Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony Question

[jochanaan]

 Alkan, though, is exactly right that Romantic composers (even Brahms!!!) probably usually had something in mind when composing.  It wasn't until Stravinsky that composers began to insist that their music was "a thing, not to be interpreted."

The trouble usually comes when you try to reduce the something to words, or even to a word.

[Cato]

Alkan, though, is exactly right that Romantic composers (even Brahms!!!) probably usually had something in mind when composing.  It wasn't until Stravinsky that composers began to insist that their music was "a thing, not to be interpreted."

The trouble usually comes when you try to reduce the something to words, or even to a word.

When Stravinsky made that remark, he was in one sense offering an interpretation! (even if he was just trying to separate himself from the earlier generation).   0:)

So what do the sounds "mean" after all?  Do they really mean only themselves?  And what therefore about the innate human tendency to find, to desire, to demand meaning?     

Is there any human who, regardless of culture, would hear giddy happiness in the last movement of the Sixth Symphony?  (I suppose it is possible, but I would wonder about the person's affect.)

The sounds of music are extensions of Nature, simulations which humans can control and organize, somewhat like being able to orchestrate the forest at sunrise, for the purpose of...what?  Expressing a forest at sunrise?  Expressing the inner joy of a secret thought?

Expressing expression?

[some guy]

So what do the sounds "mean" after all?  Do they really mean only themselves?  And what therefore about the innate human tendency to find, to desire, to demand meaning?

We should probably not get into a discussion about the meaning of meaning. That's like entering a labyrinth that cannot be exited.

But about "only," I do think we can say that sounds really do only mean themselves. But it's also true that for some listeners, perhaps most, sounds aren't good enough. They have to be turned into emotions or into narratives or into images. Seems to me music is good enough all on its own. But then I think that pigments are good enough all on their own, too, so what do I know?

[alkan]

But about "only," I do think we can say that sounds really do only mean themselves. But it's also true that for some listeners, perhaps most, sounds aren't good enough. They have to be turned into emotions or into narratives or into images.

Interesting discussion .... but I think it is an oversimplification to say "sounds really do only mean themselves".    I would say that, strange as it may seem, there is a link between sounds and human emotions.    Take musical scales for example.    Classical composers such as Haydn and Mozart deliberately (subconsciously?) used different keys when they wanted to write different sorts of music .... the extremes are probably G minor for "angry" or "dark" symphonies, and C major for "bright" and "happy" symphonies.       There is something in the combination of tones that is really suited to the emotion that the composer wants to convey.     I guess that it might be possible to write a "happy" G minor symphony (anyone know an example?), but it's probably a lot harder than using C major or E flat major .....

Given the possibility that a even simple diatonic scale can convey some sort of feeling, it's not difficult to imagine that when the genius of a great composer gets to work it is possible to stimulate all sorts of emotions in a sensitive listener.     Now it starts to get complicated because different people react differently  (viz Someguy's story about Schoenbergs 3rd SQ).    I respect that, but what really interests me is to try to understand what the composer himself was feeling and what he was trying to convey.    OK, I'm not looking for an absolute truth .... just a better understanding and new insights.        I launched a thread a few months ago on the theme of "what on earth was Sibelius thinking of when he wrote the ending to his 5th symphony ?" ..... I have always found it puzzling and frustrating, but I got a lot of interesting alternative ways to look at the terminating chord-bursts.

Finally, and just to rejoin Someguy a little, I do believe that it is possible to listen to the same piece of music different ways and get different experiences.      You can listen "analytically", usually with a score, and try to decrypt the structure, the details, and see how various effects are created.   You can also listen "emotionally" and just try to pump the music for every last ounce of excitement, sadness, beauty, majesty, etc.     You can also listen to music and just be amazed by the virtuosity or the performer(s), even if you don't care all that much for the music itself.        Just chosing only one of these possibilities implies that you are missing out on the other facets ....

[some guy]

Interesting discussion

Agreed!

.... but I think it is an oversimplification to say "sounds really do only mean themselves".

Well, be fair, I did qualify that immediately with the "But it's also true..." remark.   

I would say that, strange as it may seem, there is a link between sounds and human emotions.

True, but doesn't go far enough. There are links between everything and human emotions. Or, to put it another way, humans have emotions and anything in the world (including, or perhaps especially, the made up things) can trigger them. That's abundantly clear.

I guess my only desire here was to get beyond that. OK, we're humans. We have emotions. Now what? (I ran a poetry workshop for a number of years. People were pretty consistently concerned about the emotional content of their poems. I was concerned with the way they put words together. It seemed the most difficult thing to get across: We are humans; we have emotions. Now let's learn how to write poetry.)

[alkan]

The way this discussion is going reminds me of the theory of Quantum Physics !!          Simply stated this says that sub-atomic particles will always appear "fuzzy" because the very act of observing them (via light particles) jolts them around.         So, a quantum theory of music would say that musical tones are never absolute and precise, but are always affected by the emotions involved in the act of listening to music !!

