What is the 'composer's intention?'

[Madiel]

Monsieur Croche, you keep putting the word analogy in bold as if merely using this word is some kind of proof that connections are not real.

[Monsieur Croche]

That of course was Toscanini. But Beethoven wrote on the title page, after scratching out the initial dedication to Napoleon: "Sinfonia Eroica ... composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo," and marks his second movement "Marcia Funebre." Sounds like "direct meaning in writing from the horse's mouth" to me.

I do invite anyone to contemplate just how 'hero' and 'heroic struggle' dictate exactly which notes, whether those notes are the two contrasting themes he wrote, or all the other development of notes and the paces the composer put those notes through to come up with what is the first movement of the Eroica.

The highly creative land on some idea from which ensuing tangential ideas and new concepts spring, and it is via those tangential concepts a work emerges. Hero, Heroic, fine. Comes from that two small handfuls of notes which end up as the two main themes, one with a greatly variant character from the other, setting up conflict -- the highly innovative element of this symphony, and the composer then worked those, putting them through their paces. If anyone needs to or likes to think that Luigi, in the middle of all that invention and finding his way through this completely novel / new manner of constructing a sonata-allegro movement in Eb did all that while thinking of Napoleon, a new and better central government for all of Europe, etc., well, they can and will, and they are welcome to it.

For many a musician, Allegro con brio, the score's contents, the technical musical directives in the score from a composer who knew full well that would be enough, are all one needs to get to an interpretation that all would agree has ''the right and true meaning of the work,'' without any in the audience, musicians included, feeling they heard anything less.

[Monsieur Croche]

Monsieur Croche, you keep putting the word analogy in bold as if merely using this word is some kind of proof that connections are not real.

Because they are not real.

They're merely associative on the part of the composer, on the part of the listener. [ADD. This is a base fundamental of creativity, on the part of both composer and listener.]

Some seem to take personal affront to this, as if they are being told both their rational mind and their imagination is faulty... nope, whatever the associations, if for the listener with those associations the associations seem to consistently 'fit' the music, they are then valid. Real, no -- because, well, they are merely associative, not concrete.

I would be delighted if some can see this is more the reality of these issues of intent and content.

[knight66]

Yes, but I can see some musicians finding that sort of thing annoying:

CONDUCTOR TO FIRST CLARINET: Yes, but you are the concertmaster's/leader's lover. You must make love to the violin . . .
FIRST CLARINET (looking at scrawny concertmaster): You want this forte or mezzo-forte?

Back to your more complex other point later.

.     

Almost none of the descriptions were directed at the orchestra who were overwhelmingly given technical musical instruction. The kind of explanations I have mentioned happened within the piano rehearsals. We knew that orchestras were unlikely to put up with that kind of thing. However, call it analagy or whatever, it happened so consistently from the likes of Rattle, Mutti, John Elliot Gardiner, Abbado, Previn etc that I suggest that rather than a dumbing down for the singers, the conductors were released into saying things they could not in front of an orchestra.

There were exceptions in each direction. Boulez and Maazel stuck to notation in piano rehearsal and Sinopili stood in front of the orchestra and spent an extravagant amount of time telling everyone what Mahler's 2nd meant. Unfortunately, I don't recall what he said, but it was like a full scale lecture punctuated by musical illustrations and the orchestra did not get restless. Obviously, most of it was directed at the orchestral parts and he referred to figure such and such which we did not have in our vocal score, then tell them what it was about in a narrative.

Mike

[Madiel]

Because they are not real.

They're merely associative on the part of the composer, on the part of the listener. [ADD. This is a base fundamental of creativity, on the part of both composer and listener.]

Some seem to take personal affront to this, as if they are being told both their rational mind and their imagination is faulty... nope, whatever the associations, if for the listener with those associations the associations seem to consistently 'fit' the music, they are then valid. Real, no -- because, well, they are merely associative, not concrete.

I would be delighted if some can see this is more the reality of these issues of intent and content.

If they're in the mind of the composer, how much more real do you want them to be?

You seem to be reducing music to the generation of sounds at certain frequencies. Sure, I get that that is the "real", objective phenomenon.

But I would argue music happens more in the minds of people than it does in the oscillating sound waves. It's what people perceive that is actually the art form. And if both the composer and the listener are perceiving it, I put it to you that that is far more significant than the objective fact of the soundwaves that a mechanical device could detect without any reaction beyond the detection.

