-----Original Message----- >heh, I never thought music had to be about
anything. The best music to me isFrom: 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 >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
-----Original Message----- >>But it seems to lack a soul or a meaning or
a direction. It doesn't seem to beFrom: 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 >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) |