 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: mmatisoff
Date: 2016-07-20 20:28
I have a BA in English. As part of my degree, I deconstructed numerous novels and poems. By the time I graduated, I couldn't read fiction without looking for underlying themes or subtext. It was years before I began reading fiction again for pleasure; even then, I was critical of a writer's ability to write, to lose me in the story. I was wondering if conductors go through similar reactions when they spend years analyzing and deconstructing a piece music. Can they still hear the beauty inherent in a piece of music.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2016-07-20 22:34
Can't speak for conductors, or any professionals, but this is a topic I've thought of.
There can be dual-track appreciation. One track is simply responding to the content of the music, writing, or other. The other track is noting what the creator does, and how they do it, and how well it works - it's more about the process than the result. The two can get in each other's way. Either you do two takes, mostly satisfying one and then the other, or you sort of bounce back and forth as you go, somewhat satisfying both.
As a listener or reader I tend to bounce back and forth. Working on a piece I tend to focus more on analysis - what, how, etc. Hopefully the knowledge becomes a natural part of the performance, so that response to the content appears to be motivating the performer and is transferred to the listener. I guess that implies that performers hope to elicit pure response, rather than analysis, in their listeners. However, I think both modes of appreciation are normal.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2016-07-20 23:33
I am an educator who conducts student ensembles as well as a clarinetist performer myself. I'm not a professional conductor. I think that a conductor needs to be able to see the craft of a piece of music - the structure, the harmonic and melodic technique, the orchestration, etc. - in terms of how it builds toward the beauty that you describe. You start with the impression of beauty and musical value and then drill down to figure out what produces it. This is because there is another participant in the process, the audience, that is the nominal target of the work the performers do.
That said, I have played for many conductors who seemed only to be able to see the technical details and had no grasp of an overall meaning of the music they were working with - the conductor who has almost nothing to say except "it says piano - you're playing too loud" or "watch the baton - it isn't together!"
I'm not sure it ought to be different in reading written literature, but it more easily *can* be, because the reader has no responsibility to anyone else - the reader is the only audience for his or her specific reading (performance) of the literary work.
Karl
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Author: dorjepismo ★2017
Date: 2016-07-20 23:33
If you listen to one of the Furtwängler recordings of a Brahms symphony, you'll get a pretty good answer.
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Author: Lelia Loban ★2017
Date: 2016-07-20 23:36
Different people seem to respond quite differently to analyzing what we love. I have a B.A. in English Literature from the U. of California at Berserkeley and spent three years in the Ph.D. program in English at U.C. Davis before I had to drop out for financial reasons (after my dissertation director suddenly died and the only prof who could take over for her wanted me to mutate my topic). All that analysis didn't ruin literature for me. Quite the opposite. And it's no accident that over the years I morphed into a movie critic while doing a bit of (non-literary) fiction writing.
Similarly, my piano teacher loved teaching music theory, I loved learning it and the intense experience with him made me love music all the more. I'd try to understand things right down to the sub-atomic level if I had enough brain-power for the job. Okay, so I'm a nerd. There is one big down-side to being a research geek: It's hard to declare the research at an end and *finish* a project.
But, as an amateur musician, I don't have to declare an end to the work. I kind of like it that my clarinet playing sounds far from perfect. That means I've got an excuse to keep on practicing.
Lelia
http://www.scoreexchange.com/profiles/Lelia_Loban
To hear the audio, click on the "Scorch Plug-In" box above the score.
Post Edited (2016-07-20 23:41)
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Author: clarinetguy ★2017
Date: 2016-07-20 23:47
You asked an excellent question. Thinking back to my high school English classes, I sometimes joke that teachers have a way of sucking all the joy out of a book. Novel or short story reading sometimes becomes nothing more than a search for themes, climax, symbolism, etc.
I agree with Philip that there can be--and should be--a dual track appreciation.
Your question reminded of an interesting fact about George Gershwin. Early in his short composing career, when he wrote Rhapsody in Blue, he wasn't what most would call a disciplined composer. Being somewhat self-taught, he was often guided more by instinct than by established rules of musical composition. Many music critics and most of the established conservatory-trained composers of the time were aghast. In their view, nobody in his or her right mind could possibly take Gershwin seriously as a composer of symphonic music!