[knight66]

Because they are not real.

They're merely associative on the part of the composer, on the part of the listener. [ADD. This is a base fundamental of creativity, on the part of both composer and listener.]

Some seem to take personal affront to this, as if they are being told both their rational mind and their imagination is faulty... nope, whatever the associations, if for the listener with those associations the associations seem to consistently 'fit' the music, they are then valid. Real, no -- because, well, they are merely associative, not concrete.

I would be delighted if some can see this is more the reality of these issues of intent and content.

I am not so sure about some of that.

Firstly, all performances are interpretation of the notation. But if someone has studied the score, the context, other scores of the composer, their writing etc; then it seemed to me that some of them, one being John Elliot Gardner, were very direct in repeatedly telling us what it meant and not saying, as some did on occasion; it as though, or, this is like. Those two locutions are clearly analogy which is just as useful. But in retrospect and looking across what a number of respected musicians said, it seemed to me that on occasion they were unlocking things and sharing that with us; not always even about what we were singing, but what the orchestra would be doing before we sang or while we were singing.

All so long ago it is difficult to recall precisely to provide more 'evidence'.

Secondly all language is analogy. What is the word table but a form of letters that we have agreed upon as meaning a specific noun. It did not spring forth declaring in each language what it was. So the word table is an analagy. But no one is going to deny that a table is a table. Because we have translated one language, music, into another, say English, I don't think that automatically invalidates the possibility of the abstract notes and abstract sounds having meanings which can SOMETIMES be unlocked. Table is an abstract sound to someone who speaks no English, but that does not empty the word of meaning.

And, lots of music is indeed colour and atmosphere and nothing else. That makes this topic even more intractable.

I do know that not all musicologists will go along with this, though it strikes me more practicing musicians would.

I think I will rest my case here, there are other arguments to be made, but I don't feel the need to make them. It is just a discussion, I am not trying to put anyone in the wrong, but I am sharing what I believe from my observations and experience.

Mike

[Florestan]

Stockhausen wrote of the work as follows:

"This work does not tell a story. Each moment can stand alone. It is necessary to take time if one wishes to absorb this music; most of the changes take place very gently INSIDE the sound. I wish that this music could impart some inner peace, expanse, and concentration; an awareness that we have a lot of time, if we take it – that it is better to collect oneself than to be beside oneself, because whatever happens needs someone to whom it can happen – someone must intercept it."

So, we have:

1. "I wish that" --- a more clear statement of intention is hard to find.
2. "nner peace, expanse, concentration, an awareness that we have a lot of time, if we take it, it is better to collect oneself than to be beside oneself " --- no less than five extra-musical elements that Stockhausen wished his music to impart.

Priceless quotation, Mr. Sforz! Thanks for sharing.

Beethoven wrote on the title page, after scratching out the initial dedication to Napoleon: "Sinfonia Eroica ... composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo," and marks his second movement "Marcia Funebre." Sounds like "direct meaning in writing from the horse's mouth" to me.

To me too.

In the Piano Sonata op. 26 we even have marcia funebre sulla morte d'un eroe, but of course it´s all sham and deceit: actually there is simply Maestoso andante.

[Florestan]

If they're in the mind of the composer, how much more real do you want them to be?

You seem to be reducing music to the generation of sounds at certain frequencies. Sure, I get that that is the "real", objective phenomenon.

But I would argue music happens more in the minds of people than it does in the oscillating sound waves. It's what people perceive that is actually the art form. And if both the composer and the listener are perceiving it, I put it to you that that is far more significant than the objective fact of the soundwaves that a mechanical device could detect without any reaction beyond the detection.

Amen, brother!

[some guy]

You seem to be reducing music to...

You and I are in agreement that reduction is a bad thing.

We disagree in what constitutes "reduction," however. Following the idea that music starts where language leaves off, I find that all the attempts to describe and understand music in non-musical terms is pushing music back into a pre-musical state. If you want to follow music where it is going, you have to trust the sounds and what the sounds are doing, not reduce them to some non-musical/pre-musical situation that you already understand.

