Classical Listening

[Babbalanja]

I agree that there are incidents in contemporary art that strike me as worthy of the overused analogy with the "Emperor's New Clothes"... but quite often this analogy is presented by those who have made little or no attempt to understand, let alone appreciate, what they would denigrate. Where the "presumption of superiority" irritates me is when academics or tied-in-the-wool Modernists would dismiss the opinions of anyone who does not embrace their musical idols or artists/composers who dare to work within an accessible (hence outdated) style. It is quite possible to be well acquainted with and knowledgeable of Modern art and dislike Duchamp, DeKooning, and Warhol, just as it is quite possible to be knowledgeable of contemporary classical music and not be all that fond of Ligetti or Stockhausen. (By the way... I actually quite like Ligetti's Mechanical Music... elements of Bach and contrapuntal structure... but found the 100 Metronomes piece so retarded as to virtually ruin the disc)

I'm glad someone else thinks the "Emperor's New Clothes" metaphor is overused. It demonstrates another facet of the double-standard that works against new music. It seems there's no amount of suspicion that's unwarranted when it comes to contemporary music: people seem quite content to be wary of the motives of unfamiliar composers, as if it's the worst thing in the world to find value in a work that the composer isn't wholly committed to. It never occurs to such listeners that the catalog of prolific composers such as Mozart and Haydn may be full of hackwork that sounds just fine to our ears.

And the performance art stunts of Cage and Ligeti (which comprise only a small subset of their works) seem to be all that music fans care to know about their output. Instead of giving them credit for a creative sense of humor or for making comments on the nature of performance, listeners revile them for not being serious enough in their craft.

Then there's the accusation of elitism that conservative listeners launch against composers of new music. Such listeners delight in rewriting history so that most of the 20th century becomes a Dark Age where noisy, avant-garde music was forced on hapless audiences by a totalitarian establishment. Conventional composers, according to this mythology, were harassed at universities and driven underground because of the stranglehold that serialism had over every aspect of musical performance, production, and broadcast. This comical fantasy allows conservatives to feel virtuous in cheering for the underdogs, even though their favored composers share the same Romantic musical values that have dominated serious music for centuries.

The passivity of the modern listener has to be identified as as a major problem in this matter. Thanks to modern recording, there's no limit to the amount of times a listener can hear a work. The prospect of gaining familiarity with new music has never been easier. However, instead of taking advantage of the possibilities of new technology in expanding their horizons, listeners have decided to use it merely to collect and compare countless different versions of the same warhorses. Though they'll claim that they're open to new music, most music fans adopt listening habits that ensure that they're exposed to and responsive to very little.

Regards,

Istvan

[Petrarch's Love]

Ah, a little musical debate cropping up around the classical thread, eh?

Babalanja--I do sympathize with your point that it's important to keep music vital and innovative. Personally speaking, I can't say that I connect easily to more atonal music as a genre, but am open to listening to new music, and have been rewarded with finding some pieces and composers I really enjoy and/or find interesting as a result of giving things a try even when it doesn't sound like the kind of thing I would like. At the same time, I wonder about this:

However, I'll stick my neck out and say that I think new music would be a lot better understood if it were programmed more by orchestras. The Rite of Spring, for instance, is a radical work which still has the power to annoy conservative listeners. Not everyone loves it, but it's part of the standard repertoire. There's nothing mysterious about this, and it's got nothing to do with its musical character or artistic aims. Because it's frequently performed (thanks, Disney), it's familiar enough to audiences to make a dent in the popular consciousness. This, in turn, serves to motivate future performances.

I think it's unfair to point the finger at orchestras in this case, and not even the right analysis of why and how a piece can become "mainstream." Orchestras cannot actually spend huge amounts of their time putting on experimental pieces because they will go under. They need to put on programs that will sell tickets so that they can maintain their hall, pay their musicians, and keep in business. I know that I myself, while I enjoy hearing some unfamiliar music on a program, am much more likely to spend the money out of a modest budget and spend the time schlepping downtown for a concert made up mostly of pieces I know already or a style I am sure that I will enjoy than I am likely to take a gamble on a program made up entirely of new untested pieces that are probably atonal or experimental. I have had more unpleasant listening experiences with the latter than otherwise, and so I am not likely to invest time and money in trying more of the same. The majority of people interested in classical music (who are in turn a minority of the listening population at large) seem to feel the same way about taking a gamble when going out to the symphony, and I don't really see what the pay off is (either in terms of the tangible money intake or the intangible reward of an enthusiastic group of listeners to perform for) for an orchestra in putting on programs that are unlikely to draw the core music fans, let alone a portion of the more general audience. While I agree that it's a good idea for orchestras to be open to playing newer works, I do think that it's only reasonable for an orchestra to not put something on until there's a decent indication that there will be an audience for a work and that it's something a certain percentage of people will be receptive to.

The good news in this day and age is that the concert hall is not the only way people can hear music. Music has the chance to get into people's heads via film, TV, youtube, this thread, etc. You even suggest this in your comment above. Part of the reason that The Rite of Spring was able to become quite widely accepted was not because it was played more in orchestra halls, but because of the exposure it got in Disney's Fantasia and elsewhere. The orchestras began playing it because it had become popular and was something people were interested in coming to a symphony hall to hear, not the other way around. As I said above, I am unlikely to buy tickets to hear a purely experimental music programme, but I will certainly listen outside my comfort zone on Pandora or when watching a film, or when a friend plays a recording for me. That's the way music of almost any kind makes the transition to being something that will sell tickets. One can certainly see the effect of film as an influential place to draw listeners in the way one strand of modern orchestral music, that of movie soundtracks such as those by John Williams and others, has in recent years been increasingly performed in symphony halls and draws wildly successful crowds of listeners.


This brings us to your complaints about the "passivity of the modern listener" and the burden he or she should bear. Again, while I certainly understand what you mean when you say that some music will take more time and thought, even effort, to appreciate than others, I don't know that I agree with your basic assumption that it is fundamentally the fault of the listener for being too "passive." (I also don't know that the modern listener is, on average, significantly more or less passive than the listener of the past. There are certainly more potential listeners for any kind of music in the age of recordings than there ever were before.)

I'm amused to hear that people object to the "presumption of superiority" that characterizes arrogant Modernists. This represents the same double standard I mentioned above. Listeners are not going to get much out of new music without hearing a little about the compositional methods, and that might seem overly cerebral to casual listeners. But how much are they getting out of Mozart or Schubert's painstakingly crafted works if they know nothing about sonata form, for example? I'm not a composer or music theorist myself, but I at least realize I have to know the basics about this music or I'm just using it as ear candy."

First of all, I don't agree with this. Mozart and Schubert can absolutely be appreciated without any knowledge of the sonata form. That is one of the reasons that they are composers who not only continue to be performed but to draw in people from outside the classical aficionado circles. It is one of the great things about music as an art form that it can speak to a person's emotions directly without any need for intellectual explanation. Absolutely knowing something about music will enhance a person's experience of it, and will help them to have a deeper, richer listening experience, but outside knowledge is not necessary to having a fulfilling listening experience. To refer to listening without knowledge as treating music as "ear candy" is to diminish the value of the fact that a person can have a very powerful and meaningful experience with music even when the intellectual side of the brain is turned off. Indeed, this is probably the part of the musical experience that all of us (knowledgeable and ignorant alike) treasure most. I think it's a great mistake as someone who appreciates classical music of any kind to say that a person cannot appreciate certain music without basic knowledge.

