Musical Homophobia - or The Homophobia Histories

[Richard Tarleton]

If you think you can understand Mahler or Shostakovich without reference to their lives I would VERY respectfully suggest you are kidding yourself.

Or Dowland, or Victoria - quite, in other words

[scottycelt]

An example perhaps?

Bruckner was 'naive' ... even akin to 'a village idiot'.

Will that do?

So what is "the music"? Surely it consists largely or completely of sounds whose significance and interrelationships you understand as a result of being more or less immersed in the culture of a particular society at a particular time. In other words there's no real dividing line between "the music" and its social/cultural environment (and perhaps that of the composer too), so when you say "the music is the only thing that matters" what exactly is it that's the only thing that matters, as far as you're concerned?

I've already said it's the music ... nothing else. It either moves me or it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Bach can move me ... sadly, Mozart rarely does. Music can be a great challenge to 'understand' as well!

I'm not interested in social agendas or have dreams about Gay Pride, the Catholic Church, Karl Marx or whatever when I listen to music... in fact you could say music is my escape route from having to endure continuing to listen to any of that. It's a very personal thing.

I just listen to the music ... is this considered particularity odd and unusual when listening to music?

[MrGongGong]

I just listen to the music ... is this considered particularity odd and unusual when listening to music?

I've been away so forgive me for being slow
BUT
Do you mean by 'the music' just the sonic element ?
Or (in a more "Smallist" sense ) Musicking ?

(time for some Dahlhaus again ?)

[Mr Pee]

music [/I]... is this considered particularity odd and unusual when listening to music?

I wouldn't have thought so. But apparently we've been getting it wrong all these years, along with millions of other music lovers.

[scottycelt]

I've been away so forgive me for being slow
BUT
Do you mean by 'the music' just the sonic element ?
Or (in a more "Smallist" sense ) Musicking ?

(time for some Dahlhaus again ?)

Welcome back, Mr GG!

What I mean is that I either like/appreciate the music or I don't.

[MrGongGong]

Welcome back, Mr GG!

What I mean is that I either like/appreciate the music or I don't.

In other words there's no real dividing line between "the music" and its social/cultural environment (and perhaps that of the composer too), so when you say "the music is the only thing that matters" what exactly is it that's the only thing that matters, as far as you're concerned?

?

Things other than sonic phenomena are part of "the music" ...... which doesn't mean that you have to believe in god (or even God) to appreciate Bach

[Mr Pee]

If you think you can understand Mahler or Shostakovich without reference to their lives I would VERY respectfully suggest you are kidding yourself. Oh yes, you can ENJOY almost any sequence of sounds if your ear can make the basic tonal and melodic connections. If that's enough for you, OK - but how very limiting to your pleasure and your (undoubted) intelligence.
Music doesn't exist in an aesthetic or sonic vacuum. Hearing Wagner at 15 you came to it across innumerable experiences of music, film, social and solitary life, your own dreams and early sexual feelings, friendships and relationships.... All this bears down upon what you make of Wagner, howsoever unconsciously. No-one's denying the power of the sounds themselves to "move" you, but even if you see the musical responses of your brain as existing in some tiny secret cerebral compartment, those experiences are transformed as they become emotions, memories and a part of your identity.

Well, first of all, you have no idea how I respond to the music I enjoy, so to suggest that I am kidding myself in that response is pretty patronising. My responses are based on MY emotions and cultural background. They have diddly squat to do with the cultural climate at the time the music was written. I have read plenty on Wagner, and on Tchaikovsky; I've also read Testimony, and Northrop-Moore's "Elgar: A Creative Life", which I think is one of the finest composer biographies ever written. Did I learn from theses books? Yes. Did they increase my understanding of the composer? Yes. Did reading them alter my emotional response to the music? No. Because the music is all there is when you are listening to it.

Go on enjoying your tunes, but accept how very limited an experience of music it is.

Even more patronising than your earlier comment.

[MrGongGong]

Because the music is all there is when you are listening to it.

And the question still is, WHAT do you mean by "the music" ?
Are you suggesting that it is extra-contextual ?

[scottycelt]

?

Things other than sonic phenomena are part of "the music" ...... which doesn't mean that you have to believe in god (or even God) to appreciate Bach

I've already indicated I prefer the music of the Protestant Bach to that of the Catholic Mozart ... when it comes to the music their personal beliefs (or lack of them) are neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned.

As for the reportedly atheist/agnostic Shostakovich I loved his Fifth Symphony long before I knew very much about the background. 'A Soviet Artist's Response To Just Criticism' always seemed to me a laughably political title made up by some brainless Stalinist journalist. Shostakovich is reported to have described it in much more general human terms.

Whatever, I love it just like I do many of his other symphonies!

