Notes in music?

Started by some guy, May 30, 2019, 11:22:57 AM

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Florestan

Quote from: some guy on June 04, 2019, 06:44:27 AM
Madiel, your struggles might be less, um, strugglesome if you cease conflating "emotional content" with "emotional reaction."

That's not Madiel's conflation, but precisely yours:

Quote from: some guy on May 30, 2019, 11:22:57 AM
t's good and fine and strong just being its own sweet self, not causing emotional reactions, not expressing emotional states, not telling complicated little stories, just sounding.

You say above in plain English that music does not, or should not, cause emotional reactions and that is does not, or should not, express emotional states. Now, expressing emotional states means exactly having emotional content. Ergo, you ban from music both emotional reactions and emotional content.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Ken B

Quote from: Madiel on June 04, 2019, 02:38:08 AM
One additional remark:

If music doesn't have emotional content, what the blazes was Sibelius doing writing a piece called Valse triste? How dare he indicate that the notes are sad, eh?
Well that is interesting. If you read Glenda Goss's biography she has an appendix where she reprints Sibelius's letter to the publisher asking if they could mix tears into the ink.

Florestan

Quote from: Ken B on June 04, 2019, 08:01:10 AM
Well that is interesting. If you read Glenda Goss's biography she has an appendix where she reprints Sibelius's letter to the publisher asking if they could mix tears into the ink.

Could you please post it here?
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

#83
Quote from: some guy on June 04, 2019, 06:44:27 AM
...your struggles might be less, um, strugglesome if you cease conflating "emotional content" with "emotional reaction."

That is the crux of it, IMO.

I don't get why this issue is so contentious. The phenomena seem so obvious. The human mind attaches emotion to everything. Sound, in particular, musical or not, can be demonstrated to produce an emotional reaction. Music is a pleasing arrangement of sounds and the whole point of it is that it works on multiple levels at once. Rhythm, melody, harmony, beauty of timbre, unfolding in time. As we experience it intellectual, sensuous, emotional responses, cultural and social references, all superimpose on each other to create a rich whole. As we experience it we are free to focus our attention on whatever aspect we please, while responding to all aspects at some level. And on top of that, the very human need to claim that someone else is not experiencing it right, apparently. Music evokes emotion, but not necessarily the emotion that the composer of performer thinks it does. It does not 'communicate' emotion, except in the most blatantly programed music.

With regard to classical music performance, there is a fairly detailed specification on paper which specifies what notes to play when and how loud. Probably the composer knows precisely how he or she thinks it should be performed, but there is some considerable leeway for the performer to vary the performance while staying within the bounds laid out by the score. Listening to a performance of a Beethoven Sonata by Arrau, by Kempff, by Fischer, by Pollini, and by your cousin at her piano recital will make obvious how much leeway there is.

Karl Henning

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on May 30, 2019, 11:42:09 AM
Depends on the music. More often than not I listen to music as an abstract art form, and derive pleasure from the absolute beauty if it, which may involve appreciating a melody, the skill of the composer in interweaving independent voices into a contrapuntal fabric, transforming and combining musical themes in different ways, creating beautiful harmonies. Other times I find it interesting to imagine different emotional scenarios that are implied by the music.

Abstraction aside, it is a biological fact that sounds (including non-musical sounds) induce emotional reactions in the human mind, so there is a basis for connecting music to emotion. But that does not mean we are bound by that. For what it's worth, I don't think it can be claimed with any basis that music communicates emotion. It evokes emotion. The emotion evoked is not necessarily the emotion that the composer intended to evoke.

Completely agree.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Madiel

Quote from: Florestan on June 04, 2019, 07:46:22 AM
That's not Madiel's conflation, but precisely yours:

Exactly. Don't think I didn't look back to examine the wording. The whole problem is that whatever distinction some guy is trying to make when divorcing emotion from music, the language being used is hopeless for the task and keeps coming across as denying the entire purpose of creating music in the first place: eliciting reactions.