This is what turns a large number of people off the idea of so much as trying a classical music concert. I cannot count the number of times I've brought a friend to a classical concert and had that person say that they've never been to something like this because they don't know enough about music, that they wouldn't ever have come at all if they weren't with someone like myself who knows about this stuff. When I'm with someone like this my policy is to say almost nothing about the intellectual side of the music, the form, etc. before we've heard some of the music. I always reply to this kind of comment that this music is not about knowing something, and that anyone can appreciate "classical" music, but that you do need to listen carefully and really give it your full attention. I let the person I'm with listen and feel what's going on in the music, and usually that person comes out at the interval with some kind of opinion and often a number of questions. That's the point, after they've got their feet wet, when it's helpful to start teaching someone about something like the sonata form and giving them a vocabulary to express things about what they've experienced. Yes, it's true that classical music is going to take more thought and attention to get into than the typical pop song that a more general audience is used to, so I agree that there may be more effort of some kind necessary on the listener's part, but I think attentive listening is a different thing than having to have specialized knowledge, and I think that's a distinction that it would be helpful for people to make when speaking to people who aren't classical music buffs and who may see this talk about needing to know certain things in order to appreciate music as, not only a barrier to ever being able to get into this stuff, but also a sign that the stuff will not speak to them on a non-intellectual or abstact level and thus may not be worth the effort of getting into.

The bottom line is that there's a highly emotional quality to music appreciation, and new music just isn't as cozy and familiar to most listeners as Romantic music.

I think this is a good point...though perhaps not in quite the way you mean. Yes, familiarity may play a part in this. It takes some time for people to adjust to new things. I'm not sure, however, that this is solely where you can lay the blame for more modern music not being as popular as, say, romantic music. There's also an issue with the way much of more modern music is aiming to make people feel. Many 20th/21st century pieces are trying to be disturbing, unsettling, generally set the listener off kilter, and though I think there are some brilliant pieces written in this kind of mode, I don't know that you can entirely blame people if they don't want to regularly submit themselves to being unsettled and shaken up by the music they're listening to. Frankly, I think it's this emotional component rather than anything to do with an intellectual challenge on the part of modern music that makes it less accessible to people. Speaking for myself, I do appreciate certain modern pieces, but I know I have to be in the right mood and frame of mind to experience them in a way that I don't have to when listening to other types of music. Last year my university had a four day series of concerts making up a Messiaen festival, and I attended nearly all of it. Having some inkling of what I was going into with all Messiaen all the time, I went into it in a spirit of intellectual interest and emotional openness as a listener, and that worked fairly well, but parts were still rough going. Some of the pieces were really wonderful and fascinating, but some of his work can become rather oppressive in its eerie and strained strangeness. On the final day of the concert series I already had a headache, I had been struggling with a bad case of writer's block most of the day, and the end of time was more or less the last feeling I wanted to embody. I've never felt that kind of reluctance coming into Mozart after a bad day, which I think speaks to one of the reasons that Mozart is more universally popular than Messiaen. I'm not a person who shies away from being intellectually challenged, but I do shy away from having uncomfortable emotional experiences when I'm just not up for them.

If I'm in the right mood I can find a lot to appreciate in Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, or Shoenberg's Pierrot Luniere, or one of Shostakovich's string quartets, but if I'm not in just the right mental or emotional state those works will make a bad mood worse, may even induce an emotional funk where none was before, and can simply drive me crazy. On the other hand, regardless of what my frame of mind is, if I turn on most pieces by Bach, Mozart, Brahms, Vivaldi, and many others, I know that I not only won't be dragged down by the experience, but have many times been lifted up and healed by such listening. I think it only stands to reason that people are going to more frequently seek out an experience that they know is going to be helpful and enjoyable than they are going to force themselves to undergo something that may be intentionally either forcing them to confront something painful or simply be unnerving on a more general level. No, not all modern classical music has this sort of disconcerting effect, but it is a huge characteristic of much of the genre, and I think it's this unnerving emotional quality rather than an intellectual knowledge issue that needs to be addressed regarding modern music.

It could indeed be a way into defending this sort of music as well as a way of understanding what turns people off about it. Clearly genres like heavy metal and punk rock have a huge mass appeal because they tap into angry, dissonant, negative emotions. Part of the catharsis and confrontation with the messier side of life that people get out of that kind of more popular music could also be a way into explaining to people some of the things one can get out of dissonance in classical compositions. Or, similarly, such "uncomfortable" music might be explained by an analogy to "uncomfortable" or unsettling themes in films or books, or other kinds of art. People get that you're not going to come out of Schindler's List or some of Bergman's darker films with an up feeling, but that it is still worthwhile to confront what is expressed in such films, and atonality and dissonance are sometimes used in very analogous ways to help us confront and deal with life's less pleasant or less "harmonious" aspects. Or, you might compare the sort of wry, sometimes dark, sometimes simply offbeat sense of humor in certain modern musical compositions to the writing style of someone like Vonnegut. These sorts of comparisons may be more helpful for conveying the sort of purpose this music serves than simply saying that a person simply can't understand it without being more intellectual/academic in his or her musical approach.

[Babbalanja]

PL,

Thanks for the response. I really don't consider this a debate, just knowledgeable fans trading opinions.

Once again, I have a reply from a listener who is more open-minded than average! I envy you going to the Messiaen concert, and I commend you for being able to go outside your safety zone and enjoy it.

I think the analysis you made about the economics of symphony orchestras and modern music is an oft-told tale that doesn't jibe with the reality of the concert hall. Just look at what Esa Pekka Salonen did in his nearly two decades conducting the LA Phil: he programmed a lot of contemporary music (much of which had been commissioned by the orchestra) and his tenure was wildly successful. James Levine has done much the same here at the BSO. Am I saying that orchestras would do fine without the standard repertoire? No. But the notion that reliance on contemporary music is commercial suicide isn't borne out by the facts.

Sticking with the old warhorses is a compromise that bears a lot of blame for the state of symphonies today. In the long run, that tactic merely reinforces the impression that classical music is about the dead guys. As the aging audience that prefers their old favorites dies off, no new fans are taking their place. If the concert hall is to survive, it has to remain relevant and not merely become a musical museum.

I really disagree with this statement:

Mozart and Schubert can absolutely be appreciated without any knowledge of the sonata form. That is one of the reasons that they are composers who not only continue to be performed but to draw in people from outside the classical aficionado circles.

This is like saying that someone who hasn't developed a palate for fine wine can appreciate a rare Chateau Latour. He can drink it, and may even enjoy it (though chances are he's not going to), but the notion of appreciation doesn't enter into it. In the same way, just being in the room while Mozart is playing doesn't constitute appreciation.

Give Mozart and Schubert some credit for the depth of their genius: their music shouldn't be reduced to ear candy. If a listener doesn't even understand basics like sonata form, this brilliant, painstakingly crafted art is just pleasant melodies, nothing more. The same can be said of modern music: if you don't make the effort to engage this music, to understand its aims, and to condition your expectations of it, it will just be (as you said) an unpleasant listening experience and nothing more.

Regards,

Istvan

[stlukesguild]

Babbalanja- I'm glad someone else thinks the "Emperor's New Clothes" metaphor is overused.

Overused... or misused. Before one goes about declaring that the emperor has no clothes... that contemporary art or music is a hoax... it might do well to make a concerted effort toward understanding it. Seriously, Chinese opera does nothing for me... and there are other art forms that leave me equally baffled or uninterested. Still I would avoid making a rush judgment about whether the aesthetic of Chinese opera or the Japanese tea ceremony were a joke without having made some attempt toward understanding it.

Babbalanja- It demonstrates another facet of the double-standard that works against new music. It seems there's no amount of suspicion that's unwarranted when it comes to contemporary music: people seem quite content to be wary of the motives of unfamiliar composers, as if it's the worst thing in the world to find value in a work that the composer isn't wholly committed to. It never occurs to such listeners that the catalog of prolific composers such as Mozart and Haydn may be full of hackwork that sounds just fine to our ears.

Yes... there may be "hackwork"... by the standards of Mozart's and Haydn's finer works... but these obviously are only truly recognized with experience... just as I assume that I could recognize the "hackwork" by Raphael, Rubens, or Modigliani far easier than someone with less experience in looking at art. But one cannot fully blame the audience. Art is a two-way communication. If the audience is expected to be willing to put forth a degree of effort, the artist also needs to consider the wants, needs, and expectations of the audience. We have the Romantic/Modernist notion where the artist needs not give the least concern to the audience as long as he or she follows his or her vision. "Self Expression" is the rallying call... but somehow I don't imagine that Michelangelo or Rubens or Haydn or Bach could have got away with churning out an art which left the audience baffled... or annoyed.