Back to your reply.    We can probably say that any act of artistic creation  (music, poetry, sculpture, painting, etc) is a mixture of technical competence and emotional alchemy.      Going too far towards either extreme is generally unsatisfying .... pure technical competance appears "dry" and unstructured emotionalism appears "chaotic".     I think your poetry class example illustrates this very well.     I was aiming at the same thing in my "listening to music in different ways" example.

Well, we have wandered away from the original subject.     What was going through Tchaikovsky's mind when he wrote the waltz and march movements in his 6th symphony ??   

[Marc]

Well, we have wandered away from the original subject. What was going through Tchaikovsky's mind when he wrote the waltz and march movements in his 6th symphony??

Hoping that it would please both the music lovers and connaisseurs, I guess.
The same hope which Mozart wrote about to his father. And Tchaikovsky was a great admirer of Mozart, so .... 

[Elgarian]

(I ran a poetry workshop for a number of years. People were pretty consistently concerned about the emotional content of their poems. I was concerned with the way they put words together. It seemed the most difficult thing to get across: We are humans; we have emotions. Now let's learn how to write poetry.)

But there's a difference between the making of art and the experiencing of it as an observer who tries to engage with it. Sandra Blow used to talk about how, when she began trying to paint abstract works, she couldn't understand how to 'get the feeling' into them. She gradually realised that if she simply concentrated on getting the architecture of the picture right, the 'feeling' would look after itself. This sounds very like your approach to the writing of poetry.

But when we come to look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we expect more than merely to experience an 'interesting' structure. At least, I do. Even when we look at the work of such an austerely abstract painter as Patrick Heron, who insisted that the exploration of colour was the meaning of his pictures, we don't experience that exploration as a purely intellectual exercise. We hear the colours 'sing' - or some equivalent feeling is transmitted - and that seems to be what we value. Something comes through the appreciation of structure; it's that 'something' that I'm after.

[Superhorn]

 Is classical music an abstract thing ?  Yes and no.  A work may not have a specific program, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have expressive character. 
And some music is specifically programmatic , and yes, music can
describe extra-musical. When you hear the episonde called "Thunderstorm "in the Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss, it sure as heck sounds like
one heck of a storm.
  And even Stravinsky, who famously declared that "music is incapable of expression" , sometimes contradicted himself, as in his highly descriptive
early ballets The Firebird, Petrushka and the Rite of Spring.
  In Petrushka, one passage is meant to depict a dancing bear at a
Shrovetide festival; a solo baritone horn plays, and by golly,it sounds like a dancing bear.
  Yes, Tchaikovsky  gave the specific title "Pathetique" to his last symphony, after his brother Modest came up with the idea.Pathetique does not mean "pathetic" as in English; it means full of deeply felt emotion.
  The two inner movement provide a respite from the anguish of the outer ones,and make that anguish all the greater.

[Superhorn]

  Music doesn'r exist in a vacuum. You can't divorce it completely
from the extra-musical.

[Harry]

What T really meant with this Symphony will always be a riddle, and I like it that way. He had in many ways a tragic life, and no doubt that emerges forcefully in his music. If this is touching you, or you recognize it in yourself, so much the better, so whatever you feel is the message.

[some guy]

...some music is specifically programmatic , and yes, music can describe extra-musical. When you hear the episonde called "Thunderstorm "in the Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss, it sure as heck sounds like one heck of a storm.

This is not quite the same thing as "meaning," though, is it? (Sorry, I guess we DO have to go into the labyrinth with no exit.) You might as well ask here what a storm means? (And an actual storm means ever so much more, and so many different things, than Strauss's storm.) Besides, an actual storm does itself include many sonic events. And music is a thing made up of sonic events. So where they meet, you can create a musical episode that can very easily recall an actual storm to our minds, even if some of the visuals have to be translated into flute scales--not all ascending flute scales "sound" like lightning, and no lightning flashes ever sound like flutes!! Indeed, there's quite a lot of music in that storm episode that nor you nor anyone else has ever heard in an actual storm.

Music can indeed present a simulacrum of things that are already musical, or at least sonic. That leaves open the question of whether music can depict things like mountains or falling in love or war or witches tormenting an ex-girlfriend. And that sidesteps the original idea of what music means.

[Elgarian]

Music can indeed present a simulacrum of things that are already musical, or at least sonic. That leaves open the question of whether music can depict things like mountains or falling in love or war or witches tormenting an ex-girlfriend. And that sidesteps the original idea of what music means.

I feel uneasy about this - as if several different definitions of meaning are somehow being telescoped together in such a way that they can't be discussed without bewilderment. (At any rate, I confess to being bewildered.) There are bits of Handel's Acis and Galatea, for instance, where the meaning clearly involves birds in some way. That doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed for its 'abstract' meaning, where the formal structure is the only thing considered (for anyone capable of doing that); but there's no doubt that at least part of the 'meaning' Handel intended to convey involved birds in some way. The libretto makes it clear; the recognisable character of the sounds makes it clear. Doesn't it?

I don't see why there's a problem involved in music carrying this kind of meaning along with it - any more than a big blob of green paint on top of a vertical brown stripe can carry some sort of meaning relating to 'tree' as well as being an abstract design. Or am I simply not understanding what this discussion is about?

