Autobiography & Understanding: a Few Idle Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

The two recent Shostakovich Threads have raised issues about the relationship between events in that composer's life and the Music that he wrote, issues that might merit a Thread of their own, if only to avoid derailing the home topic of those Threads.

The Leningrad Symphony seemed most to stimulate the most polarized statements of opinion, with Bbm, JLW, Edgleyrob, Pet and others putting the work in their lists of "favourite work(s)", whilst edashtav has a much lower opinion of it ("Bombastic, Appalling, Repetitious, Unworthy, Banal, Trivial, Vacuous, Rebarbative, Unsubtle, Boring"). Barbie, in defence of the work (which he regards as "a masterpiece"), says "it has to be understood in the context of its time and listened to in that manner", later saying that similar claims can be made about Beethoven's Fidelio and other works.

Personally, like Suffy, I think that the Symphony isn't as bad as its detractors say, nor as good as its admirers claim; for me it doesn't have half the emotional power of that other Symphony written at a time when its composer was serving as an ARP officer, watching his home city being destroyed by the Nazis, RVW's Fifth.

But what do people mean by "understanding a piece of Music" in this (or any other) way? Is this just another way of saying that their enjoyment is enhanced by knowing more about the back story of a work? And/or another way of saying they "appreciate" it more? I dislike the Second Movt of the Leningrad, in spite of my appreciating what it's "describing". And, if JLW's assessment of it is correct, then some ed's epithets are exact: it is "banal", "bombastic", "appalling", "repetitious", "rebarbative" - these aren't "silly" comments, they're precisely what the composer wished to portray. Does the intention "improve" the Music?

If a letter written by the nineteen-year-old William McGonagall were to be discovered, in which he claimed that he was so sickened by the megalomaniac sentimentality of Victorian Poetry that he was going to parody it for the ret of his career, does that change our attitude to McGonagall's work? Does his poetry become "better"? Is an appreciation of a childhood brought up in the Third Reich (where Hitler's appropriation of Haydn's Emperor's Hymn was a permanent feature) all that is needed to make Barbie hear Lachenmann's Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied as something other than "self-indulgent barbed-wire nonsense"? Would sales of Alistair Hinton's String Quintet soar if only people knew that the passage immediately before the voice first appears was directly inspired by Elsie Butterthwaite's unfavourable comment about a tie he wore in 1978?

So; "Fate knocking at the door", the metamorphosis of the song of the Yellowhammer, or an ambiguous presentation of Eb major with c minor, establishing links for the immediate and long-term Tonal odyssey? All of these? None? All of these and more?

[Petrushka]

I'll need the rest of Sunday afternoon to mull over this one as it's a very complicated issue. Will need to lie down in a dark room and come back later.

[verismissimo]

I'll need the rest of Sunday afternoon to mull over this one as it's a very complicated issue. Will need to lie down in a dark room and come back later.

Yep. But I don't plan to listen to the Leningrad again any time soon.

[teamsaint]

I think that there is a tendency , understandable really, among lovers of classical music to take as read,the complexity of music such as the " Leningrad".
Understanding that music is usually and consequently a long term process , and the music only gradually reveals itself, (for most of us) both through listening and reading/other modes of understanding.Part of that process must surely be an attempt to understand the back story.
A useful question might be to ask how we might respond to the" Leningrad", for instance if presented with it unseen, with no clues, no signs outside of the music. Tellingly of course, some clues are provided in the movement markings, and of course the composer knew that his audiences would inevitably know some of the back story.

As a contrast to the 7th, it might be useful to contemplate music inspired by, but not from direct experience of , historical events. Songs written by southerners in defence of the striking miners in 1983/4 might fall into this category.Hard to understand those songs fully ,(lacking in complexity though they may be) without knowing the back story. The risk of banality is ever present in such music, but quality of writing and some depth of understanding on the part of the listener can overcome those dangers.

As for the 7th, perhaps its equivocation is its genius. Or perhaps its just deeply flawed.Or perhaps.....or perhaps i'll have a better idea when I have heard it in live performance.


Edit: The two DSCH threads are the sort of thing that make it worth hanging round here......inspiring to read the many educated and passionate viewpoints.
Super Edit: thought long and hard before posting this, so go easy on me.....