Babbalanja- And the performance art stunts of Cage and Ligeti (which comprise only a small subset of their works) seem to be all that music fans care to know about their output. Instead of giving them credit for a creative sense of humor or for making comments on the nature of performance, listeners revile them for not being serious enough in their craft.

I'll grant you this... admittedly not having explored Cage or Ligeti to the extent I have explored Mozart or Bach. Yes... there are sub-par works by the masters... even musical jokes... such as Mozart's pornographic lieder. On the other hand, the problem may owe much to the critics and historians who have made so much out of those jokes. Cage's 4:33 has become virtually the single piece which is always talked about... just as Duchamp's Fountain (the urinal)... is championed by the critics as some grand challenge to the notion of what art is, when in reality the work was never intended to be seen as an actual work of art, but rather as a prop in a comic performance piece.

Babbalanja- Then there's the accusation of elitism that conservative listeners launch against composers of new music. Such listeners delight in rewriting history so that most of the 20th century becomes a Dark Age where noisy, avant-garde music was forced on hapless audiences by a totalitarian establishment. Conventional composers, according to this mythology, were harassed at universities and driven underground because of the stranglehold that serialism had over every aspect of musical performance, production, and broadcast.

This accusation may be an exaggeration... but it certainly is rooted in a degree of fact. The avant garde always evolves into the academy... and quite often abuses its power... as a form of taking revenge for those years when they were the underdogs. One can easily document the ascension of Modernism to academia in American art schools. Drawing departments were dismantled. Even the tools of life drawing were destroyed: vast collections of plaster busts were ordered smashed. (The Pittsburgh Museum of Art houses one of the surviving collections of such casts of Greek and Roman sculpture and even entire facades of Gothic cathedrals. The collection is akin to walking through a 3-D art history book.) Figurative painters were muscled out of their positions. Students were pressured to conform to the teacher's vision. Joseph Albers at Yale was notorious, and his mistreatment of students who did not share his vision on art included students of a conservative bent to the most experimental (Robert Rauschenberg, for example). Such a prejudice against anything that did not fit in with the teacher's own vision of what art should be, remained even during the time when I earned my degree at one of the leading art schools in the nation. Obviously, the more experimental aspects of Modernism never supplanted the Romanticist drive in other aspects of the culture: in film scores, in the concert halls, or in the public tastes. Such a dominance by tied-in-the-wool Modernists is no longer a reality. We now live in an era when there is no clear notion of where the cutting edge is... (although now there is something of a rise in academia of faculty who were part of Pop and Post-Pop which was something of an antithesis of late Modernism). As a result we have Minimalists, Neo-Romantics, Late Modernists, Polystylists, Neo-Impressionists, etc... and none seems to have a clear hold on academia or the music press/critics.

Petrarch's Love- I think it's unfair to point the finger at orchestras in this case... Orchestras cannot actually spend huge amounts of their time putting on experimental pieces because they will go under. They need to put on programs that will sell tickets so that they can maintain their hall, pay their musicians, and keep in business.

This is where a degree of hypocrisy enters into the equation. One the one hand we have the artists who demand the right of "self expression"... the freedom to create whatever they wish without the least concern for the demands of the audience and patrons. One the other hand we have the same artists blaming this audience and these patrons when they refuse to financially support their experimentation. We live within a free market system. We cannot expect that the audience... the larger public... should be expected to financially support something that does not resonate with them... something that quite often makes no attempt to engage the audience. Of course the least suggestion that an artist should make an attempt to engage the audience... to consider their wants or needs... is dismissed under the Romantic/Modernist thinking as pandering... "selling out"... as if Shakespeare was a sell out... or Mozart was a sell out. I don't believe the gap between the audience and the Modernist artists can be solely blamed upon either party... but the reality is that I doubt that this gap is going to be closed by the disinterested audience. It needs to be the artists who make an attempt to engage the audience... to draw them in.

PL-The good news in this day and age is that the concert hall is not the only way people can hear music. Music has the chance to get into people's heads via film, TV, youtube, this thread, etc.

True... and we might do well to remember that while John Cage does not have the audience Mozart now has, neither of them have the audience share of Lady Gaga. Classical music has an admittedly limited, but still sizable audience, and if we measure the sales of CDs I might even suggest that John Cage and Ligeti and certainly Philip Glass may just have a larger audience than Mozart or Bach ever enjoyed during their lifetime.

Babbalanja- Listeners are not going to get much out of new music without hearing a little about the compositional methods, and that might seem overly cerebral to casual listeners. But how much are they getting out of Mozart or Schubert's painstakingly crafted works if they know nothing about sonata form, for example? I'm not a composer or music theorist myself, but I at least realize I have to know the basics about this music or I'm just using it as ear candy."

PL- First of all, I don't agree with this. Mozart and Schubert can absolutely be appreciated without any knowledge of the sonata form. That is one of the reasons that they are composers who not only continue to be performed but to draw in people from outside the classical aficionado circles. It is one of the great things about music as an art form that it can speak to a person's emotions directly without any need for intellectual explanation. Absolutely knowing something about music will enhance a person's experience of it, and will help them to have a deeper, richer listening experience, but outside knowledge is not necessary to having a fulfilling listening experience.

Yes... I agree. This is the "hook" or the "engagement"... "seduction"... of which I spoke. With nearly every work of art that I am enamored of there was something that engaged me from the start. I clearly remember first attending a Paul Klee exhibition just out of my teens. I had virtually no interest in Modernism and absolutely no use for abstraction... but something in Klee's work piqued my interest: perhaps it was the playfulness... the color... or the various elements that might attract a bibliophile such as myself. Whatever it was, I ended in purchasing the catalog for the exhibition (I still have it... two copies, actually) and kept looking at the work... eventually reading up on the artist... and then eventually looking at more and more related artists.

One does not need to know the history of the development of European painting to appreciate this:



Standing before this huge canvas one can simply feel the joy and movement of the dance, the childlike abandon of the drawing, the sheer sensuality of the color. Later one can explore the history of this painting and where Matisse fit in within the tradition of French and European painting: his echoes of Cezanne's bathers, of Renaissance paintings of the dance, of the influence of Persian and Islamic art filtered through Ingres and Delacroix.

This is what turns a large number of people off the idea of so much as trying a classical music concert. I cannot count the number of times I've brought a friend to a classical concert and had that person say that they've never been to something like this because they don't know enough about music, that they wouldn't ever have come at all if they weren't with someone like myself who knows about this stuff.

I agree. It should not be presumed that great art is difficult or inaccessible and that it can only be appreciated by those "in the know." I'm not suggesting that great art cannot or should not be difficult or challenging... but I am questioning the notion that only that which is difficult or challenging can be great art... and that the audience can only appreciate such with the appropriate degree of experience. There is such a bias even now. There are those who would dismiss Puccini, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, or even Mozart because they are too accessible... too popular... and as such they cannot be as good as they sound. I love Wagner and Mussorgsky and Stravinsky and Arvo Part... but I do not assume that they are more profound than Mozart. Mortal Terror has a quote he is fond of using of the two great Modernist writers, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway:

Faulkner: "[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

As much as I love Faulkner, I must agree with Hemingway... depth of meaning and emotional content does not demand labyrinthine complexities that challenge the audience.

Clearly genres like heavy metal and punk rock have a huge mass appeal because they tap into angry, dissonant, negative emotions. Part of the catharsis and confrontation with the messier side of life that people get out of that kind of more popular music could also be a way into explaining to people some of the things one can get out of dissonance in classical compositions. Or, similarly, such "uncomfortable" music might be explained by an analogy to "uncomfortable" or unsettling themes in films or books, or other kinds of art. People get that you're not going to come out of Schindler's List or some of Bergman's darker films with an up feeling, but that it is still worthwhile to confront what is expressed in such films, and atonality and dissonance are sometimes used in very analogous ways to help us confront and deal with life's less pleasant or less "harmonious" aspects.