Granted, the technical vocabulary for music does seem a bit more effable than the music itself. And if you focus on the vocabulary itself, then you will be able to conclude that that doesn't describe the music very well. But that's just the point. Language does not describe music very well. Autobiographical, political, philosophical, transcendental language does not describe music very well. That's my point. Musical language does not describe music very well. That's your point. But it's the same point. Music is doing something that is beyond the capacity of language to describe. Maybe, as Mike has suggested, conductor harangues will get choral musicians sufficiently in "the mood" to sing the notes well. I suppose it could happen. But surely that is a temporary effect. Eventually, the notes and the various symbols surrounding them have to be trusted. (The fact that many conductors and even a few composers do not trust them, not totally, is neither here nor there. After all, the "species-specific" for humans is language. Language is the default mode for all of us, musicians and painters and sculptors alike. And it's certainly to be expected that if a composer is invited to talk about her music that she will use words to do that, rather than the more sensible response which would be to hum a few bars. None of this proves anything like what Florestan and Mike seem determined to prove, but it does seem to confirm the idea that language is our default mode.)

It's not, as I have said way too many times already, that "that is all there is." It's that the music, the "that" that we're talking about is already the "something more," the "something beyond" that the question "is that all there is?" is plaintively wishing there were.

Here's how it looks to me:

orfeo--"Is there nothing more?"

some guy--"This is the something more."

[knight66]

I said I woud leave off....but from what you have said, I cannot have made myself clear.

There was next to no haranguing. Once or twice over decades. What we built up with a number of returning conductors was a relationship of trust and conductors shared their views, frequently not directly about the words. They are after all fairly explicit. Most of the time they used technical terms for what they wanted. But a number of conductors clearly wanted to expound on what the piece meant at specific moments. This was not a bunch of thickies who were giving it a go. Lots of the singers were quite hightly trained and this was not an issue of geeing up the simple minded singers with a few anecdotes and finessing them to perform without requisite understanding or connection.

No language can be absoluely translated into another language, something is certainly lost or changed. But that does not mean that all translation is futile, treat with suspicion perhaps and certainly sift the sands.

Mike

[Florestan]

a number of conductors clearly wanted to expound on what the piece meant at specific moments. This was not a bunch of thickies who were giving it a go. Lots of the singers were quite hightly trained and this was not an issue of geeing up the simple minded singers with a few anecdotes and finessing them to perform without requisite understanding or connection.

According to some views expressed here, conductors should actually not talk at all during rehearsals, just let the music speak for itself. At most, they can point out that an allegro is not fast enough or that a pianissimo is not soft enough, and if need be they can even hum ad libitum --- but in no case should they ever try to use non-musical terms to describe this or that passage, or the whole work. What, are not the sounds and their interesting combination enough? 

No language can be absoluely translated into another language, something is certainly lost or changed. But that does not mean that all translation is futile

Of course.

[Madiel]

You and I are in agreement that reduction is a bad thing.

We disagree in what constitutes "reduction," however. Following the idea that music starts where language leaves off, I find that all the attempts to describe and understand music in non-musical terms is pushing music back into a pre-musical state. If you want to follow music where it is going, you have to trust the sounds and what the sounds are doing, not reduce them to some non-musical/pre-musical situation that you already understand.

Granted, the technical vocabulary for music does seem a bit more effable than the music itself. And if you focus on the vocabulary itself, then you will be able to conclude that that doesn't describe the music very well. But that's just the point. Language does not describe music very well. Autobiographical, political, philosophical, transcendental language does not describe music very well. That's my point. Musical language does not describe music very well. That's your point. But it's the same point. Music is doing something that is beyond the capacity of language to describe. Maybe, as Mike has suggested, conductor harangues will get choral musicians sufficiently in "the mood" to sing the notes well. I suppose it could happen. But surely that is a temporary effect. Eventually, the notes and the various symbols surrounding them have to be trusted. (The fact that many conductors and even a few composers do not trust them, not totally, is neither here nor there. After all, the "species-specific" for humans is language. Language is the default mode for all of us, musicians and painters and sculptors alike. And it's certainly to be expected that if a composer is invited to talk about her music that she will use words to do that, rather than the more sensible response which would be to hum a few bars. None of this proves anything like what Florestan and Mike seem determined to prove, but it does seem to confirm the idea that language is our default mode.)

It's not, as I have said way too many times already, that "that is all there is." It's that the music, the "that" that we're talking about is already the "something more," the "something beyond" that the question "is that all there is?" is plaintively wishing there were.

Here's how it looks to me:

orfeo--"Is there nothing more?"

some guy--"This is the something more."

No, that is not what is happening at all. However many times I point out I am not a Romantically minded person, trying to add "something more" to absolute music, we come back to these kinds of notions that the notes aren't enough for me. The notes are more than enough for me. The point is that most people don't hear notes as "just notes". People don't sit there listing off the frequencies.

