Re: Bob's Stupid Musical Question

-----Original Message-----
From: Juozas Rimas <JuozasRimas@TAKAS.LT>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Monday, April 29, 2002 4:22 PM
Subject: Re: Bob's Stupid Musical Question

>heh, I never thought music had to be about anything. The best music to me is
>almost always about nothing...

Instrumental music never has to be about anything ... but so often it is. The composer has a very clear emotional or æsthetic or intellectual feeling or idea, and this is what shapes the composition. When it's performed, the listener receives a great deal, often an overwhelming amount of the composer's intentions. People more expert than I may be able to explain some of this within the mechanical details of musical composition, but I regard it as a largely mystical kind of communication, through instrumental music, from one person's heart and mind to those of other people.

The best examples of this aren't like Pauline Kael's "all consumed entirely in the theater," but leave the listener with deep impressions and feelings that last, often for the rest of the listener's life. This music, or memories of it, transport us to unique emotional places -- probably very near the places the composer intended.

These impressions can't easily or successfully be described in words; that's one reason why instrumental music is so instantly accessible, while critical literature about music is a much less successful and far less accessible kind of communication. Only music speaks to us so directly and simply this way; words about music are pretty much doomed to fail.

A lot of you know what a fan of Charles Ives I am, and I'm particularly thinking of his symphonies as quite startling examples of instrumental music "being about" things. Ives had an enormous amount of political and cultural and historical "things" to communicate through his music, and often succeeded eerily and powerfully. And yet wordlessly.

During World War II, Samuel Barber was drafted into the US Army Air Corps, and its generals (who knew the talent they'd bagged) commissioned him to write a symphony about the newly emerging military tool of strategic air power -- the bombers that were leading the Allied war against the Axis. Barber hitched rides all over America on Air Corps bombers, absorbing the emotional experience of the machines and their crews, the loneliness and unique natural experience of flight, and then the might and power of this new instrument of war. Though Barber himself was unsatisfied with the symphony and tried to destroy it after the war, it's since been recorded by a modern New Zealand orchestra, and I find it a remarkable example of the communication of complex emotional and intellectual material through music. (It's certainly not at all what anyone would call "military music.")

The short answer is: Instrumental music is often "about something." And usually, only the music can explain what it's about, and only the heart and mind can understand what the composer meant it to be about.

Bob

>>But it seems to lack a soul or a meaning or a direction. It doesn't seem to be
>about anything ... not love, not >courage, not grief, not a celebration of
>bucolic nature things
>
>heh, I never thought music had to be about anything. The best music to me is
>almost always about nothing...
>
>Juozas Rimas Jr (not the one playing)
>http://www.mp3.com/juozasrimas (oboe, piano, strings)