Yes. the analogy with Schindler's List, in particular, is one that I have thought of myself. I have little doubt that Spielberg's masterpiece is one of the greatest films I have ever seen. The acting is superlative. The cinematography is stunning. Everything about the film is enthralling... but it is also such an emotionally draining film that I have not watched it many times. Casablanca, Some Like it Hot, Psycho, The Shining, are also all brilliant films... but I can watch them again and again. If I am taking the wife out for an evening of artistic entertainment I'm probably going to avoid Schindler's List, Schoenberg, or the Francis Bacon exhibition (which by the way... I did make the mistake of taking her to without much success, I might add. Screaming Popes and Sado-Masochistic Homoerotic icons just didn't resonate with her for some reason.)

[mortalterror]

Once again, I have a reply from a listener who is more open-minded than average!

I ruined a perfectly fine evening listening to Shoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, and Part, but since I'd rather hear Monteverdi or Schubert I'm some sort of small minded cretin? I guess open minded people are just the one's that agree with you. And what's all this talk about warhorses and museums? I like museums. Would it really be such a tragedy if the whole world happened to look like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/4725704...44816627/show/ ?

I don't appreciate the implication that I'm somehow backward or mired in the past. I'm totally open to change and the new if I think it's an improvement. High speed internet, iphones, and solar power: sign me up. I'm convinced. But I haven't heard one thing on this board to make me believe that these space age bums are better than Beethoven. I haven't heard anything to make me suspect they are superior to Elgar, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninoff, Holst, Ravel, Prokofiev, Orff, Copland, Barber, Morricone, or Williams. I don't trust the way these new historians frame the narrative. When it comes to write the history of 20th century film it's going to be all Stan Brakhage and no Stanley Kubrick, and the Beatle's best tune wasn't Hey Jude, it's Revolution 9.

[Drkshadow03]

Would it really be such a tragedy if the whole world happened to look like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/4725704...44816627/show/ ?

You want the whole world to look like a bunch of Hindu statues having sex, while Jesus looks on?!

[mortalterror]

You want the whole world to look like a bunch of Hindu statues having sex, while Jesus looks on?!

Yes, yes I do.

[Babbalanja]

I've been listening recently to a lot of 20th century composers who fell into the black hole between the radicals and the Romantics.

The Second Symphony (1959) of Henri Dutilleux is an update of the decadent French music of Debussy and Ravel, from a composer who embraced Modernism.

George Perle was a Jersey boy who pioneered "twelve-tone tonality," as demonstrated in his String Quartet #5 (1960). Sonata form for the space age!

Carlos Chávez was a Mexican modernist who was associated with Copland in the Thirties. I really love his vibrant chamber music, but this performance of his Sinfonía India by Dudamel and the Berlin PO is phenomenal.

Regards,

Istvan

SLG,

I don't know what to make of the suspicion you seem to harbor against artists and composers:

One the one hand we have the artists who demand the right of "self expression"... the freedom to create whatever they wish without the least concern for the demands of the audience and patrons. One the other hand we have the same artists blaming this audience and these patrons when they refuse to financially support their experimentation.

Does this grotesque caricature really address the issue of why contemporary classical music is underappreciated? Am I wrong in thinking that creating an imaginary villian like this is a convenient way for certain listeners to evade responsibility for their own conservatism?

I wonder what it is about artistic self-expression that inspires such contempt in you. Shouldn't that be the artist's aim in the first place? It seems to me that artists who actively gauge the "wants, needs, and expectations of the audience" usually come up with derivative music. If that's what they want to compose, great. But I'd rather they create the way they want, and see if I can meet them on their own terms.

Regards,

Istvan

[Helga]

the only classical music I listen to is from Star wars but I do love it

[stlukesguild]

I ruined a perfectly fine evening listening to Shoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, and Part, but since I'd rather hear Monteverdi or Schubert I'm some sort of small minded cretin? I guess open minded people are just the one's that agree with you. And what's all this talk about warhorses and museums? I like museums. Would it really be such a tragedy if the whole world happened to look like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/4725704...44816627/show/ ?

Great slide-show... but there are some rather abstract works there, Mortal, that would have been largely dismissed as crude or primitive until the advent of Modernism opened up the possibilities:









Surely such works, which I agree are quite marvelous, are no more or less "abstract" than these Modernist works:









The name of the site, however, is something of a misnomer because I do find something there that certainly "sucks":



Frank Frazetta is an artistic equivalent of Anne Rice, Dan Brown, or J.K. Rowling... with the sole exception that the man can certainly render, where Rowling and Brown certainly struggle to produce a well crafted paragraph.

[mortalterror]

Frank Frazetta is an artistic equivalent of Anne Rice, Dan Brown, or J.K. Rowling... with the sole exception that the man can certainly render, where Rowling and Brown certainly struggle to produce a well crafted paragraph.

I debated with myself for a while about putting him in, but then I came to the conclusion that you really can't go wrong with swords and titties and anyone that says different is gay.

Surely such works, which I agree are quite marvelous, are no more or less "abstract" than these Modernist works:

I don't think it's the abstraction which throws me. As far as I can tell, when I judge a work of art my eye looks for color, light, form, perspective, composition, and content. Unfortunately, in modern art I don't see a lot of good lighting. I don't like the colors. The human form is generally distorted in some unpleasant way. The picture looks flat and two dimensional. The content will be uninteresting, and the image will rest in the cradle of the frame like a loose sack of oranges.

[stlukesguild]

SLG, I don't know what to make of the suspicion you seem to harbor against artists and composers:

Quote:
One the one hand we have the artists who demand the right of "self expression"... the freedom to create whatever they wish without the least concern for the demands of the audience and patrons. One the other hand we have the same artists blaming this audience and these patrons when they refuse to financially support their experimentation.

Does this grotesque caricature really address the issue of why contemporary classical music is underappreciated? Am I wrong in thinking that creating an imaginary villain like this is a convenient way for certain listeners to evade responsibility for their own conservatism?

I wonder what it is about artistic self-expression that inspires such contempt in you. Shouldn't that be the artist's aim in the first place? It seems to me that artists who actively gauge the "wants, needs, and expectations of the audience" usually come up with derivative music. If that's what they want to compose, great. But I'd rather they create the way they want, and see if I can meet them on their own terms.

Contemporary art in general is still a work in progress. What will or will not be embraced by future generations as the definitive work of our time is something we can only guess at. There are camps of highly educated individuals... experts in the field even... with opinions that differ greatly. There are a great many late Modern and Contemporary artists who I find to be little more than an elaborate hoax... a hoax that can only have been perpetuated in an era when there are no clear standards of what is of is not "good" art. This is, perhaps, the cost of opening up art to nearly unlimited possibilities. I say this as an artist who may work in a manner that on the surface is very much rooted in older traditions... but I also say this as an artist who embraces many of the most advance approaches to art. The suspicion I have is that it it quite possible that some of the most extreme experiments in music will have little or no lasting value... and that some of that which the champions of the avant garde dismiss as derivative or conservative may just have more lasting value that they give credit for.

As Petrarch's Love has suggested there are times when one is up for the more extreme forms of Modernist music... when one is prepared to be challenged... assaulted... to have one's expectations challenged... to be disturbed. There are also times when I am prepared to watch a film like Schindler's List knowing full well how harrowing and disturbing it is. And there are other times when I am not up for it... when I find that too much is demanded of me for too little in return as far an aesthetic pleasure is concerned.

Sean Scully, one of the leading contemporary abstract painters (he just recently was given a one-man retrospective at the Met) wrote a brief essay upon art and the notion of beauty from which I've culled the key points:

Things have come apart visually. If something looks good, then it is said that maybe it is not good. It is not good because it looks good...