Gershwin didn't say much, but the criticism hurt. He later devoted a great deal of time learning the "right" way to do things, studying with Joseph Schillinger from 1932 to 1936. The results were mixed. He composed Porgy and Bess during this period, one of his best works. At the same time, his more "correct" Second Rhapsody and Variations on "I Got Rhythm" never became popular.
I suppose we could say Gershwin got the last laugh. His music is performed all the time, while much of the "correct" music of academic composers sits on shelves, seldom performed outside of university settings.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-07-23 02:30
Interesting question and a thousand thank yous for breaking the monotony of ligatures, reeds, etc. A bit of my own background: I'm a professional player with a good background in theory (music and lit) currently completing a dissertation that looks at the various uses of music in Joyce's Ulysses.
I don't see the interpretive acts of a conductor as all that different from a clarinet player (but perhaps the clarinetist needs to be a bit more egalitarian dealing with colleagues). When you form an interpretation of the Brahms Sonatas, for instance, are you then sick of them?
Though as I've learned more about music, some pieces/composers are less interesting to me. I don't particularly care to listen to Strauss's tone poems (his operas, however, I find incredibly beautiful); the trade off, of course, is that I've "gained" some other composers, like Chopin and Schumann. But to me, that process has to do with expanding my musical intelligence and not so much with the act of interpretation.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2016-07-23 14:35
I think you bring up an interesting point. Interpretation is just as fluid as the rest of our journey through life. Whether we even realize it or not, each time we come back to a familiar work, the way we approach it DOES change with the amount of experience we have had in between. You can listen to the same orchestral works conducted by the same conductor years apart and hear vast difference of almost every element starting with pace and moving to phrasing and articulation.
It's just the natural order of things...........we never stop learning.
................Paul Aviles
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-07-28 02:56
Music's immediacy is something that you can't argue with. You may find that you like different music at different times in your life. You may hear different things in a piece of music because you are different, or because the performer is different. You may react differently than the person sitting next to you. You may get bored.
I would highly recommend watching Bernstein's "The Unanswered Question". At the end of each show he comments upon his analysis of a piece of music. (I didn't think much of the grammatical part, but you might.) His deep understanding of harmony intensifies his experience of the music.
Musicians don't deconstruct music. You can't perform postmodern literary criticism on music. You couldn't very well play Beethoven as a feminist or Marxist. Beethoven is Beethoven. Music is simply human. It doesn't matter what color you are or what your political beliefs are, Mozart sounds the same. People might have widely differing interpretations, but interpretation isn't "criticism". Music can be intellectual as well, but it must have greatness and sensitivity of soul.
Some music is political in the sense that Beethoven is "revolutionary" while Bach is "conservative". However, music itself expresses the feelings, emotions, or spiritual experiences of people, not their political views. Beethoven's dedication of the Eroica symphony was political. (It was originally dedicated to Napoleon.) However, you don't have to know anything about the Napoleonic age to understand it. Nationalistic music is political (Smetana, Bartok, etc.), but again you don't have to know anything about that to enjoy, love, and understand it as a human being.
Musicians might do a lot of analysis of a work, but that's studying it's harmony and form. The literary equivalent would be something like "New Criticism". It's asking why a piece sounds the way it does, not trying to deconstruct what it is. When you play the notes, it is what it is. Harmony and form are like the matter of music. They are like colored bricks in a wall. You can rearrange the bricks into all sorts of patterns, but you can't rearrange them without re-writing the piece. (You would end up with PDQ Bach instead of J.S. Bach.)
Sometimes they try deconstruction with Opera, by changing the scenery, costumes, or characters. The Met did a white Othello recently. It isn't specifically musical. It still sounds the same.
Early Music is sort of like literary criticism, insofar as musicians try to interpret the way they think a piece would have sounded in 1700 or whenever. You might say that they "deconstruct" the sounds or approaches of the romantic and post-romantic period. However, they are interested in how it would have sounded when the composer wrote it. The are not deconstructing the piece, they are deconstructing it's romantic or modern mis-interpretation. They are trying to get at the original, not deconstruct the original. The process could be considered "criticism". They find the original manuscripts, read the old treatises on music, and come up with conclusions that reflect what the know.