You know what we call music that doesn't elicit reactions? BORING. We turn it off.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

Karl Henning

#86
This will be a droll tangent here:

In June 1930, a Berlin newspaper wrote to Schoenberg asking him to comment on the "musical life and the shift of the center of gravity from Vienna to Berlin."

Schoenberg replied:

Even before the war people in Vienna were rightly and wrongly proud and ashamed of being less active than Berlin.

Even at the time Berlin showed a lovely and intense interest in recognizing and explaining the symptoms of a work of art, something that was missing in Vienna, thanks to centuries of experience in composing.

Even in those days whatever was new was derided after several performances in Berlin,whereas in Vienna it needed only one performance. In extreme cases--in both places--no performance at all.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Karl Henning

Quote from: Madiel on June 04, 2019, 01:50:56 PM
Exactly. Don't think I didn't look back to examine the wording. The whole problem is that whatever distinction some guy is trying to make when divorcing emotion from music, the language being used is hopeless for the task and keeps coming across as denying the entire purpose of creating music in the first place: eliciting reactions.

You know what we call music that doesn't elicit reactions? BORING. We turn it off.

Good.
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Madiel

#88
As for the proposition that music doesn't communicate, 2 responses.

The first is that you can make exactly the same propositions about written and spoken language. In fact this thread is as good a demonstration as anything of the scatter-gun approach of putting words together in the hope that others will comprehend, but risking the chance that they won't. I suppose people could just admire the words themselves (which might lead to putting the prettiest words together on some aesthetic principle), but when I choose a sequence of letters I generally am trying to communicate something. 26 letters are arguably capable of slightly more precision than 12 notes, but generally when people try to deny musical communication they don't realise they are using the same arguments that would deny their own communication with words.

The second response is that composers themselves repeatedly indicate they do have intentions to communicate. And no, it doesn't have to be Programme music. Composers who aren't interested in that still use adjectives like "triste". Some marches are marked as funeral marches. Mozart wrote a musical joke and frankly Haydn wrote plenty. Composers wrote tragically, they wrote heroically, and over and over again they actually demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to give the vast majority of listeners the kind of feeling they wanted to give.

The fact that a few listeners get a different feeling is no more proof that music doesn't communicate than the fact that no matter what you write or say, and however well you write or say it, some people WILL MISUNDERSTAND.

Seriously. This whole argument boils down to "people get different things out of it so there must be nothing in it". It's a frankly weird form of reasoning. It's like saying that because the several blind people made wrong conclusions when feeling an elephant, there was no elephant.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

Quote from: Madiel on June 04, 2019, 02:03:26 PM
As for the proposition that music doesn't communicate, 2 responses.

The first is that you can make exactly the same propositions about written and spoken language. In fact this thread is as good a demonstration as anything of the scatter-gun approach of putting words together in the hope that others will comprehend, but risking the chance that they won't. I suppose people could just admire the words themselves (which might lead to putting the prettiest words together on some aesthetic principle), but when I choose a sequence of letters I generally am trying to communicate something. 26 letters are arguably capable of slightly more precision than 12 notes, but generally when people try to deny musical communication they don't realise they are using the same arguments that would deny their own communication with words.

The second response is that composers themselves repeatedly indicate they do have intentions to communicate. And no, it doesn't have to be Programme music. Composers who aren't interested in that still use adjectives like "triste". Some marches are marked as funeral marches. Mozart wrote a musical joke and frankly Haydn wrote plenty. Composers wrote tragically, they wrote heroically, and over and over again they actually demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to give the vast majority of listeners the kind of feeling they wanted to give.

The fact that a few listeners get a different feeling is no more proof that music doesn't communicate than the fact that no matter what you write or say, and however well you write or say it, some people WILL MISUNDERSTAND.

Seriously. This whole argument boils down to "people get different things out of it so there must be nothing in it". It's a frankly weird form of reasoning. It's like saying that because the several blind people made wrong conclusions when feeling an elephant, there was no elephant.