-------------------

To respond to your post: however many times there is some criticism of attempts to link music back to other things - to language, to experience - it misses the fundamental point that this is what everybody does. A point you've just made yourself. Everybody. Composers. Conductors. Professional musicians. This isn't some weak-minded idea dreamt up by some poor listeners who can't grasp what the nature of music is, this is the way that people steeped in music behave.

Trying to assert that music just "is", that there aren't "intentions" involved, that it doesn't "mean" anything, might all feel very nice as a theory, but it completely ignores the empirical data of how composers, conductors and performers actually work. I don't actually care how well or how poorly language describes music, and I don't have the slightest argument with the notion that music does things that can't properly be expressed in other ways, and yet composers, conductors and performers constantly use language.  And they don't just do it to talk to the uneducated masses, they use language with each other. They talk about music to each other, all the time, with language.

-------------------------

Which is all in any case completely besides the point I was actually making before you decided to reduce my sentence to little more than the word "reduce". My point was an entirely different one, that Monsieur Croche keeps trying to say that the "music" can be found in a series of sounds, and meanings associated with those sounds are something external. And I say that this is wrong because your CD player can reproduce the series of sounds, but the CD player is not a musician and feels absolutely nothing. The CD player does not perceive music. It is human beings that perceive music, and they do that by the meaning they give to the sounds, the way they perceive patterns, and changes in patterns.

People have in fact demonstrated it's possible to have a computer write music - someone created a computer "composer" some years ago that did a fair job of imitating a middling Russian romantic school composer. But the computer doesn't think of what it's doing as music. It doesn't think at all. It follows a set of instructions about how Russian romantic music is supposed to work. It is only human beings, hearing the sequence of sounds the computer has come up with, that hear music.

[Madiel]

In short, I'm not looking for something more than the notes. I'm looking for recognition of what notes do.

The composer's intention in having an 'A' played is not simply to generate recognition that it is 440 cycles per second. A machine will record that fact. A human listener might too, but do we really think that's all they ought to notice?

EDIT: It really is no different to something that has already been referred to: understanding the difference between the letters "t a b l e" (themselves representations of sounds that don't relate to the drawn shapes) and the way those letters are combined to form an idea. There is something more than the letters. That's the whole point of using the letters.

And a list of the sounds that a human voice is capable of creating is not a dictionary. Organising things into higher-level structures is the key. Music is not merely notes, it is notes placed in a structure.

[Madiel]

Heck, I'm ready to answer the original question. What is the composer's intention? To arrange notes into a satisfying structure.

Next question, and the crucial one: what makes a structure satisfying?.

And it's "satisfaction" that is fundamentally a human concept. A computer cannot be pleased. A computer can record a series of notes for you, but it can't tell you whether it's happy with them.

[some guy]

How funny. I too was ready, before I ponced off to class, to answer the original question:

To make music.

Otherwise, if a composer is asked to do something besides make music, something like describe what they've done, then they'll use language. Of course. We are humans. That's our default mode. It's nothing special about music or musicians. It's just that if explaining or describing or evaluating is called for, then language is what a human is going to use to do it with.

If the notes are enough for you, more than enough, then I don't know where we disagree.

Oh well. I certainly don't think that saying the notes are sufficient means that what I'm doing is listing off frequencies as I listen.

Here's what I've gotten from you, though from time to time you seem to be saying that that's not what you think: that music makes people think of things, of stories or of emotions or of biographies or of pictures. If that's not what you think, OK. But it's that that I differ with. At least for me, what happens when I hear music is that I think of nothing except music, I hear those sounds in that order in in those combinations. If I were to try to describe, in words, what I've heard, what I am most struck with is how very different my words are from the music. And I'm a poet, so if anyone--if any profession--is up to the task, it would be a poet.

But no. Far as I'm concerned, the best way to understand music is to listen to a lot of music. Not to listen to a lot of composers. Not to listen to a lot of conductors. Not to listen to a lot of classical music fans posting to classical music forums online. But to listen to a lot of music. There may, from time to time, but some very temporary and very insufficient utility to trying to describe what's going on in a piece, especially for new things, that is, for things that are not yet familiar. But otherwise, there's nothing like listening to music to understand what it is that music does.