The equivalent of musical deconstruction was atonal music, avant garde free Jazz, and things like that. It didn't go over well. It doesn't work because the laws of harmony are physical laws. Different kinds of music can use harmony in different ways (like Western Classical and Chinese Classical), but both rely on the natural overtone series at their core. Even "atonal" music has it's origin in the natural tonality the overtone series. It is literally inescapable.
Sometimes musicians say they are tired of hearing something the same way, or playing it the same way over and over, so they intentionally play it different somehow. This is just interpretation.
Sometimes great musicians "deconstruct" a piece by ignoring the tempos, dynamics, or even pitches of composers. I think they would object to it being called deconstruction. The decision isn't political or sociological. They are just making music. Even composers produced different versions of their own music, or re-worked it into other pieces.
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2016-07-28 03:04)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-07-28 22:22
Very interesting post Matthew!
Just a few points to keep the thread going:
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Musicians don't deconstruct music. You can't perform postmodern literary criticism on music. You couldn't very well play Beethoven as a feminist or Marxist. Beethoven is Beethoven. Music is simply human. It doesn't matter what color you are or what your political beliefs are, Mozart sounds the same. People might have widely differing interpretations, but interpretation isn't "criticism". Music can be intellectual as well, but it must have greatness and sensitivity of soul.
1. Music criticism can, and often does, borrow strategies from poststructuralist literary criticism. Michael Klein from Temple University, for example, has some very interesting essays drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan. And Kofi Agawu has several books on semiotics and music. (Just to name a few.)
2. Feminist and Marxist theories don't posit that a particular writer is/was a feminist or a Marxist; they show the ways in which underlying factors, such as gender, class, etc., may have shaped a writer or text. And this sort of criticism could influence how a performer interprets a piece: is Mozart's music a confirmation of enlightenment bourgeoisie rationality, or is its grace ironic and therefore subversive? Do you play it with absolute refinement, with a bit of edge (maybe faster tempos, more drastic color and dynamic changes, etc.), or do you not worry about it and let the audience make of it what they will?
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Musicians might do a lot of analysis of a work, but that's studying it's harmony and form. The literary equivalent would be something like "New Criticism". It's asking why a piece sounds the way it does, not trying to deconstruct what it is. When you play the notes, it is what it is. Harmony and form are like the matter of music. They are like colored bricks in a wall. You can rearrange the bricks into all sorts of patterns, but you can't rearrange them without re-writing the piece. (You would end up with PDQ Bach instead of J.S. Bach.)
Analysis is simply a tool; in music, however, it is also a form of criticism (see Joseph Kerman's famous article "How We Got Into Analysis"). But music isn't simply a case of "it is what it is." I could give you a half dozen analyses of a Schumann song, all of which are viable and all of which would affect the way you interpret the song. In this sense, music is even more difficult to get at than literature (and you see how many critical methods they've employed) because at least the building block of writing--the word (or the sign, in the lingo)--stands in for some thing. But music lacks that level of referential grounding; its comparatively high degree of abstraction therefore allows it to be analyzed and interpreted in a multitude of ways.
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The equivalent of musical deconstruction was atonal music, avant garde free Jazz, and things like that. It didn't go over well. It doesn't work because the laws of harmony are physical laws. Different kinds of music can use harmony in different ways (like Western Classical and Chinese Classical), but both rely on the natural overtone series at their core. Even "atonal" music has it's origin in the natural tonality the overtone series. It is literally inescapable.
This paragraph bothered me a little bit.
1. Atonal music and free jazz are styles of music, not a deconstruction of it.
2. Modal scales (the forerunners of tonality) were set in place before widespread knowledge of the overtone series (Descartes's treatise is the earliest writing on the overtone series that I know of). I'd therefore argue that tonality is much more nurture than nature. Otherwise, how would you account for the simultaneous rise of the major and minor modes when the minor third appears so late in the overtone series?
3. As a result, I find that critiques of atonal music on the basis of the overtone series don't hold up. It's like saying "abstract expressionist paintings don't work because pictorial representation is inescapable." Jean-Jacques Nattiez, in his book Music and Discourse, has an interesting discussion on music vs. noise, which seems to be what you're getting at (if you're interested).
