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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