The famous English journalist Bernard Levin said Stockhausen is not as bad as it sounds. It is beautiful... in a world where art should be visually assaulting... The attack on painting is part of this. Exhibitions of sticks, photographs, and rough TV videos are thought automatically to be "morally" superior because they are not good to look at; therefore, they are better than they look... and they are adored by curators who would like to promote such art sociologically conscious because it deals with issues such as race, poverty, housing, etc...

In order to look for any kind of audience at all, this kind of art has to squeeze itself into the world of the visual arts, the world which is occupied largely by painting. For this quasi-visual, pseudo-political space to be opened up, something has to be wrong with painting. Hence the problem of visual excellence versus the issue of quality. It's not as good as it looks, or it's not good because it looks good- or if it looks good it must be decorative and therefore not good.

This is the most transparently dishonest argument of all, one always put forward by a gang of (mostly European) curators (Arthur C. Danto for example) who want to be considered intellectuals, but who couldn't go two rounds in the ring with a real philosopher...

A truce between the pseudo-intellectual position of concept-based art and its promoters and the authentic, round, emotional achievement of painting cannot... be found any longer. The problem is that when the visual territory of painting is ceded to the point where it passes the test of being considered intellectually acceptable by the sophists, it is reduced to a gray square. There all the guts, beauty, poetry, personality, and last but not least, color are taken out of it. And by color I mean its courage to be bigger, more generous than mere idea, where the idea and feeling become an embodiment.

Those who would have us believe, for example, that Marcel Duchamp is the equal of Matisse would also ask us to believe that one is better than it looks and one is worse... Matisse and a lot of other painters are as good as they look. They look that good because they are that good. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with decoration but has everything to do with the roundness of the visual experience...

Stockhausen has a place in history. And so therefore Bernard Levin is right when he says it's not as bad as it sounds. But neither is Mozart.

-excerpted from The Argument, Sean Scully

You ask the question about my perceived attack on "self-expression"... the sacred cow of Modernism. What, I might ask, is "self-expression?" On one level I don't buy the notion that any work of art can be truly "self expressive" for no work of art can ever encompass all of the aspects of an individual human being. At the same time, no work can help but be "self-expressive" in the sense that it reveals something of the individual who created it. An artist can be limited by the most confining restrictions dictated by the patrons and still achieve an art that is original and "self-expressive". Renaissance painters were directed by theologians as to appropriate iconography, symbolism, color, etc... In the 19th and 20th century we have seen magnificent achievements by illustrators or by artists working on commercial commissions. Within literature we come again to the exemplary example of Shakespeare's plays... written with an audience clearly in mind.

I am not suggesting that all art should pander to an audience... or even the largest possible audience. Nor am I suggesting that as artists we should not be grateful for the greater degree of autonomy we are afforded today. On the other hand, we should recognize that this comes at a price. The painter Rubens worked directly for wealthy patrons. They stipulated the subject matter, scale, what they wished to have conveyed... at times even the colors. In Holland, the Dutch moved away from this system toward the modern commercial concept of art. An artist produced what he or she wished... or what he or she thought would sell... (and one suspects it was a combination of the two)... and then the dealers marketed the art to the wealthy collectors. While the artists were now free to paint as they saw fit, it was rapidly made clear that if they wished to eat well they needed to find a means of meeting the demands of the market.

Art, it would seem, has always involved a balancing act between the demands of the market and the desires of the artist. Modernism has long been mythologized as a great rebellion against the desires of bourgeois taste... but is it really so? Were all the artists drawn to abstraction or atonalism at the same point in history because of some internal urge... because this language was imagined by all as best suited to expressing the time... or might it be possible that they were responding to the dictates of the market and of academia... that they were aware of who buttered their bread?

Certain camps of contemporary music and contemporary art have painted themselves (figuratively) into an ever shrinking corner. Again, I am not suggesting that it is the sole fault of the artists... but neither can we fully blame the audience. Such strikes me as the lame complaint of any artist whose work is not successful: "It's the audience. They are too ignorant. My work is far too advanced for their simple-minded ways of thinking." Again, I do not think we can continue to count on a disinterested audience to support art which the find meaningless or distasteful through taxes, grants, etc... Neither can we count on them attempting to narrow the gap between the artist and audience. I certainly agree that education may play an essential role... but I also am simply suggesting that artists may need to seriously consider the wants and needs of the audience (and not the mass audience as a whole... but the audience of passionate art/music/literature lovers... and recognize that considering the wants and needs of the audience in no way leads immediately to derivative or mediocre art.

I debated with myself for a while about putting him in, but then I came to the conclusion that you really can't go wrong with swords and titties and anyone that says different is gay.

Swords and titties are fine, but Frazetta just paints them in a cliche-ridden manner worthy of a horny teenager drawing in the back of his biology notebook. Rubens made a hell of a career out of swords and titties... and Picasso painted more than his share... at least of the latter... although they are admittedly often painted in the wrong place... or portrayed beyond the usual expected pair.

[Petrarch's Love]

PL, Thanks for the response. I really don't consider this a debate, just knowledgeable fans trading opinions.

Sounds good...though we may sometimes differ in our opinions.

Once again, I have a reply from a listener who is more open-minded than average! I envy you going to the Messiaen concert, and I commend you for being able to go outside your safety zone and enjoy it.

It is one of the advantages of being in a university setting that they can often fund more experimental or less known concerts...and get an audience of intellectuals who will attend!

I'm going to focus on this issue, which I think is at the heart of what you are disagreeing with in both St. Luke's comments and my own:

I really disagree with this statement:

Mozart and Schubert can absolutely be appreciated without any knowledge of the sonata form. That is one of the reasons that they are composers who not only continue to be performed but to draw in people from outside the classical aficionado circles.

This is like saying that someone who hasn't developed a palate for fine wine can appreciate a rare Chateau Latour. He can drink it, and may even enjoy it (though chances are he's not going to), but the notion of appreciation doesn't enter into it. In the same way, just being in the room while Mozart is playing doesn't constitute appreciation.

Give Mozart and Schubert some credit for the depth of their genius: their music shouldn't be reduced to ear candy. If a listener doesn't even understand basics like sonata form, this brilliant, painstakingly crafted art is just pleasant melodies, nothing more. The same can be said of modern music: if you don't make the effort to engage this music, to understand its aims, and to condition your expectations of it, it will just be (as you said) an unpleasant listening experience and nothing more.

Well, I don't really see why a person can't appreciate fine wine without a oenophilic vocabulary and perfect french pronunciation either. But to get back to music:

You appear to be taking the stance that there is either knowledgeable appreciation or there is a thoughtless, casual sort of listening. What I, and I believe St. Luke's, are assuming is that these are not the only two modes in which music can be heard, understood and appreciated. I do agree with you on two counts. One is that I agree that a person probably will not get into the sort of music we are discussing by being an extremely casual listener. If a person is listening to Mozart with the same sort of minimal investment that he or she listens to Lady Gaga playing in the background at the local coffee shop, then it is unlikely that this person will be really getting much of what Mozart has to offer out of the experience. I don't think there's actually anything wrong with listening to Mozart as background music that evokes a generally pleasant mood, but I concur that this won't really lead to a deeper appreciation.

I also agree with you that one way that a person can develop a keener appreciation of the kind of music that does have a greater artistic depth than Lady Gaga (the latter reaching a different sort of bathetic depth) is through expanding his or her formal knowledge of the history, theory, structure etc. of that music. As a college instructor I am certainly among the first to recognize the very positive way that introducing people to and helping them to understand the more intellectual and formal aspects of art can help usher them into a more meaningful understanding of and engagement with any art form, be it poetry, the visual arts, music etc. Certainly the sort of approach you suggest in helping people develop an understanding and respect for the sort of craft that went into, say, a Schubert sonata is one way of helping people to appreciate and get something substantial out of their experience of this music.