Post Edited (2016-07-28 23:57)
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Author: Matt74
Date: 2016-07-29 00:33
Brycon,
Thanks for your comments. I think you are right when you said that words refer to something, whereas, strictly speaking, notes don't. I tried to come up with something to the same effect, but it got too complicated.
Yes, one could treat a piece of music, or any other piece of art, as if it were literature, making social an other comments about it, and then have this influence your playing. However, the basis for interpreting it that way is extra-musical, and the audience would have no idea what you were thinking. They just hear the music. Writing about music isn't making music.
If someone uses Marxist or Feminist critiques (or adopts any other "-ism") they are to that extent a Marxist or Feminist (or whatever), because "-isms" are ways of thinking. When you are writing it matters a great deal what you think about "gender", "class", etc. You will say different things. It doesn't matter when you play music. Wagner thought a great deal about being German, but you don't have to be German to like Wagner! (Or NOT like Wagner!) If someone decided that Mozart was bourgeois, and played him elegantly, the audience wouldn't know the difference. Later, they might say to themselves, "Hmm. Mozart must have been elegant." I doubt they would say, "Hmm. Mozart must have been subversive." You might think Haydn is funny, but he is. If you play Bach like a thundering stampede of buffalo for some reason, you frighten young children!
Music, like any art form, has social aspects. However, when most classical musicians make music they don't have any personal agenda in performing. It's music. A great musician shows us things in the music, and brings new things to the music, but doesn't make their performance a socio-political commentary on the music. At least, I don't think they should.
The harmonic series was understood well by the Ancient Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans. Plato uses the harmonic series in "The Timaeus". Boethius explained the knowledge passed down to him from the Greeks. The ancients constructed a seven step "major" scale by stacking perfect fifths. And of course, people have played trumpets and flutes from time immemorial, so they knew about overtones, even if they didn't analyze them mathematically like the Greeks.
When I said tonality, I didn't mean "Western Tonality", although I understand that was confusing. I meant any music that uses octaves, fourths, fifths, etc. Most forms of music are modal. The reason most of the world's music is some variation on pentatonic scales and 7 step scales is because the overtone series makes it work. The whole step derives from the distance between the fourth and the fifth, the half step the distance between the third and fourth.
Atonal music (at least the 12 tone sort) is based on the octave. Anything based on the octave is also based on the overtone series. Even equal temperament, which technically violates the overtone series, still has to respect the true octave, and the rest of the intervals are close enough to the real overtone series to sound like them. So, even the whole step, half step, and other intervals in atonal music are ultimately based on the overtone series. (Even quarter tones are theoretically based on equal temperament, and ultimately the natural scale.) Truly atonal music would have to avoid the octave and any interval which reminded the ear of any natural interval. That would be noise. Atonality is based in natural harmony, because it can't be otherwise, but is a deliberate attempt at destroying it.
Atonal music and Free Jazz are usually introduced as the ultimate logical extensions of harmony, etc. I don't think this is true. Atonality (literally "not tonal") is deconstructive because it deconstructs tonality. The purpose of a 12 tone row is to avoid any harmonic center. Free jazz is deconstructive because it deconstructs form.
IMO atonal music isn't really a style. If it all sounds the same it's only because, you can't really write in ANY style using only 12 tone rows.
Free Jazz is a style but depends upon the manner in which they play, and because you can't really improvise 12 tone rows. There is always some harmony.
- Matthew Simington
Post Edited (2016-07-29 00:38)
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Author: brycon
Date: 2016-07-29 02:50
Quote:
Yes, one could treat a piece of music, or any other piece of art, as if it were literature, making social an other comments about it, and then have this influence your playing. However, the basis for interpreting it that way is extra-musical, and the audience would have no idea what you were thinking. They just hear the music. Writing about music isn't making music.
That sort of interpretation is extra-musical in that it draws from ideas outside of the music itself; any viable sort of interpretation, however, whether it be feminist or Marxist, will use analysis for support (see Klein's writing, for example). And in that sense it isn't extra-musical: it's using the music to make the point.