So far as I can see, there is only one danger to that path, and that is if you do it enough, there will be nothing that will bewilder or perplex or even, perhaps, dismay. And being bewildered by a new piece of music can be quite delightful. It never happens to me any more, but there's always hope. There are always new composers, and some of those nice people might come up with something that really baffles me.

I live in hope.

[James]

Monsieur Croche, you keep putting the word analogy in bold as if merely using this word is some kind of proof that connections are not real.

They are 2 very separate systems of communication (language). But words & music mix well too.

[James]

Far as I'm concerned, the best way to understand music is to listen to a lot of music. Not to listen to a lot of composers. Not to listen to a lot of conductors. Not to listen to a lot of classical music fans posting to classical music forums online. But to listen to a lot of music. There may, from time to time, but some very temporary and very insufficient utility to trying to describe what's going on in a piece, especially for new things, that is, for things that are not yet familiar. But otherwise, there's nothing like listening to music to understand what it is that music does.

So far as I can see, there is only one danger to that path, and that is if you do it enough, there will be nothing that will bewilder or perplex or even, perhaps, dismay. And being bewildered by a new piece of music can be quite delightful. It never happens to me any more, but there's always hope. There are always new composers, and some of those nice people might come up with something that really baffles me.

I live in hope.

No one learns in a vacuum. Listening to a lot of music as a child would is fine and well - but A LOT more is required  to understand its inner workings ("under the hood", "opening the clock", so to speak) - to see what makes it tick, how it can be played, all of the details etc. You know, a 'deeper' understanding & appreciation of what music is and how it is made.

[(poco) Sforzando]

I do invite anyone to contemplate just how 'hero' and 'heroic struggle' dictate exactly which notes, whether those notes are the two contrasting themes he wrote, or all the other development of notes and the paces the composer put those notes through to come up with what is the first movement of the Eroica.

The highly creative land on some idea from which ensuing tangential ideas and new concepts spring, and it is via those tangential concepts a work emerges. Hero, Heroic, fine. Comes from that two small handfuls of notes which end up as the two main themes, one with a greatly variant character from the other, setting up conflict -- the highly innovative element of this symphony, and the composer then worked those, putting them through their paces. If anyone needs to or likes to think that Luigi, in the middle of all that invention and finding his way through this completely novel / new manner of constructing a sonata-allegro movement in Eb did all that while thinking of Napoleon, a new and better central government for all of Europe, etc., well, they can and will, and they are welcome to it.

For many a musician, Allegro con brio, the score's contents, the technical musical directives in the score from a composer who knew full well that would be enough, are all one needs to get to an interpretation that all would agree has ''the right and true meaning of the work,'' without any in the audience, musicians included, feeling they heard anything less.

M. Croche invites us to contemplate; very well then, I have contemplated. A key point, left so far unsaid in this discussion, is that Croche's pure-music approach represents a 20th-century aesthetic that has overturned an earlier Romantic understanding of music in which programmatic and literary analogues were felt to be essential to the work. One major scholar, I think it was Carl Dahlhaus but I don't want to dig through all my books to make sure, made the point that to many of the Romantics, literature was the most prestigious of the arts and thus a literary interpretation of a musical journey was not only acceptable but desirable. You can see this devotion to literature above all in Berlioz, who made Virgil, Goethe, and Shakespeare his highest literary gods, and in Schumann as well.

Consequently for Berlioz, who was hardly a fool, it made perfect sense to see the scherzo of the Eroica as depicting the funeral games following the death of the hero. And he supplied a detailed program for his own Fantastique, which we of a more modern persuasion might want to hear as solely a piece of absolute music. Of course these programmatic interpretations and fanciful titles are not without their problems. Even if the Eroica scherzo represents funeral games, what is one to do with the finale? The ending might be seen as the apotheosis of the hero, but that leaves out the body of the variation set.

It is only towards the end of the 19th century that you begin to see an attitude like Walter Pater's famous "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it." This is echoed in Stravinsky's "I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being."

