----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 29, 2002 6:12
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)