However, this is only one way that a person may arrive at such a substantial appreciation of music, and where I continue to disagree with you is in the claim that formal knowledge and understanding are necessary to appreciate complex music. Again, I’m not saying knowledge doesn’t enhance a person’s listening experience or that it can’t be a way into developing appreciation. I'm also not saying that it may not take some time and attentive listening to get into certain kinds of music. What I’m saying is that formal knowledge is not the only way into deepening one’s understanding of music. It is entirely possible to listen attentively, openly, seriously and intelligently to a musical work and to respond to it on a significantly more nuanced level than the casual listener in the coffee shop without having any prior understanding of its formal qualities, its historical context, or particular musical terms. The interpretation of such a listener may not be as thorough as that of a more knowledgeable listener, but it can still be an interpretation of good quality and characterized by true appreciation.

Indeed, I think the argument that it is in some way disrespecting the composer to be ignorant of the formal craft he put into his work indicates a logic that appears to be putting the cart before the horse. The craft and formal elements of a work are the tools of the artist that enable him or her to express something to the person listening. There are plenty of composers who have used and do use the sonata form as a tool, some of them with excellent technical skill. The reason we keep listening to Schubert and Mozart is partly because they were remarkably good at employing the sonata form, but also because of what it is that they managed to express using the techniques of that form. Such composers manage to reach people and speak to them in a way that other, albeit technically proficient, composers cannot. The form is the answer to the question of howthey did it and how we can go about understanding it better, but the answer to why they did it and why we still listen to this music usually has less to do with this sort of formal analysis. Certainly some artists use form more self-consciously and referentially than others, and so some formal knowledge can help a person understand a certain statement that artist is trying to make etc., but ultimately the thing that we are getting out of listening to a piece of music is not usually that Mozart was really smart, but that Mozart has given us a certain kind of experience. It is that experience that makes us appreciate and be curious about how Mozart was smart, not usually the other way around. I think this speaks, not only to the question of how people experience music, but to your disagreement with St. Luke’s about the degree to which an artist needs to try to connect with his audience. I think we can all agree that an artist who slavishly caters to popular preconceptions of what art should be to the exclusion of his/her own expression, is less likely to produce really interesting new work. However, neither can an artist base the worth of his work solely on the basis that he has used an innovative technique in crafting it. He or she must also bear the burden of not just reaching a listener with formal educational understanding of how that craft is innovative, but conveying some experience of value and worth to a listener who may not be formally knowledgeable but has taken the time to really listen in a thoughtful manner. The most successful great art is often capable of operating on a number of different levels at the same time, being something that people can relate to readily on an instinctive, an emotional and an intellectual manner. It delivers something that brings people in and gives them something rich enough to make them want to stay.

But again, in terms of the ability to appreciate music, not only have I often had very rich conversations about music with people who have little or no formal knowledge about it, but I personally have appreciated music many, many times on a purely non intellectual level. I can’t help but imagine that almost anyone who is very fond of music has connected to it in this way, which is profoundly appreciative without being in the least analytical or dependent on formal knowledge. This is undoubtedly the way I first came to appreciate music from a very young age. I found myself getting lost in it and caught up in the experience of it. I noticed things about it that I enjoyed, that intrigued and moved me, that puzzled and challenged me, without knowing what the terms for them were, or even exactly how those elements were working. The formal knowledge absolutely came afterward for me.

This conversation also made me think of the time in my life when I was possibly the most profoundly appreciative (in more senses than one) of music. When I was 18 I went through a period of several months when I was unable to walk, periodically unable to see, and generally confined to bed without the ability to read, but one of the things I was able to do was to listen to music (and to remember the poetry I had memorized—always memorize your favorite poems. They come in handy in near death situations and long lines at the supermarket! ). In such circumstances the intellectual/analytical part of me was pretty much turned off, but my appreciation and understanding of the music—some of it works and even composers that I had never heard before—was both deep and appreciative. Indeed, I think my understanding of some of the music I listened to in that time, without any thought at all as to its structure or an intellectual level analysis of its parts, was far more profound and taught me much more about what was going on in the music than some of the listening I’ve done when I’ve had in-depth intellectual knowledge of a piece or genre but been less attentive to it in other ways.

What I am saying is simply that it is possible to listen attentively without listening learnedly. Formal learning can aid the attentive listener, but lack of it does not preclude a person from being able to access a work. I will also suggest that from a purely pragmatic stance as an apologist, a defense based on saying that the other person is lazy and not learned enough is more likely to turn people off the music you think they should pay more attention to than a defense based on explaining why this music resonates with you and what you think we can all get out of it.

Yes. the analogy with Schindler's List, in particular, is one that I have thought of myself. I have little doubt that Spielberg's masterpiece is one of the greatest films I have ever seen. The acting is superlative. The cinematography is stunning. Everything about the film is enthralling... but it is also such an emotionally draining film that I have not watched it many times. Casablanca, Some Like it Hot, Psycho, The Shining, are also all brilliant films... but I can watch them again and again. If I am taking the wife out for an evening of artistic entertainment I'm probably going to avoid Schindler's List, Schoenberg, or the Francis Bacon exhibition (which by the way... I did make the mistake of taking her to without much success, I might add. Screaming Popes and Sado-Masochistic Homoerotic icons just didn't resonate with her for some reason.)

Nothing says romantic date with the spouse like a Francis Bacon exhibition.
I personally began almost literally running away from a hall with several prominently displayed Francis Bacon pieces not so long ago in a London museum. There's only so much I can take. I had to peek in a few more times, though, to confirm that the same man had, indeed spent a full two hours (and possibly more) starring intently at the works. To each his own. Yes, I think it's important to keep in mind that there may be a different sort of purpose or type of reward that comes from different kinds of art.

I ruined a perfectly fine evening listening to Shoenberg, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Messiaen, Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, and Part, but since I'd rather hear Monteverdi or Schubert I'm some sort of small minded cretin? I guess open minded people are just the one's that agree with you. And what's all this talk about warhorses and museums? I like museums. Would it really be such a tragedy if the whole world happened to look like this http://www.flickr.com/photos/4725704...44816627/show/ ?

I don't appreciate the implication that I'm somehow backward or mired in the past. I'm totally open to change and the new if I think it's an improvement. High speed internet, iphones, and solar power: sign me up. I'm convinced. But I haven't heard one thing on this board to make me believe that these space age bums are better than Beethoven. I haven't heard anything to make me suspect they are superior to Elgar, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninoff, Holst, Ravel, Prokofiev, Orff, Copland, Barber, Morricone, or Williams. I don't trust the way these new historians frame the narrative. When it comes to write the history of 20th century film it's going to be all Stan Brakhage and no Stanley Kubrick, and the Beatle's best tune wasn't Hey Jude, it's Revolution 9.

Thanks for that Monteverdi link, Mortal. Not only did I enjoy listening, but I have now determined that if I'm unable to land a tenure track professorship next year, I can still use my doctoral robes to pursue a backup career as person who makes impressive entrance and directs early music performers.

Meanwhile, maybe the whole group can unite in a sing along of "Hey Jude."

I've been listening recently to a lot of 20th century composers who fell into the black hole between the radicals and the Romantics.

The Second Symphony (1959) of Henri Dutilleux is an update of the decadent French music of Debussy and Ravel, from a composer who embraced Modernism.

George Perle was a Jersey boy who pioneered "twelve-tone tonality," as demonstrated in his String Quartet #5 (1960). Sonata form for the space age!

Carlos Chávez was a Mexican modernist who was associated with Copland in the Thirties. I really love his vibrant chamber music, but this performance of his Sinfonía India by Dudamel and the Berlin PO is phenomenal.

Regards,

Istvan

No more time for listening this evening, but I'll give these a try tomorrow.

[Babbalanja]

Roger Sessions (1896-1985) was the greatest symphonist of the 20th century. He redefined the form for the new age, producing nine symphonies full of vitality, optimism, and musical complexity. He won the Pulitzer for the Concerto for Orchestra, his last major work.

Sessions: Concerto for Orchestra, pt. 1

Sessions: Concerto for Orchestra, pt. 2

Regards,

Istvan

As Petrarch's Love has suggested there are times when one is up for the more extreme forms of Modernist music... when one is prepared to be challenged... assaulted... to have one's expectations challenged... to be disturbed. There are also times when I am prepared to watch a film like Schindler's List knowing full well how harrowing and disturbing it is. And there are other times when I am not up for it... when I find that too much is demanded of me for too little in return as far an aesthetic pleasure is concerned.