I don't agree. It may be true on a thread like this that you can write something and someone else can claim you said something that you had no intention of saying. That is because this is a discussion of "philosophy" which is the art of putting together a lot of tautological statements and/or deciding to use words to which you have assigned your own private meaning.

In the ordinary use of language there is very little ambiguity, if you don't want there to be.

There are 17 cats in that house.

The car costs $22,000, unless you want the sunroof, which will cost an extra $2,000.

I will be home at 5:30 and fix dinner. Don't be late.

That hat is just ugly, I refuse to wear it.

Can anyone claim to misunderstand these statements.

Someone plays Faure Barcarole No 5. Can you tell me what it communicates? Maybe it communicates Faure's idea that you can imply a melody and a harmony without ever playing a well defined chord or playing an explicit melody.

Maybe we can agree on the "meaning" of a Sousa march. That is music which has a overpowering social cue.

Of course there are poems, which are designed to be beautiful combinations of words with ambiguous meanings. Poems play with language, they don't use language for its practical purpose.

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

Quote from: k a rl h e nn i ng on June 04, 2019, 01:38:02 PM
Completely agree.

I have to admit, in the rare event that someone agrees with me on this board I am tempted to print it out and put it up on my refrigerator.  :laugh:

Karl Henning

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on June 04, 2019, 02:28:57 PM
I have to admit, in the rare event that someone agrees with me on this board I am tempted to print it out and put it up on my refrigerator.  :laugh:

(* chortle *)
Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Madiel

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on June 04, 2019, 02:18:47 PM
I don't agree. It may be true on a thread like this that you can write something and someone else can claim you said something that you had no intention of saying. That is because this is a discussion of "philosophy" which is the art of putting together a lot of tautological statements and/or deciding to use words to which you have assigned your own private meaning.

In the ordinary use of language there is very little ambiguity, if you don't want there to be.

There are 17 cats in that house.

The car costs $22,000, unless you want the sunroof, which will cost an extra $2,000.

I will be home at 5:30 and fix dinner. Don't be late.

That hat is just ugly, I refuse to wear it.

Can anyone claim to misunderstand these statements.

Someone plays Faure Barcarole No 5. Can you tell me what it communicates? Maybe it communicates Faure's idea that you can imply a melody and a harmony without ever playing a well defined chord or playing an explicit melody.

Maybe we can agree on the "meaning" of a Sousa march. That is music which has a overpowering social cue.

Of course there are poems, which are designed to be beautiful combinations of words with ambiguous meanings. Poems play with language, they don't use language for its practical purpose.

Again there's a problem with your reasoning. You correctly demonstrate that words are less ambiguous than music (while noting that some words are more ambiguous than others). You confine the ambiguity to poetry, but let me assure you, as a person who wrestles with the ambiguity of language while writing laws for a living, the ambiguity is far wider than poetry.

But the flaw in your reasoning is: music is more ambiguous, therefore music has no meaning. Sorry? How does that work?

Do you think POETRY has no meaning because the language is different? Do you think that an impressionist painting conveys less because it doesn't have sharp lines, or do you think it conveys nothing at all? Do you think that because an electron can't be pinned down in a particular spot it simply has no location?

I simply don't get this desire to convert "ambiguous" into "meaningless". No-one is claiming that music can tell you what time to be home for dinner unless it involves a dinner bell. But I find it quite bizarre to conclude that because a Faure barcarolle (and thanks for picking a favourite piece) doesn't contain that kind of specificity we ought to jump to the opposite end of the spectrum and conclude it doesn't represent any kind of intention to communicate any kind of feeling.

Music appreciation does not consist SOLELY of admiring the abstract quality of the construction of the counterpoint. If that was it, we wouldn't be able to meaningfully distinguish between various masterpieces that we undoubtedly do distinguish between. Various times where composers provided 2 or 3 contrasting pieces would be an exercise in repetition. Read one poem, read them all.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

Madiel

I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that some of Faure's barcarolles are a good deal sadder or angrier than others.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

#94
Quote from: Madiel on June 04, 2019, 02:47:03 PMBut the flaw in your reasoning is: music is more ambiguous, therefore music has no meaning. Sorry? How does that work?