[Richard Barrett]

Just a quick thought... if a composer "puts everything into" his/her music that will naturally include a response to personal/social circumstances, but how this process is operating and what traces it leaves behind might be something that not even the composer is fully aware of (although I would say it behoves composers to be as fully aware of what they're doing as possible), let alone listeners who might be moved to try and connect the music to what they know of its history. And this doesn't just apply to composers of course, or to composition: almost everything that any of us feels or expresses has an "autobiographical" dimension, including listening to music as well as creating it.

[Petrushka]

Beethoven set the trend for autobiography in music. The Eroica's famously scribbled out dedication to Napoleon has left many listeners and commentators to conclude that Beethoven himself was the hero of his own work. That LvB had contemplated suicide in the face of his terrible deafness is borne out by the Heiligenstadt Testament but he didn't do it and here in the Eroica's first movement is this sense of titanic struggle against the odds, autobiography in music for the first time. I can, and do, hear this struggle and knowing the background, the historic circumstances and Beethoven's own fight against the odds adds immeasurably to what I gain from listening to the work.

Citing the Eroica as an example, Richard Strauss was explicit in his autobiographical claims in writing Ein Heldenleben. Similar to Shostakovich in the 15th Symphony, Strauss goes so far as to quote his own works in the 'Heroes Works of Peace' and more explicit than that you cannot get! Gustav Mahler was also explicit in claiming that his symphonies were about his whole life and the suffering he had endured.

So could we listen to the above mentioned works knowing nothing whatsoever of the autobiography behind the music? Of course we can but in my view the real appreciation will only come with the knowledge of what lies behind the notes. I certainly appreciated Ein Heldenleben much more when I was fully aware of what every one of Strauss's quotes was.

As for the Shostakovich 7, I believe that it lies firmly in the tradition of Beethoven's example. Again, we don't need to know what circumstances lay behind it's composition or to have read books on Stalin's Russia or the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, but if you do all of this then the appreciation of why the notes were written in the way they were is very considerably deepened.

There are other works (Berg's Lyric Suite is one, Elgar's Violin Concerto another) that have autobiographical content and I daresay there are many that do but of which we know nothing.

Hope I've made some sense here.

[teamsaint]

Just a quick thought... if a composer "puts everything into" his/her music that will naturally include a response to personal/social circumstances, but how this process is operating and what traces it leaves behind might be something that not even the composer is fully aware of (although I would say it behoves composers to be as fully aware of what they're doing as possible), let alone listeners who might be moved to try and connect the music to what they know of its history. And this doesn't just apply to composers of course, or to composition: almost everything that any of us feels or expresses has an "autobiographical" dimension, including listening to music as well as creating it.

ah , so they DO have post structuralism in music !!

well, to a point, at least .

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

ah , so they DO have post structuralism in music !!

Viva la differance!

Pet is right, I think, in suggesting that the possibility of making explicitly autobigraphical statements in one's Music is first based in perceptions of the Music of Beethoven. That a composer's culture and training is implicit in his/her Music before the Nineteenth is clear - Bach didn't spontaneously write Fugues - he had to learn the craft from previous masters; Mozart didn't spontaneously start writing Kabuki at the age of four - he reproduced the sort of Music he'd heard around him. But, whilst it's easy to hear the Grosse Fuge as a metaphor for Beethoven's psychological experiences, it's not so common to listen to a Mediaeval isorythmic motet in such a way. Is it doing Beethoven an injustice, believing that this is what his Music is doing - is this done simply because we know more of Beethoven's biography than we do Perotin's or Dunstaple's? Do some listeners impose autobiographical elements into a work - in the way that many British listeners heard Britten's Music as that of a "conchie"?


Incidentally, ts, your #4 needs no "going easy" - it sums up many listeners' experience of coming to terms with long-scale, instrumental Musical structures exactly.

[Richard Tarleton]

Incidentally ferney, and OT, why yellowhammers? is this a personal obs.? One of my bird books (helpfully) suggests 1st notes of B5 as mnemonic for flight call of lesser redpoll.....

Sorry......

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Incidentally ferney, and OT, why yellowhammers? is this a personal obs.? One of my bird books (helpfully) suggests 1st notes of B5 as mnemonic for flight call of lesser redpoll.....

Sorry......

Not OT at all ... Beethoven is reported to have said of the opening five bars of the Fifth Symphomy on different occasions both that it represented "fate knocking at the door" and that it was based upon the song of the Yellowhammer. (Bars 244 - 249 perhaps closer to the Yellowhammer song here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxwghyuHzzQ

The song of the Lesser Redpoll is more like Stravinsky in Neo-Classical years:

http://www.avibirds.com/euhtml/Lesser_Redpoll.html

... and, whilst the Common Redpoll can be heard in Austria, the Lesser is ... well, precisely named.