It may interest you to know that I'm often in the mood to listen to Bach's cello suites or Schubert's piano trios. The music of Mozart and Beethoven is an inexhaustible source of fascination for me. Not every note that comes out of my iPod has to be harrowing atonal noise.

But then again, most 20th century composed music isn't so forbidding anyway. I guess it's because I've listened to so much of it, but I get a lot of different moods out of contemporary music. I've said plenty of times that Schoenberg gets a bad rap: I hear a lot of personality, even charisma in his works. Even notorious noisemakers like Carter, Ligeti, and Xenakis have many facets to their music. I hear playfulness and sorrow in their works as often as I hear anxiety or anger.

Once again, I'm not sure what to make of your fulminations against the composers who supposedly have no regard for the audience. Your experience in the visual arts is useful by way of analogy, but I think the comparison to musical modernism is tentative at best. I still say that history has been rewritten to make it seem like the big bad academicians are to blame for the conservatism of the listening audience.

You seem to have political reasons for getting annoyed by arrogant composers not seeing the realities of the market. In fact, I'm more likely to agree that composers have been writing bad music than that they are ignoring economic expediency by being too experimental. But dismissing so many composers' music as "meaningless and distasteful" isn't an honest assessment of their artistic aims, it's just prejudice.

In most art forms, I've seen a retreat from real innovation during my lifetime. And in serious music, even the composers who are working in accessible forms are lumped in with the avant-garde. What does this indicate except that audiences haven't kept up with developments over the past few decades? Why are the artists to blame if the marketers can't get the point across that post-1950 composed music isn't all abstruse and scary?

Regards,

Istvan

Laura,

You appear to be taking the stance that there is either knowledgeable appreciation or there is a thoughtless, casual sort of listening. What I, and I believe St. Luke's, are assuming is that these are not the only two modes in which music can be heard, understood and appreciated.

In that case I agree with you two. No one needs a degree in music to appreciate a work. I myself am not a composer or music theorist. I've never studied the score of a work. I have a certain amount of knowledge about music, but nothing that a first-semester music student wouldn't be expected to know.

It is entirely possible to listen attentively, openly, seriously and intelligently to a musical work and to respond to it on a significantly more nuanced level than the casual listener in the coffee shop without having any prior understanding of its formal qualities, its historical context, or particular musical terms. The interpretation of such a listener may not be as thorough as that of a more knowledgeable listener, but it can still be an interpretation of good quality and characterized by true appreciation.

I still strongly disagree with this.

The fact of the matter is that you have to have some prior knowledge or you're not truly appreciating the music for what it is. This could be as basic as knowing the instruments of the orchestra; knowing what sonata form is; knowing what a theme-and-variations structure means. I'm sorry if having to undergo even this minimal amount of education scares people away from listening to classical music, but that's what's necessary. You know this, too, but for some reason you can't admit that true appreciation comes at a price.

It's the difference between standing in a pool and actually swimming. With just a minimum of training, kids learn to swim. If they don't make that effort, they can't swim.

I personally have appreciated music many, many times on a purely non intellectual level. I can’t help but imagine that almost anyone who is very fond of music has connected to it in this way, which is profoundly appreciative without being in the least analytical or dependent on formal knowledge.

Again, you're overstating the case: a "purely non-intellectual level"? Please. I don't listen to music on a very intellectual level either. I'm thrilled and fascinated by music the same way you are. But it's just weird to assert that music appreciation is as passive as you make it out to be.

Regards,

Istvan

[Petrarch's Love]

I still strongly disagree with this.

The fact of the matter is that you have to have some prior knowledge or you're not truly appreciating the music for what it is. This could be as basic as knowing the instruments of the orchestra; knowing what sonata form is; knowing what a theme-and-variations structure means. I'm sorry if having to undergo even this minimal amount of education scares people away from listening to classical music, but that's what's necessary. You know this, too, but for some reason you can't admit that true appreciation comes at a price.

It's the difference between standing in a pool and actually swimming. With just a minimum of training, kids learn to swim. If they don't make that effort, they can't swim.

I think the problem I'm having with this is probably not what you are suggesting would be helpful for people to learn, which is innocuous enough, but the way you are asserting it as the duty of the listener. Obviously I have no problem with saying that it's a good idea for people who want to know more about classical music to know something about the instruments of the orchestra and some basic musical forms. I do think this is a good idea an probably something people will eventually come to if they want to really explore classical music in depth. On the other hand, telling people that they must have specific formal/factual knowledge in order to appreciate something simply turns them off nine times out of ten, and you’re not talking about people who are already coming in with some interest in how you go about deepening and appreciation of music, you’re talking about people who are resistant to the idea of investing time in something because they don’t see what the pay-off is. Most people get that there’s at least one very basic reason that swimming lessons are useful, so that you don’t drown when you fall off a boat. There isn’t the same sort of obvious use for getting into a certain genre of music, so to get people interested the explanation of how cannot go without the explanation of why.

I was thinking about it, and my attitude toward this may partly stem from my own teaching experience. One of the things I learned early on, at least in the college classroom (which is the only level I've taught), is that you can certainly demand effort out of students, but you cannot demand factual knowledge, even basic factual knowledge until you've given them a reasonable foundation to work with and warmed them to your subject some. In other words, I can certainly tell my Shakespeare students that I expect them to work in this class, that it's their responsibility to do the reading, write their weekly responses, be attentive to the lines we go over in class, keep an open and active mind and generally come in with their thinking caps on. These kinds of demands will usually promote better class participation and better learning. What I cannot do is make a forthright demand that they know formal elements about the play we’re reading before we’ve gotten into a discussion about it. For example in class discussion I might make a demand like having a student try to find a particular place in the text that they are trying to make a rather fumbling point about, or to point to something we can all see, like what kind of word is being used frequently in a speech, what's being repeated, whether people are talking alone or to each other etc., or I might ask students to start by talking about what they think of the psychology of a certain character. This will move discussion forward. If I throw out a question about any kind of fact based knowledge, even something some of them may in fact already be familiar with, like iambic pentameter, or if I start off a class session with the premise that they must know certain basic structural elements of drama or poetry in order to even get started, then I'm going to get a dead discussion (even in cases when it is true that they need formal material like a gloss of the material). Rather than draw attention to these things as a challenge, I just give them the formal terminology and factual information so that we can them move on to using them as tools for delving into the more important questions of analysis and critique that I do expect them to work very seriously toward.

This is true for two reasons. One is that factual knowledge makes people nervous. They're afraid of being challenged on that ground in even seemingly innocuous ways because it presents the possibility of being wrong and looking stupid. The outright suggestion that someone doesn't know/should know a certain thing makes them shut down because they are on some level afraid of losing face because of it. The other reason is that it really is unfair and unproductive to ask someone to know something that really does not involve any work beyond being told and remembering it. If I have some basic knowledge that another person doesn't, it really makes very little sense for me to tell that person that he or she should learn this stuff rather than simply giving them the knowledge and taking care of that issue right away. So in the classroom it works best to just give them the formal knowledge about history, form, critical terminology etc. but make them work at the really interesting part, which is the process of questioning and analyzing and generally delving into what we're reading. There really is very little connection between acquiring knowledge of the terms and basic facts and a person's ability to analyze a piece of art. Some students can memorize terms, vocabulary etc. very quickly and easily but aren't sufficiently attentive to their reading to see the best way to apply these terms to understanding the sort of ideas and emotions being conveyed. Other students come in with a pretty good instinctive sense of the way Shakespeare's language is moving, the general effect of having a soliloquy in a scene etc., but may not necessarily know that what they are noticing is called a soliloquy or that they are drawn in by the language of certain passages because of a particular way the meter is being handled. There are, of course, a lot of people somewhere in the middle for whom the term and the understanding of what lies behind it come at the same time when they are introduced in class. Learning the terms for these things absolutely helps deepen a student's understanding, and absolutely, if you are teaching someone something, why not simply teach them the accepted formal vocabulary along with the concept it describes. However, the formal knowledge is not the place to put a lot of pressure in terms of where the challenge lies in learning about any kind of art.