[Tony Halstead]

This is very moving and heart-warming.
You are coming across as a sensitive soul, a cultured and musically highly knowledgeable human being.

[Resurrection Man]

Bruckner was 'naive' ... even akin to 'a village idiot'.

Will that do?



I've already said it's the music ... nothing else. It either moves me or it doesn't. It's as simple as that. Bach can move me ... sadly, Mozart rarely does. Music can be a great challenge to 'understand' as well!

I'm not interested in social agendas or have dreams about Gay Pride, the Catholic Church, Karl Marx or whatever when I listen to music... in fact you could say music is my escape route from having to endure continuing to listen to any of that. It's a very personal thing.

I just listen to the music ... is this considered particularity odd and unusual when listening to music?

Oh but you are missing the 'angst', dear boy, the 'angst'. You can't possibly understand or appreciate the music unless you know what a dreadful life the composer led....how he/she/inbetween/thinking about it was as a four-year old, when their favourite teddy-bear was roughly taken from them at such a tender age....how this appalling life-experience manifested itself twenty years later....oh the angst, the angst.

[scottycelt]

This is very moving and heart-warming.
You are coming across as a sensitive soul, a cultured and musically highly knowledgeable human being.

Thank you ...

However, if you are referring to me, I'm rather more comfortable coming across as an insensitive, uncouth, musically-ignorant Neanderthal, if you don't mind.

I have no great ambition to be just one of the forum hoi-polloi, you know ...

[Tony Halstead]

I have no great ambition to be just one of the forum hoi-polloi, you know

In the absence of emoticons...
<laugh>
<laugh>
<laugh>

[ahinton]

Oh but you are missing the 'angst', dear boy, the 'angst'. You can't possibly understand or appreciate the music unless you know what a dreadful life the composer led....how he/she/inbetween/thinking about it was as a four-year old, when their favourite teddy-bear was roughly taken from them at such a tender age....how this appalling life-experience manifested itself twenty years later....oh the angst, the angst.

If that's supposed to be a constructive and enlightening comment, then God help us all.

[ahinton]

It all depends what you mean by "appreciate" doesn't it...

If you think you can understand Mahler or Shostakovich without reference to their lives I would VERY respectfully suggest you are kidding yourself. Oh yes, you can ENJOY almost any sequence of sounds if your ear can make the basic tonal and melodic connections. If that's enough for you, OK - but how very limiting to your pleasure and your (undoubted) intelligence.
Music doesn't exist in an aesthetic or sonic vacuum. Hearing Wagner at 15 you came to it across innumerable experiences of music, film, social and solitary life, your own dreams and early sexual feelings, friendships and relationships.... All this bears down upon what you make of Wagner, howsoever unconsciously. No-one's denying the power of the sounds themselves to "move" you, but even if you see the musical responses of your brain as existing in some tiny secret cerebral compartment, those experiences are transformed as they become emotions, memories and a part of your identity.

Personally, if someone has an intense experience with Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, I am amazed that they WOULDN'T want to know more about how it came into existence... (which brings us back to exactly why my threadstarter protested about the Russian Government's pressure upon a filmmaker to airbrush Tchaikovsky's homosexuality out of his biography).

Beethoven and the Heiligenstadt testament? Mahler removing the third hammer blow from the finale of his 6th? Even Bruckner's battle with fear and doubt in the 9th is the more terrifying if you understand how he saw His Creator...

Go on enjoying your tunes, but accept how very limited an experience of music it is.

I'm quoting this because it makes so much sense that it needs to be put up again so that the doubters and the complacent can perhaps re-read it and think about it once again!

Of course no music can be or ever was written in utter disregard of the social situation in which its composer wrote it, just as each individual's response to it will be an individual response born of an understanding or a lack of understanding of that situation; it works both ways, to the extent that, whilst "the music itself" (i.e. its component parts of structure, narrative, melody, harmony, rhythm and all the rest) can and does indeed make its own presence felt and can and does stimulate a variety of intellectual and emotional responses in the individual listener, it has not and cannot have been created in any kind of vacuum to the point at which that is all that's demanded of it by its recipients. Woould Bach's Cantatas, Chopin's Études or Bruckner's Symphonies have been the same - or had the same effect on listeners - had their composers been living and working in Los Angeles? Would Shostakovich's works have been identical had he been composing in England or Sessions's or Krenek's or Pettersson's or Liszt's or (fill in the blanks) have been the same had they been functioning in different countries at different times and with different people around them than was the case in each instance? I think that some of the problem here is that music's ability to start where words leave off (cliché though it has long been) risks unwittignly attracting confusion of thought of the kind that makes some believe that it therefore exists entirely outside any "extra-musial" considerations and others that it cannot exist meaningfully unless the listener is able to understand and appreciate every detail of the circumstances of its composition and the relevance of those circumstances to the nuts and bolts of the music.