What is the 'composer's intention?'

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

...why isn't your music enough on its own to encourage the imagination?

It is. But I really enjoy hearing how people connect with extramusical elements in ways that I don't connect to them. In some ways, I suppose you could say I like to allow an audience to manipulate even my own mind about why a piece of mine is titled in a certain way. It allows me to think about my compositions in a fresh new way as if I'm in the shoes of someone completely different. I always think to myself 'oh I've never thought of this piece in such a way before' whenever anyone shares their interpretation of the title Please Do Not Feed The Fish. The piece is using extramusical elements, but it's the audience who expresses it and not the composer. That's the whole point.

[Monsieur Croche]

Yeah... Honestly, I get a "seeing the trees, not the wood" vibe [from the approach to music some take.]

[some listener's] talk of timbre, texture, harmony really does come across to me as if they are so interested in the composer's tools that you are likely to not give a lot of attention to what they are building with those tools. The equivalent of admiring the detailed stonework on a cathedral but being disinterested in the soaring edifice.

I don't get a feeling of anything much like genuine concern in this statement.
---I think this more a fairly transparent form of a less than implicit sort of protest against any whose approach to music or discussion of it does not place first and foremost the emotional / spiritual aspects of the art of music (with, it seems, a requisite to nearly gush and drip about it.) Any non-emotive/spiritual approach is then somehow judged as deficient and read as a denial of and insult toward those emotional / spiritual aspects of the art itself and an insult to those who pride themselves in wearing that particular emotional / spiritual fan-of-the-art badge.
---I don't think I'm the only one who senses in that a kind of purport of seriously elitist-exclusive one-upsmanship re: who is more deeply sensitive than whom. That too readily gets to who has "the right" to talk about music and in what tenor of speech... the implication being one party 'owns' music. That property owner it seems can also make the rules about how the serfs may speak about the property, the owner having both droit du seigneur and a moral obligation to cry out if the serfs do not speak about his property in tones deeply pious enough.

In what way is it inconceivable to imagine an architect can be / is far more likely to be fully aware of both the macro and the micro of the building he is making or has made, as well as the aesthetic, spiritual, and all other aspects of and about the structure? I find it much harder to imagine the architect would not, innately, be 'all that' at once.

My chief concern is that once [a compostion student] has all those tools... how are they going to decide what to build with them?

---Wow, and I thought I could be a moralizing pedant finger-wagger, lol. Well, welcome to that club of deeply dubious distinction. 
---Leave those concerns to those who have all the tools and are working with them. Other artists, critics, and the general public, collectively, long term and generally, all do their job well -- after the fact of those with the tools having made and completed a work. Best wait until a building is built, see it in its finished entirety, to have any valid concerns or critiques about it.

I dunno. Maybe there is a kind of composer who doesn't actually need a goal or motivation. Maybe their goals and motivations will be external, purely driven by someone asking you for a piece within certain performance parameters.

---This is a futile and useless spin, does nothing, goes nowhere. The only ones who need at all to bother with those questions are the ones actually writing the music.


Best regards.

[Madiel]

I don't get a feeling of anything much like genuine concern in this statement.

Then I'll have to try harder to communicate my concern next time. I'm not especially good at conveying emotion in writing. Someone on a forum once accused me of being autistic.

---I think this more a fairly transparent form of a less than implicit sort of protest against any whose approach to music or discussion of it does not place first and foremost the emotional / spiritual aspects of the art of music (with, it seems, a requisite to nearly gush and drip about it.) Any non-emotive/spiritual approach is then somehow judged as deficient and read as a denial of and insult toward those emotional / spiritual aspects of the art itself and an insult to those who pride themselves in wearing that particular emotional / spiritual fan-of-the-art badge.

And once again, you think that if I'm protesting against one extreme I must therefore be advocating the other. I don't know how many times I've pointed out that the music I most enjoy and listen to is absolute, structural, intellectual. I get more pleasure out of a sonata form than a Wagnerian singer spending 10 minutes dying. I've got no time for people appending romantic titles to every Chopin piece within sight. I go around these forums expressing my fandom for Holmboe, a "neoclassical" composer who frequently gets described with terms like 'intellectual' and 'severe'. You simply won't find me gushing and dripping. The only person who thinks I'm that kind of person is you.