What is true in the classroom (where people are, in fact, already there because they want to learn) I have found even more true talking to people more generally. Indeed, what I've found in terms of the response to my own field is that people frequently become nervous when I tell them I teach college level English because they have some terrible sense that I am going to quiz them on grammar and rhetoric, or that they're stupider than I am because they don't know certain terms. The formal, factual terminology is just an enormous hot button issue for many people, when it shouldn't really be that big a deal. So when talking to people who don't know much about poetry, or who even are resistant and say they don't like it or they don't get it, I am even less likely to tell them they need formal knowledge in order to get into this stuff. Yes, it is going to help to understand some basic formal elements (and this is even more true with a writer like Shakespeare, which does involve learning an older vocabulary, certain major historical references etc., which one really doesn’t have to have in order to listen to Mozart), but that is not really the important thing about Shakespeare and not the place I am going to start talking to someone about Renaissance poetry.

I absolutely know that in most cases it is going to be a waste of my time and that of the person I’m talking to if I start off by saying something like “You need to understand what a soliloquy is in order to appreciate Hamlet” which is pretty much the equivalent of you saying a person needs to know what a sonata form is in order to appreciate Schubert. That not only sounds like work, it sounds like I’m placing myself in the position of someone who has some sort of superior knowledge the other person doesn’t have access to and (most importantly!) it does not convey to the person what it is that I get out of spending time with Hamlet. It is not the burden of the person who just never happens to have learned what a soliloquy is to go figure it out on the gamble that once he’s learned enough he will like Hamlet. It is my burden as the person who does have this knowledge to both give that person the very basic fact of what a soliloquy is along with the reason that this is something that could be useful knowledge for that person. So I might start off by saying that one of the things that has drawn people to Hamlet as a play for centuries, and that I still find fascinating, is the way Shakespeare is exploring the conversations that we have with ourselves, the big questions we all wrestle with when no one else is around. I might say that one of the amazing and intriguing things about the play is the way Shakespeare frequently gives Hamlet these set speeches, called soliloquies, where he’s talking to himself alone on stage and so he is essentially opening up the private interior thoughts of another person for us as the audience and laying them out there for us to hear and to think about (that dramatic move, in and of itself, really is such an amazing thing that it continues to floor me every time I pause to think about it…but I enthuse/digress). The point is, that knowing what the form, the soliloquy is may be helpful to the person I’m talking to, and it is probably a term I will bring up, but it’s not the thing to make a big issue about and it is not something the person needs to know in order to read the "To Be or Not to Be speech." There is work required for understanding Hamlet, but the big work is not in knowing what a soliloquy is. The big work is in spending the time wrestling with the language and the ideas. Similarly, I don’t think knowing a cello from a viola or the basic movements of a sonata form is the big work required for understanding complex music, so it’s not the most important thing to put pressure on in trying to defend a certain kind of music. If anything music, not being a verbal art form, does not require any previous training in order to be listened to attentively in the way that one may need to acquire a certain vocabulary to understand what Hamlet is talking about.

Again, you're overstating the case: a "purely non-intellectual level"? Please. I don't listen to music on a very intellectual level either. I'm thrilled and fascinated by music the same way you are. But it's just weird to assert that music appreciation is as passive as you make it out to be.

Perhaps this is simply an issue with the way we are each employing the term “intellectual.” I don’t see a correlation at all between non-intellectual listening and passive listening. I’m not talking about passive listening. I’m talking about an active and engaged listening experience that does not involve thinking about formal intellectual issues. Perhaps when I refer to “intellectual” I mean something more like analysis, or a conscious awareness of the formal aspects of a piece versus an experience in which a person is aware, possibly in a very nuanced sense, of the way the music is moving, the effect of the different parts etc., but not actually consciously thinking about it. I suppose when I think of what I mean by times that I’ve experienced music at a "purely non-intellectual level," I mean times when it really is an experience as opposed to something I am listening to but also thinking about at the same time. I have often had experiences with music when I find that I am no longer thinking in words at all, when my sense of a detached, intellectual self is completely lost and I am engaged directly with the music itself without any intermediary. Yes, I may be able to describe later the sort of things that I have absorbed in that wordless experience, either in terms of formal terms and ideas I am familiar with, or by seeking out and learning what it is that people call something I’ve noticed about the music, but the experience itself, for me at least, is sometimes really, truly, not dependent at all upon knowing anything about the piece.

The way I got into some of those Messiaen pieces I heard last year had nothing to do with any formal knowledge about Messiaen so much as feeling out what it is that he was conveying in those works and just experiencing, for example, the sense of things returning again and again, connected but somehow vaguely disjointed, almost random, but in the way that nature is random, with some sort of intangible logic behind it all. When listening I wasn’t even expressing this to myself that articulately, but that was something like what I would have said (possibly did say) to someone at the interval in trying to describe the effect the works had on me. It wasn’t until after I had sensed this quality to certain pieces that I read the program notes and discovered his interest in ornithology and bird call or that I struck up a conversation with a musicologist who (tried) to explain the modes of limited transition that account for some of that very distinctive type of variation and repetition that marks Messiaen’s musical voice differently than another. Certainly I could just as easily have come in armed with these facts and noted the same things about the music, may have put my finger on what was going on in it much more quickly in fact, but the formal knowledge wasn’t the reason I came to appreciate some of those works. That had more to do with opening my mind to entertain the musical language of the sounds as it spoke to me directly than opening my mind to the formal techniques being employed. Perhaps what you are saying is that if a person is noting these kinds of things, even on a purely non-verbal level, that is still an “intellectual” engagement with the piece, while I am thinking of that direct engagement with the music as a “non-intellectual” engagement as opposed to the conscious intellectual attempt to describe the experience that comes afterward? I wouldn’t apply the term intellectual to an experience in which I am actively engaged with what the music is doing, aware of various shifts, and connections between the various parts, but it is only registered on the non-verbal level of simply being aware that, say, something is shifting unexpectedly at a certain point of the music, or even on a physical level such that, for example, I am aware that the pattern of my own breathing has altered in response to the music. Perhaps you would say that such observations still have some sort of intellectual quality to them, though, in that they can then be used to form a more intellectual analysis or are, in fact, the things that intellectual terms are seeking to describe?

The only analogy I can really think of to what I mean by this non-intellectual experience of music is that of experiencing a space, whether natural or architectural. I see you're in the US, so I'll pick the rotunda of the Capitol building as an impressive architectural space. Some people who work in the Capitol Building will walk through it without really thinking about where they are at all and without any real appreciation of the space. Others may be visitors who go in there on their own and are certainly impressed and aware that there is something very grand about this space. This visitor experiences the sound of the reverberating voices against the dome, walks through the size of it, is aware of the curves of it. Such a visitor certainly has an appreciation for how the experience of the Capitol building is different, more engaging and set apart from his or her own cubical filled office, but I don't think most people would characterize that as an "intellectual" experience. Then you have a third group of visitors to the space who come on the guided tour, or who may have taken a course on architectural history in college. These people will probably appreciate the inside of the Capitol Dome in the same way the other visitors did, but they can expand their experience on an intellectual level by learning things about the Classical and Palladian architectural, the geometric ratios of the building's various parts, the way the whispering gallery works etc. I see informed musical listening as analogous to the guided tour. No, it's not essential to having a very moving and appreciative experience of our nation's Capitol Building, but it can certainly help to enhance and deepen that experience, and perhaps may also help to lead someone into a greater interest in exploring other architecture as well. Similarly I think a person can enter the "space" of a sonata and "walk" through it in an attentive and appreciative way without needing the guided tour of formal knowledge and awareness of the sonata form, but that it can certainly add to the experience to have such a formal awareness.