 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: vjoet
Date: 2006-07-07 14:56
In a recent thread (Music from The Terminal) a poster mentioned a lack of meaning and depth in Viktor's Tale.
I'm approaching 60, but back in my teens, I had heard and ascribed to the idea that German music was deep, French dramatic, and Italian lyrical. The clear implication was the German was the best.
I spent almost 35 years away from music as I made my living. In that time I encountered somewhere a discussion that the very idea of depth in music was bogus. The meaning of music is the sounds, period. Nothing more, nothing less. To speak of depth in music is laughable.
Now mature, my thinking is along these lines:
1. The baroque commentators had it right: music must stir the heart.
2. Music that strays too far from being informed by traditional folk music is destined to footnotes in musicology. It seems all those we consider great composers and near-great share this common element: from Mozart, Debussy, Verdi and Mahler to Shostakovic and Stravinski, to John Williams, Hovhannes and Bernstein, there is that element, and element that --for lack of better word -- I'd call folk.
Can music be deep, in the sense of philosophy or theology? To my mature thinking, no, it can't be. But it can stir the heart deeply, and in that sense only it can be deep.
Any discussion?
vJoe
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Author: Bob Phillips
Date: 2006-07-07 15:37
In my opinion, certain elements of music are inborn to humans (maybe dogs, too). An insightful composer can reach those elements.
The music I enjoy the most is constructed creatively within some artistic conventions. Some "interesting" stuff gets rubbed against the walls of the conventions --where it becomes either intriguing or offensive.
Music that is bound by a small subset of the established conventions is short on "breadth" (if we won't allow depth), constrained, boring --perhaps realized by the use of "cute" lyrics, thumpy rhythms, or loudness.
I find it difficult to appreciate music built in a different set of conventions than those I'm familiar with. I enjoy my visits to the Thia resturant, but find the background music uninteresting.
Bob Phillips
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Author: vjoet
Date: 2006-07-08 13:12
This thread has taken a different direction. But it is still interesting.
I think any appreciation of music must stem from our (largely) unverbalized definition of music itself.
If the avant garde composers wish music to be explorations into acoustics and/or hearing, that is their right. If one of them wishes to sound a pitch for 20 minutes, and that is the substance of their composition, they may certainly do so. It doesn't mean I or any person or musician will sit 20 minutes listening to a tone and be expected to clap their hands afterwards.
If the avant garde composers wish to continually startle the audience by always presenting the unexpected, that is their right. They seem to ignore the fact that recognition of self-similarity and recurrence in waves is a very high mental faculty (identifying/recognizing the patterns over time), and is probably the one that makes music so captivating. If they want to do away with self-similarity and recurrence that is their right, but in so doing they make their music inaccessible, unenjoyable, and so much cacophony. Such composers regulate themselves to footnotes in the text books.
I recently bought a CD of Alla Pavlova's symphonies 1 and 2. For all the world #1 sounds like a composition thesis. It doesn't touch the heart, it startles, is unmemorable, and is noisy. #2 is brilliant, a worthy successor to Sibleus. Undoubtedly what she learned in writing #1 enriched her palate of possibilities, but only when she used that richer palate in the moving #2 did she find her voice, not experimental voice, but musical voice.
vJoe
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