In what way is it inconceivable to imagine an architect can be / is far more likely to be fully aware of both the macro and the micro of the building he is making or has made, as well as the aesthetic, spiritual, and all other aspects of and about the structure? I find it much harder to imagine the architect would not, innately, be 'all that' at once.

It's not inconceivable at all. But I'm simply not getting both the macro and the micro from the posts I'm responding to. If I actually got the sense of both at once, then it would be thoroughly in accord with my own views and indeed my own temperament. I work in a job that requires awareness of both the macro and the micro, and it's precisely the ability to hold both of those at once that makes it a specialised and difficult job.

But what is coming across to me is frequently no more than a description of music as a series of "micros".  Which in my mind is really not the same thing as "macro". It's not actually the "micros" that distinguish a masterpiece from an also-ran, but the manipulation of those "micros" into larger patterns and structures. The Mona Lisa is made up of brushstrokes in exactly the same way as the painting of an amateur hack.

And that's really what I'm trying to explore here. What makes one thing a masterpiece and another thing an also-ran? Even among masterpieces, what makes one piece of music sound tragic and another sound joyous? You've got the same 12 notes to work with, you've got (at least for the same time period) the same instruments available to play those notes. Describing music at the molecular level simply doesn't explain the overall effect, and in fact it's felt at times in these discussions as if there's no logical reason for more than one piece of music to exist.

I don't really care whether it's called "emotional" or "spiritual" or whatever, but the fact is music generates a reaction, and it's generating different reactions that actually provides some kind of purpose to bothering to generate different sounds to the ones previously generated.

[Madiel]

The short version: what's really struck me is the complete lack of a connection between those tools at the "micro" level and the intention to create a tragic piece, a heroic piece, a lyrical piece, a calm piece or an agitated one. I keep hearing that it's just about making... a piece. That sounds good. Doesn't matter how it sounds, so long as it's... good.

[Monsieur Croche]

The short version: what's really struck me is the complete lack of a connection between those tools at the "micro" level and the intention to create a tragic piece, a heroic piece, a lyrical piece, a calm piece or an agitated one. I keep hearing that it's just about making a piece that sounds good. Doesn't matter how it sounds, so long as it's... good.

I am more than a bit stymied by the question in there. My first reaction is those adjectival qualities, as so named, sound very like qualities attributed most to romantic era repertoire and those, titled just 'symphony,' etc. and without text having such qualitative attributes named after the fact of their completion.

I think the intents you name, and maybe that is just a matter of language falling short, or words not so well chosen, sound more like a laundry list a film director would hand a film composer.

I can think of some general mechanics, configurations, combined with the tempo and relative amount of musical activity, that might lead a listener to think, 'particular qualitative adjective,' but as far as actual note content, again, it seems like a list where a composer would be most reliant upon borrowing or imitating gestures and vocabulary of the past.

I guarantee you I am not being deliberately obtuse or coy about the question.

Maybe, without intending it to be any kind of challenge, or great task, if you would name some pieces which were known to have been intended by the composer as setting out to write a "tragic or heroic or lyrical piece," might help.

"Calm or agitated" have at least as much to do with tempo and the relative 'traffic' of note activity within that tempo. Again for these last two qualities, other than the more direct 'chase scene' 'agitated' cliche genre from the archives of film scores, I'm rather stumped as to what your concept and perceptions of those are, which is why I would like to have further from you on the very idea, the premise, and who you think has come up with music with that intent at the fore.

I have to confess that a lot of what you ask here, and the sort of ethos of it, sounds like a devotee of music asking for a return of the arch-romantic sensibility from composers of the present day, yet, you say you are a fan of the neoclassical, which some do think as either more cerebral or if other, 'emotionally remote.'

I'll be very curious if I can get a better idea of what you're getting at. It may be clear to you, but it is extremely vague and general to me as I read it.


Best regards.

[Madiel]

Brahms. Tragic Overture.

Strauss. Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life).