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If someone uses Marxist or Feminist critiques (or adopts any other "-ism") they are to that extent a Marxist or Feminist (or whatever), because "-isms" are ways of thinking. When you are writing it matters a great deal what you think about "gender", "class", etc. You will say different things. It doesn't matter when you play music. Wagner thought a great deal about being German, but you don't have to be German to like Wagner! (Or NOT like Wagner!) If someone decided that Mozart was bourgeois, and played him elegantly, the audience wouldn't know the difference. Later, they might say to themselves, "Hmm. Mozart must have been elegant." I doubt they would say, "Hmm. Mozart must have been subversive." You might think Haydn is funny, but he is. If you play Bach like a thundering stampede of buffalo for some reason, you frighten young children!
It may not matter so much when you play music, but these sorts of things may be in the music itself (and we presumably want to be able to understand and interpret music).
I agree that if I apply, say, a Marxist reading to my performance of Mozart (not saying it makes sense--just for the sake of argument), of course no one in the audience will have the slightest idea. But it doesn't matter because music isn't a line of communication whereby a completely intelligible message is sent between the composer and the audience or between the performer and the audience (nor is writing for that matter). Only some of what a composer put into a piece will be realized by the performer. And only some of what the performer put into his/her interpretation will be realized by the audience. Nattiez refers to a piece of music as a "trace" in this respect.
All that is to say, yes, playing music isn't at all like writing about music. But criticism shouldn't be tossed out just because music isn't capable of delivering a clearly worded message. As a performer, criticism may influence the way you play, and certainly, as an audience member, it could change the way you think about music. (I'm attempting--poorly, admittedly--to make a distinction between composer, performer, and audience member as well as the various interpretive strategies applied by each.)
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The harmonic series was understood well by the Ancient Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans. Plato uses the harmonic series in "The Timaeus". Boethius explained the knowledge passed down to him from the Greeks. The ancients constructed a seven step "major" scale by stacking perfect fifths. And of course, people have played trumpets and flutes from time immemorial, so they knew about overtones, even if they didn't analyze them mathematically like the Greeks.
When I said tonality, I didn't mean "Western Tonality", although I understand that was confusing. I meant any music that uses octaves, fourths, fifths, etc. Most forms of music are modal. The reason most of the world's music is some variation on pentatonic scales and 7 step scales is because the overtone series makes it work. The whole step derives from the distance between the fourth and the fifth, the half step the distance between the third and fourth.
The topic of scales is massive. Here's a short version:
In Boethius' treatise, he classifies consonances and dissonances through ratios derived from the monochord, not as discrete units of the overtone series (as Descartes did). Once he had realized the ratios of the various intervals, Boethius then noticed that combinations of the smaller ones, 6 whole steps (ratio of 9:8), for example, failed to equal an octave (2:1). He didn't have a satisfactory solution to the problem. But he wasn't really writing for practicing musicians anyways; he was more concerned with the mathematical issues.
When Boethius' writings were rediscovered around the 9th century, musicians would pay lip service to his classifications but also note that practicing musicians did their own thing. Thirds, for instance, were increasingly treated as a consonant interval, which shows that modal thinking had arisen on its own, outside of the mathematical writings of the Greeks.
(Also, if I remember correctly, the Pythagorean scale was given its name by later theorists, in homage to Pythagoras not because he had derived a scale from fifths.)
Bernstein's lectures are an attempt to apply generative grammar to the history of music. But tonality's origins lie in the tetrachordal scale units of church musicians, not in the overtone series. You can't really apply Chomskyan ur-theories to the whole enterprise of music.
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Atonal music and Free Jazz are usually introduced as the ultimate logical extensions of harmony, etc. I don't think this is true. Atonality (literally "not tonal") is deconstructive because it deconstructs tonality. The purpose of a 12 tone row is to avoid any harmonic center. Free jazz is deconstructive because it deconstructs form.
IMO atonal music isn't really a style. If it all sounds the same it's only because, you can't really write in ANY style using only 12 tone rows.
Free Jazz is a style but depends upon the manner in which they play, and because you can't really improvise 12 tone rows. There is always some harmony.
I see what you mean by deconstruct. But at the same time, any new mode of expression deconstructs something that came before it. Following the same line of thinking, C.P.E. Bach is a deconstruction of his father's polyphony (and Monteverdi is a deconstruction of himself). At a certain point, that way of thinking becomes too broad to be useful.
Post Edited (2016-07-30 01:24)
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