Am I worrying about concepts I'm better off leaving for later?

[Scarpia]

FWIW, a listener's attempts to get a grasp of the design of a piece, is exactly one of the activities in which most listeners benefit from reading about music. 'Carefully listening' will only get you so far.

Or, it takes you so far afield, that then you have to learn from scratch how to communicate to others about musical form.

I can think of a few examples.  The first recording I got of Strauss' Alpine was the original issue of Karajan's recording.  Absurdly DG configured the disc as a single hour-long track.  I would listen knowing that somewhere in there were meadows, brooks, summits, a vision, flowers, a storm, thickets, etc.  It was wonderful, but the only thing I was really sure of was the storm.  Recently I listened to another recording were the section markings in the score were configured as separate tracks.  Now I can look at the cd player when I please and note that, "oh, this is the meadow."  The music is just as ravishing, and now I have the added possibility of seeing how Strauss chose to "paint" a certain thing.  It definitely enhanced my pleasure without any reservation.

Another second example is Elgar's violin concerto.  My first impression, "too many notes, make it stop!"  When I made that comment here, several members, especially Elgarian, posted very useful descriptions of their reaction to various parts of the piece and the scales fell from my eyes, so to speak.

A third example would Schoenberg's chamber symphony No 1.  It was very useful to have before my eyes (in the CD booklet) a description of how the music can be considered as an expanded sonata movement in which elements such as the slow movement and scherzo are incorporated into what would normally be the development section.  (Very similar to Sibelius 7 and Liszt's Sonata)  Presumably that insight came from people who had studied the score.  I can still wallow in the expressive excesses of the music, but being aware of the general scheme allowed me to comes to terms with the music more easily than I otherwise would have.

[Grazioso]

FWIW, a listener's attempts to get a grasp of the design of a piece, is exactly one of the activities in which most listeners benefit from reading about music. 'Carefully listening' will only get you so far.

Which is a point I was trying to make earlier. How do you listen carefully when you have no idea what to listen for? The sounds are all there to be heard, but how do you go about breaking them all down into something conceptual and communicable? How do you reverse engineer the sound waves into the animating concepts employed by the composer?  The theoretical and intellectual approaches to music are not to be loathed precisely because they give you points of entry into the music, ways of making sense of what you hear, and communicating it to others.

I see it as somewhat analogous to literary criticism. You can learn a lot by studying structuralist, Marxist, feminist, reader-response, postcolonialist, etc. theoretical frameworks and then applying them to a work. Each provides a new lens through which to see a text, and each will have you searching for particular signposts as you progress through.

You may ultimately decide that one approach or another is of little use or relevance, but at least they get you paying closer attention, seeing things you might not have noticed before, and--this is crucial--providing you with a language for articulating what you find. (Of course, one must be careful not to give the concepts and the terms hegemony over reality.)

[Renfield]

Which is a point I was trying to make earlier. How do you listen carefully when you have no idea what to listen for? The sounds are all there to be heard, but how do you go about breaking them all down into something conceptual and communicable? How do you reverse engineer the sound waves into the animating concepts employed by the composer?  The theoretical and intellectual approaches to music are not to be loathed precisely because they give you points of entry into the music, ways of making sense of what you hear, and communicating it to others.

Allow me to just note that you may be over-stretching the point a little, with regard to the highlightedsegment. Something can be conceptual without being communicable, as you yourself note, by having been made conceptual in a way that is simply not common to anyone other than yourself.

To that extent, it is not contradictory to conceptualise music independently of academic musical study, much like it isn't contradictory to conceptualise literature independently of any given system of literary theory. You'd obviously be 'mapping' (in the logical sense of the word - 'assigning') different concepts to the same underlying structure, but it is neither impossible nor counter-intuitive to do so. Just communicatively inefficient; making it inadvisable, perhaps, but certainly not absurd.


In a similar way, apropos of the advice to 'listen carefully', it is not impossible to build a working inventory of musical structures without trying to look for them (which, as you note, is pretty challenging if you don't know what to look for): brains are taxonomical engines. It would just take longer - possibly more than a lifetime for some!



Edit: This echoes a past discussion on perfect pitch. One might recognise tones independently of context, without being able to name them in the common way.

[Palmetto]

To that extent, it is not contradictory to conceptualise music independently of academic musical study, much like it isn't contradictory to conceptualise literature independently of any given system of literary theory. You'd obviously be 'mapping' (in the logical sense of the word - 'assigning') different concepts to the same underlying structure, but it is neither impossible nor counter-intuitive to do so. Just communicatively inefficient; making it inadvisable, perhaps, but certainly not absurd.

Do you mean similar to the way different cultures historically mapped stars into different constellations even though they were all looking at the same night sky?

[Renfield]

Do you mean similar to the way different cultures historically mapped stars into different constellations even though they were all looking at the same night sky?

Exactly! The process of discovering constellations, and naming them (emphasis on the comma) is an exceptionally apt analogy.