestral.

[teamsaint]

http://static.gigwise.com/artists/00...uction-car.jpg

This works well also, although, re the Chris n Vicks thread, it's probably the wrong side of the legal boundary...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8riUi_rgOQ

[Thropplenoggin]

A great thread by the OP.

I've played guitar for fifteen years but with more a practical knowledge of chords and scales. Since almost all my listening is classical these days, and I've begun to read around the subject (Wolff's imperious biography of Bach, etc.), I've decided to gen up on music knowledge to try and get more out of these books and some of the more musicological discussions on here.

The book I plumped for is this. Tax-dodgers link here.



It's pretty technical, as it's written by a science writer, and so goes into details about the physics as well as theory, but that's something I wanted to know about, too, and I've been able to keep up thus far (50 pages in!)

Another thing I've begun to do is follow scores with music. I started with Bach's cello suites, though this was not as easy as I'd imagined it to be! My advice: pick the slowest sarabande and the slowest interpretation of that sarabande you can find. Suite scores available to peruse as PDFs for nowt here.