I don't have to go things with titles either. Heck, try Sibelius' 4th symphony for tragedy and 5th symphony for heroism. I've referred before to cases where a composer wrote 2 or 3 pieces in a set with clearly different characters. Beethoven's violin sonatas op.23 and 24 are as good an example as any of pieces with contrasting moods. There are a sufficiently large number of such sets that it's difficult to believe they just happen by accident, that the contrasts are just stumbled upon.

And this is one of my two glaring, screaming problems with statements that seem to limit musical success to a technically proficient process of putting notes together until they sound good. I keep being given the impression that emotional effects that are almost universally recognised by audiences ought to be treated as accidents.

The other glaring, screaming problem, which is related, is this:

I own one car. It works. I haven't felt the need for another, although at the moment it's beginning to have a few small issues and I'm considering replacing it. I own one television. I own one functioning kettle. One properly functioning kettle.

Explain to me why, by contrast, my house contains hundreds upon hundreds of bits of music. Because you keep giving me the impression that one technically proficient, fully functioning one that satisfies me ought to be enough.

Okay, so do I have several different varieties of tea in the house. I sort of have a 'default' one, and other flavours that I'm sometimes in the mood for. But I've only got one English Breakfast, one Earl Grey and so forth.

And yet, having one fully satisfactory sonata form, or theme and variations, or symphony, or string quartet, in now way prevents me from wanting to acquire another one. Explain why.

That's what your point of view is missing. If you reduce music to skilfully putting sounds together, if you take out notions of individual expression, you provide me with no explanation not only of why I should prefer your composition to another well-constructed composition, but why I should ever want to have two of them in my house at the same time.

This really has nothing to do with Romanticism, it has to do with the basic question of why people keep manipulating 12 notes and the instruments that can play them despite the fact that it's all been done extremely competently many times before. It has to do with why there is the slightest point to our composer friends on the forum bothering to add more material to a market that is already super-saturated.

EDIT: And if you say "they create because they must", that is a far more Romantic notion than anything I've said. It also provides no basis for why anyone ought to  listen. Just create, shove it in a drawer and start the next one.

[Madiel]

PS I just stumbled across a Strauss quote, while composing the work.

It is entitled 'A Hero's Life,' and while it has no funeral march, it does have lots of horns, horns being quite the thing to express heroism.

[Florestan]

My hat off to orfeo and (poco) Sforzando. High five, gentlemen!

That's what your point of view is missing. If you reduce music to skilfully putting sounds together, if you take out notions of individual expression, you provide me with no explanation not only of why I should prefer your composition to another well-constructed composition, but why I should ever want to have two of them in my house at the same time.

This really has nothing to do with Romanticism, it has to do with the basic question of why people keep manipulating 12 notes and the instruments that can play them despite the fact that it's all been done extremely competently many times before. It has to do with why there is the slightest point to our composer friends on the forum bothering to add more material to a market that is already super-saturated.

EDIT: And if you say "they create because they must", that is a far more Romantic notion than anything I've said. It also provides no basis for why anyone ought to  listen. Just create, shove it in a drawer and start the next one.

Excellent points and an implicit question whose answer I eagerly await.

[Florestan]

Maybe, without intending it to be any kind of challenge, or great task, if you would name some pieces which were known to have been intended by the composer as setting out to write a "tragic or heroic or lyrical piece," might help.

Beethoven - Wellington´s Victory
Schubert - Symphony No. 4 "Tragic"
Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
Liszt - Heroide funebre, Mazeppa, Orpheus, Prometheus, Tasso
Nikolai Medtner - Piano Sonatas: Tragica, Minacciosa, Romantica

Grieg - no less than 4 books of Lyric Pieces, each with its own title
Alexander von Zemlinsky - Lyric Symphony
Alban Berg - Lyric Suite

[Karl Henning]

Oh, I know other people would do it. I just find it stupid if it has nothing to do with the music. And no, I'm not a fan of Satie.

Surely you enjoy his sense of humor?

[Karl Henning]

Yeah, and this... this is what I have a problem with. Because it seems very much as if you are enjoying misleading people. Ha! If I put fish in the title, there'll be people who will try to relate the music to fish.

They will play . . . Find the Fish!