That attitude surely underlies M. Croche's aesthetic, it is probably what he was educated to believe, but it must be remembered that such an attitude is of its own time and not definitive for the ages. Even today some distinguished musicologists are revisiting these assumptions and finding some merit in the older, programmatic style of interpretation after all. Scott Burnham of Princeton University wrote a book called "Beethoven Hero," in which he analyzed the heroic style as found in the 3rd and 5th symphonies, the Egmont Overture, and some other pieces, and concluded that the older, now maligned programmatic readings were not so different from more contemporary analyses of the direction of the piece. It's a very dense, difficult book, which Charles Rosen called the most important contribution to musical literature in twenty years, and anyone prepared to scoff at it ought to at least read it. Joseph Kerman of UC Berkeley wrote a book on the concerto in which he discussed the relations between soloist and orchestra in terms of human communication, where the soloist plays various roles as sometimes a leader, sometimes a partner, sometimes an antagonist, etc. It's very interesting, and opens room for contemplation (that word!) about the essential nature of music that the rigid Pater/Stravinsky model tries to shut down.

I do not know if Beethoven was consciously thinking of Napoleon or the new Europe when writing the Eroica. Possibly now and then, possibly not much at all beyond a fleeting association. I am sure he was thinking in new ways to expand musical time, to enlarge and complicate the function of the development section and coda in sonata form, to include independent episodes in the return of the A section of his Funeral March that made the movement much more complex than the standard ABA form, and so forth.

This is you might say the purely musical level, and of course it is valid. But I think it worth our while to ask why have the Eroica, the 5th, the 9th, the Appassionata and Waldstein, loomed so large in musical history? These are Beethoven's primary "heroic" works, but they are only a small part of his output. Can it have been purely their formal innovations? Why should the Eroica have become so much more a musical icon than the F major quartet, op. 59/1, every bit its musical equal? Even M. Croche, the apostle of pure music, describes the Eroica's first movement in terms of theme, character, conflict – words that go beyond the pure music attitude of a Stravinsky and borrow metaphors from the drama. Joseph Kerman, in his excellent study of the Beethoven quartets, makes the point that with Mozart and Haydn, their contributions – however delightful – remain "types," where with Beethoven we start to sense that each composition is somehow an "individual." And however interesting I may find Beethoven's use of the Neapolitan in the Appassionata, or the sense of hearing a concerto for solo piano in the Waldstein, each of these works and those of many composers following seems to me to create a world of its own that cannot be simply felt or described in terms of its formal procedures.

[Madiel]

Here's what I've gotten from you, though from time to time you seem to be saying that that's not what you think: that music makes people think of things, of stories or of emotions or of biographies or of pictures. If that's not what you think, OK. But it's that that I differ with. At least for me, what happens when I hear music is that I think of nothing except music, I hear those sounds in that order in in those combinations.

I'm not talking about stories, biographies or pictures. Well, not in general. There are certain pieces that are quite definitely attached to stories or pictures, but it's not a general proposition.

I am talking about emotions. But not simply thinking of them. Having them. Why do you actually listen to music? Do you get pleasure out of it? Do you react?

Surely you do. Why else do you do it?

There are parts of this conversation that come across as the aural equivalent of people saying "I eat food because it is necessary to obtain my nutritional requirements of protein, fat and carbohydrate", which is strictly true but completely ignores the involvement of the senses in the experience. And this is one of them. Saying you "hear those sounds in that order in those combinations" is a perfect description of what a machine with a microphone attached would be capable of doing. It could register the sounds just like you do.

And then what? You offer no description of your response to hearing those sounds in that order in those combinations.

If you don't have any kind of reaction to the process of hearing sounds, then what's the purpose of the exercise?

The point of this conversation, as far as I'm concerned, is that a composer doesn't write music down for the purpose of you registering a series of sounds like a mechanical recording device, and that any description of music and composition that merely discusses the objective mechanics of notation and sound production is missing the point in the same way that describing your favourite meal's nutritional content is missing the point. The purpose is to create a response, and while our avant garde composer friend seems to be of the view that he doesn't attempt in any way to steer the nature of the response, I suspect most composers are not like that, in the same way that most chefs are not merely producing dishes to meet your body's need for nutrients.

[Monsieur Croche]

They are 2 very separate systems of communication (language). But words & music mix well too.

I don't think words and music 'mix well.' They can and do work well in combination, that is only if the words are sung or at the least 'intoned,' like the slightly sungsprechgesang. [I think spoken word and music together are almost completely at odds with each other, and mix no better than oil and water.]

When there is sung text, even in another language, the sound of what we recognize as words, and from the human voice, completely shifts the focus of almost every listener on the planet, the words always in the foreground, the music, no matter how forceful or present, not in the foreground.

I'm being pedantic here, of course, making the distinction between words and music working well together, and thinking they literally do not 'mix,' like, say, an oboe and a clarinet playing together.