I do not claim or agree with the statement that the primary difference between music and language is the degree of ambiguity. Peanut butter is softer than steel. That doesn't mean that the only distinction between peanut butter and steel is the surface hardness. There is a qualitative difference between what music can convey and what language can convey. Can music pose or answer a question (even an "emotional" one)?

How did Brienne of Tarth feel when Jamie Lannister returned to Kings Landing?

Answer 1) She was sad because she loved him and she would be lonely.
Answer 2) She was disappointed because she believed he had redeemed himself, when it turns out he relapsed to his evil ways.

Answer 3) Faure Nocturne No 1.
Answer 4) Bach, Sinfonia in c minor, BWV 788

It seems to me that laws are ambiguous, but not because language is ambiguous. They are ambiguous because they must be applied to a huge variety of circumstances, often circumstances that the writers of the laws did not or could not foresee. (And sometimes because the people writing the laws don't agree and take refuge in ambiguity.)


amw

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on June 04, 2019, 03:15:55 PM
How did Brienne of Tarth feel when Jamie Lannister returned to Kings Landing?

Answer 1) She was sad because she loved him and she would be lonely.
Answer 2) She was disappointed because she believed he had redeemed himself, when it turns out he relapsed to his evil ways.

Answer 3) Faure Nocturne No 1.
Answer 4) Bach, Sinfonia in c minor, BWV 788
Of course the showrunners themselves answered that question by providing a musical cue at the point where that event happened. This is arguably the entire purpose of non-diegetic film and television music. (Q: How did Janet Leigh's character feel about being murdered? A: Bernard Herrmann, Psycho (1960), cue no.17) (translated into English it's probably safe to say the meaning of that musical cue is "she experienced negative emotions about her impending death")

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

Quote from: amw on June 04, 2019, 03:39:19 PM
Of course the showrunners themselves answered that question by providing a musical cue at the point where that event happened. This is arguably the entire purpose of non-diegetic film and television music. (Q: How did Janet Leigh's character feel about being murdered? A: Bernard Herrmann, Psycho (1960), cue no.17) (translated into English it's probably safe to say the meaning of that musical cue is "she experienced negative emotions about her impending death")

I'm at a loss, since I haven't seen the final season of GoT, only read reviews. People seem to disagree about it, nevertheless. What did the music reveal? Choices 1, 2, or maybe that she thought he had a cute butt and she regretted not being able to admire it anymore. :)


amw

I mean I haven't seen any of GoT but if the debate only names emotions that are variants of regret or sadness it seems likely that the background music is prejudicing people's opinions. (Otherwise why not e.g. that she was happy such a toxic person had walked out of her life, or that she was angry with him because he could have done better, etc)

Madiel

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on June 04, 2019, 03:15:55 PM
There is a qualitative difference between what music can convey and what language can convey.

Certainly, but the whole argument has been that music cannot convey anything. Certainly that it can't convey emotion.

As to another part of your post that I haven't quoted, I'm really not sure that you want to tell a legislative drafter about his own job and I'm certainly not inclined to derail the main conversation any further. Suffice to say that some of the sentences you provided as examples of unambiguous utterances were not as unambiguous as you suppose. Which is no different to how many of my instructors think they've sorted everything out right until I ask them curly questions which make them realise they haven't.
I am now working on a discography of the works of Vagn Holmboe. Please visit and also contribute!

some guy

Quote from: Madiel on June 04, 2019, 02:47:03 PMI simply don't get this desire to convert "ambiguous" into "meaningless".
No one at any time on this thread has ever expressed such a desire, though.

The only time this desire has been mentioned is when someone wants to substitute this idea for the ideas actually being expressed.