[Karl Henning]

Sorry to jump in, but as a sort of composer myself, I find that words and music interfere with each other when I'm listening—I think the same part of my brain processes both, so they compete, and if I can understand the words they take over from the music. When listening to songs I'll generally read the text afterwards, and I've never been able to enjoy songs in English. (I find that the best songs convey meaning even without the words. Don't know how else to explain it, but I think you can grasp the entire emotional trajectory of eg Dichterliebe or Winterreise, with less specificity but more of... whatever the word is for when a work of fiction makes you feel that the world of the story is much wider and more real than is actually shown onscreen/on the page. Of course there's also probably bias on my part in selecting which ones are the "best" songs. Lmao)

I wonder if there are any composers who didn't write any vocal music, or at least a minimal amount of it. I can't think of any offhand. (Even I've put some work into a Requiem, although that text is so formalised already as to be virtually meaningless....)

Chopin arguably wrote "minimal" vocal music, but his work had its characteristically singular focus.

[Karl Henning]

Chopin.

Should have known you had got here first!

[amw]

Chopin arguably wrote "minimal" vocal music, but his work had its characteristically singular focus.

As well, vocal music makes up the second largest proportion of his output, I believe.

It seems like all actual composers relate strongly to text in some way, probably another respect in which I shouldn't call myself one, heh

[Monsieur Croche]

I keep being given the impression that emotional effects that are almost universally recognised by audiences ought to be treated as accidents.

That is because that is often the case. Sibelius four: Maybe he actually sat down before he penned a note and said, "I am going to write a tragic piece." I doubt it. More likely, he had musical ideas, recognized their quality, and being a formalist and a very practiced composer, consciously stayed on track through the writing. I'm pretty sure it is not labeled by Sibelius as "Tragic," while most everyone agrees it feels 'dark.' The Strauss Ein Heldenleben you mentioned, well, I'm avowedly not a fan, and a lot of his music other than the operas sounds very shallow to me, the "emotions" on the superficial and cartoonish side. Each to their own, of course, but I hear frippery, you hear "Tragic."

...having one fully satisfactory sonata form, or theme and variations, or symphony, or string quartet, in no way prevents me from wanting to acquire another one.

Because those forms are not at all fully set or rigid, the forms differing one piece to the next, with sonatas, from the earliest Sonata di Chiesa to later one-movement massive structures like Liszt's Sonata in B Minor, through to the latest sonata written where the ink dried moments ago. Sonata form, or the others, is not a cake pan with a non malleable shape, and if it were there are still an infinite amount of ingredients to mix, pour into it, to make an infinite variety of cakes, just as there is no limit on the variety of harmonic language that can be in any of those forms.
You may as well ask why Beethoven wrote thirty-two piano sonatas and numbers of other sonatas for violin and piano and 'cello and piano, or why then Schubert and Brahms and Ives and Boulez bothered to compose sonatas. You know the answer. None are the same, and one was just not enough.

...it has to do with the basic question of why people keep manipulating 12 notes and the instruments that can play them despite the fact that it's all been done extremely competently many times before.

I'm certain you fully know the 'why' of this, but if this question is for you genuous, and really something you will grapple with unless you get that one highly romanticized sort of answer, "yes, I sit down and know exactly the piece will be tragic and pull out all the tragic musical devices and vocabulary and make it tragic," you might have to accept that as much as you are deeply into music as a listener, knowing the actual process at all intimately may remain forever outside of you.

It has to do with why there is the slightest point to our composer friends on the forum bothering to add more material to a market that is already super-saturated.

Sorry, dude, once an artist has managed to get a work performed or recorded, you can require that they further personally hard sell themselves and their works to you until you are blue in the face, though I would not hold my breath if I were you. Sure, music is a business, but from one business company to the next, the uniqueness of either the product or service usually does not come anywhere close to the uniqueness of a piece composed by even a second-tier composer.
---It is a different marketplace with an entirely different product of an entirely different nature. You're expecting the artists, or the classical music industry, to pitch to you why you should ride in their car and buy it. Well, music is not actually a car. Your expectation of that hard-sell of the music, that's a massive fail.

If you reduce music to skilfully putting sounds together, if you take out notions of individual expression, you provide me with no explanation not only of why I should prefer your composition to another well-constructed composition, but why I should ever want to have two of them in my house at the same time.