A composer's transformation of the sounds of Nature that he remembered, and/or his ruminations on the rotten hand dealt him by Fate. Is the Symphony itself "made better" (or, for that matter, "worse") by listening with either of these concepts in mind?

[Richard Barrett]

ah , so they DO have post structuralism in music !!

Well, I wouldn't know about that! - what I was trying to say is firstly that listening can be just as creative an activity as composing or performing (I speak as someone who began as a listener and was somehow inexorably drawn to "expand" my listening by composing and performing), and secondly that the consequent "musical personality" that a listener brings to the music they hear has features which could be described as something akin to "stylistic" ones, and therefore could be said to possess an "autobiographical" dimension...

(sorry, I'm only intermittently online today, looking forward to taking a more active part in this discussion as it goes on!)

[Flay]

This discussion is well above me... but was not Shosty about the most autobiographical of all composers in the way he used the DSCH motif so frequently?

[teamsaint]

Well, I wouldn't know about that! - what I was trying to say is firstly that listening can be just as creative an activity as composing or performing (I speak as someone who began as a listener and was somehow inexorably drawn to "expand" my listening by composing and performing), and secondly that the consequent "musical personality" that a listener brings to the music they hear has features which could be described as something akin to "stylistic" ones, and therefore could be said to possess an "autobiographical" dimension...

(sorry, I'm only intermittently online today, looking forward to taking a more active part in this discussion as it goes on!)

You'll have to forgive my long ago and not so far away undergraduate understanding of these things, but this WIKI article would be of interest
.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

Derrida and other post structuralists suggest that the act of reading (in texts) is as creative (potentially) as writing.
AFAIR, "Texts" can be expanded into many (or any) other areas other than literature.. I have for a while been casually interested in how this is applied to music, and how academic musicians (or whoever !) have used these theories and approaches.
For those not familiar, one of the areas that structuralism covers is the way that words and meaning within texts are connected as part of a larger system. In music i guess these would be things like pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm.

Post structuralists (such as Derrida) tend to look for discontinuities , or to see (as post modernists do ?)" texts" as not part of a wider framework of meaning.

Apologies, the above is certainly a flawed understanding, but i do think we can learn about that the way we respond to music, in the way that RB suggests, in a practical way, from the way that critical theory is used around language.
I am entirely unsure where such approaches exist in the music world, though I am sure that they do.

[aeolium]

There are several reasons why I am not that keen on the attribution of autobiographical associations to pieces of music. The first is the obvious fact that music simply doesn't lend itself to this kind of ready association. The second is that it ought to be quite legitimate for someone to listen to a piece of music knowing nothing of the life of its composer or the circumstances of its creation - that knowledge ought not, for me, to be a prerequisite for listening to the music. The third is that to make such associations - even where it is possible to do so - is immediately to reduce the work to meanings that are individual and particular and away from those of more general and universal application. If one listens to a work, say an elegiac work which seems to have some tragic character, how does it assist one's perception of that character to learn that the work was written shortly after the death of someone close to the composer (as if that circumstance was in some way a necessary precondition for the composer to be able to write a work of that kind)? And surely composition does not work in that Pavlovian way. How does one account for the last movement of Mozart's G minor quintet in which an almost funereal sadness is replaced by a kind of effervescent joy as if the masks of tragedy and comedy had come together?

In some ways, ignorance of a composer's life can paradoxically allow a listener to hear a work free from preconceptions about it and try to work out such meanings as there are without imputing those derived from extra-musical events.

[EdgeleyRob]

This discussion is well above me... but was not Shosty about the most autobiographical of all composers in the way he used the DSCH motif so frequently?

Way over my head too.

A few lines from http://www.historynet.com/leningrad-...ony-of-war.htm sum up the Leningrad for me.

'The Leningrad Symphony stands as a courageous artistic expression forged in the crucible of conflict by one of the twentieth century's greatest symphonists.'

'It is, if you like,' said Shostakovich, 'a polemic against the statement that 'when the cannons roar the muse is silent." Continuing his thought in the Time magazine article, the composer declared, 'Here the muses speak together with the guns.'

This music grips me from the very first note,and that Bolero like episode in the first movement is just chilling to my ears.
If I could choose only one DSCH Symphony,the 7th would be the one.
I spent a couple of days in St Petersburg a few years ago.
Trying to imagine what it must have been like during those terrible times,and this music,were never far from my thoughts.