---Why on earth you think you should have a right to expect an explanation about a piece of music which has already been vetted and accepted by professionals for performance in a public venue or accepted by professional companies who record and sell CDs is for only the egocentrically entitled mind to know. I find that whole approach crass, not a little infantile, and think any explanation as to why that explanation should be expected would be a self-excusing rationale.
---When it comes to the young tyro composers, the amateurs and not quite yet fully professional, it seems it might be better and less stressful for you to stay at a far remove, i.e. it appears that when it comes to music you require a lot of prior certifications in the form of approvals, the seals and wax from experts and general public acclaim from past generations to the near present. Don't expect of yourself to then comfortably measure the quality of new and unknown works by the not yet fully vetted professionals.
---Some people, you know, just use and trust their own ears in these matters, but that means a willingness to listen, to sample the product as it were, without a sales pitch first.
---If being hard sold is part of the deal for you, maybe you're better off going out and looking for a new-used or new car instead of music if you're expecting that kind of sales pitch about the product. At least the car will actually get you somewhere.

[Madiel]

Surely you enjoy his sense of humor?

Satie? No, not really. I don't actually know a huge amount of his music, but from what I know I'd put the humour no higher than causing a slight smirk together with some bemusement.

I did play the "Sonatine bureaucratique" many years ago, and I don't think I found the written commentary especially funny.

Haydn is far funnier for me.

[Florestan]

Monsieur Croche, you missed orfeo´s point entirely. Anyway, the tone and content of your reaction speak volumes.

[Madiel]

Monsieur Croche,

I don't have time to untangle your mess of quotes, nor your even bigger mess of misunderstandings. So let's just make some brief points.

1. I selected Ein Hedenleben, A Hero's Life, for heroism. How on earth you could possibly think I consider it "tragic" is... I'm sorry, that's just bizarre. And whether you or I like the piece is completely irrelevant.

2. I do know the answer re Beethoven writing 32 sonatas. I'm asking whether you know the answer. The whole point is that it's far harder to derive an answer from your position than mine. Shouting one is not enough is not an argument, a kettle salesman could just as easily shout the same thing. Do I thereby give in and buy a second kettle?

3. You appear to believe that I'm arguing that every piece must have an easy word label such as "tragic". This is not what I'm arguing, and it's never been what I'm arguing. What you've apparently been arguing is that a composer never has such a label in mind, which is demonstrably not true.

4. And your entire last part misses the point all the more spectacularly than the rest. I'm not putting forward what I believe, I'm putting forward what I think is the logical question as a result of what you believe. I believe that music is a form of expression which means that each composer brings something unique as a result of their unique personality.  You deny that music expresses and conveys things - it's you who needs a further explanation as to why there's any point to providing more material. And I repeat, shouting one is not enough is not an argument, it's a bald assertion.

[Monsieur Croche]

Beethoven - Wellington´s Victory
Schubert - Symphony No. 4 "Tragic"
Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
Liszt - Heroide funebre, Mazeppa, Orpheus, Prometheus, Tasso
Nikolai Medtner - Piano Sonatas: Tragica, Minacciosa, Romantica

Grieg - no less than 4 books of Lyric Pieces, each with its own title
Alexander von Zemlinsky - Lyric Symphony
Alban Berg - Lyric Suite

Schubert added the title Tragic to his autograph manuscript some time after the work was completed. [after the fact intent?

There are numbers of works I would call 'lyric,' Berg's Violin Concerto certainly qualifies on that front, as does Stravinsky's Apollo.

I don't have 'the facts' on how or when the others were titled, the many instances of like 'what Schubert did,' title after the fact of the work having been completed, are known... Beethoven's Sonata Pathetique another known, Beethoven submitted the piece to his publisher, who then suggested the Pathetique; Beethoven said, "Alright." lol.

[Florestan]

Schubert added the title Tragic to his autograph manuscript some time after the work was completed. [after the fact intent?

I know it allright. But I´m sure that he didn´t add it just because he saw a signpost in the park reading "Tragic" and thought: "Hey, that would make a great funny title for the last symphony I wrote!"

I don't have 'the facts' on how or when the others were titled

And I don´t expect you to get them right, either. After all, they are unimportant, or even harmful, extramusical trivia., right?