[some guy]

I feel uneasy about this - as if several different definitions of meaning are somehow being telescoped together in such a way that they can't be discussed without bewilderment.

Sorry! What I was trying to do was separate out the different definitions of meaning, so we could all agree on which one to talk about (not the depiction one*).

there's no doubt that at least part of the 'meaning' Handel intended to convey involved birds in some way. The libretto makes it clear; the recognisable character of the sounds makes it clear. Doesn't it?

Sure does. That's another example of the storm type, music mimicking other sonic events.

I don't see why there's a problem involved in music carrying this kind of meaning along with it - any more than a big blob of green paint on top of a vertical brown stripe can carry some sort of meaning relating to 'tree' as well as being an abstract design. Or am I simply not understanding what this discussion is about?

There's no problem with music doing this--at least that's not the problem I was addressing originally. I wanted to get the discussion back to whether or not music could mean things like "the struggle between life and death." And particularly if it's even desirable to load music up with such meanings. There's no doubt that music can make bird calls and storm sounds. Those things are already "musical," after all.

*which I divided into two parts, the mimicking of other sound events, birds calling or thunder crashing, and the depiction of non-sonic realities, like mountains or falling in love or even falling in love with three oranges.

[Scarpia]

That music can imitate the sound of a bird or the wind or a thunderclap is the lowest level of musical expression.  In a great piece of music like Beethoven's pastoral these effects are a thin veneer layered on top of some very profound music.  What great music does is evoke emotions in an abstract way, independent of any specific story or narrative.  It does this through a combination of culturally define cues and innate biological responses to sound (harmony, and melody).  Sometimes composers like to associate the music with a specific story narrative (like a Strauss tone poem) but in great music this adds a bit of extra flavor to deeply conceived music. 

And again, music evokes emotion, it does not communicate anything definite.

[Elgarian]

I wanted to get the discussion back to whether or not music could mean things like "the struggle between life and death." And particularly if it's even desirable to load music up with such meanings. There's no doubt that music can make bird calls and storm sounds. Those things are already "musical," after all.

*which I divided into two parts, the mimicking of other sound events, birds calling or thunder crashing, and the depiction of non-sonic realities, like mountains or falling in love or even falling in love with three oranges.

Yes, I do see that, but I'm still struggling to explain my unease, and I haven't yet done it adequately. My point about the birds isn't just the mimicking. Scarpia's right - the mere mimicking is nothing to make a fuss about. But the fact that the bird sounds are there tells us that Handel wants us to be thinking about birds at that point - he's offering not merely an illusion that birds are present (which isn't terribly convincing in any case) but a feeling about birds. He's directing our emotional response in a bird-ish direction, for an emotional, partly extra-musical purpose.

Music has the same problem as abstract painting: as Scarpia observes, it conveys feeling, but we have nothing concrete to attach it to without some other hint - which we can provide ourselves (using our Duchampian 50% responsibility for the engagement) and imagine mountains, or the sea, or Antarctica, or simply 'awe', or seek further hints from the composer. So I think this means that a passage of music can generate feelings which have the potential to be associated with 'the struggle between life and death', but without further hints (or some provision of our own imagination) we may not be able to pin it down. But if the composer, let's say, offers us a lively dance theme followed by a funeral march, and then leads us into a section that makes us feel afraid - won't we interpret that (correctly) as some kind of musical discourse on 'the struggle between life and death'? This is a terribly crude example, and in truth one imagines that what would be going on would be far more subtle, but do you see what I mean?

[some guy]

Elgarian, yes, I see what you mean.

In my own experience, I've never felt that either music or abstract painting were problematical in this way. Music and abstract painting have always seemed to me to be sufficient in themselves without being turned into something else (mountains, sea, Antarctica, awe) before I could enjoy them, before I could feel I understood them.

Or to put it another way (going the other direction), I've always been able to appreciate sounds and images (non-representational shapes and colors) without feeling any need to translate them into some other reality. So perhaps I will not be able to address your unease, I guess is what I'm saying. Or perhaps this will do the trick--if I can be comfortable with the sounds and the images as they are, in themselves, then it is possible* to enjoy music and abstract art without the attaching of concrete things to them.

*Perhaps the real question is not, is it possible, but is it desirable? My point here has been that it is desirable. I'm certainly aware that the other may be desirable, too. It seems a terrible distraction to me. It seems a pulling away from whatever you're trying to understand/enjoy, a movement towards something else, something alien. But it's possible that that's just my personal problem, too, eh?

[Elgarian]

In my own experience, I've never felt that either music or abstract painting were problematical in this way. Music and abstract painting have always seemed to me to be sufficient in themselves without being turned into something else (mountains, sea, Antarctica, awe) before I could enjoy them, before I could feel I understood them.

I don't think it's the enjoyment that's problematic; it's the talking about it afterwards. In terms of visual art, I respond very much as you do to abstract work; it's sufficient in itself (insofar as it can be so isolated). Patrick Heron says somewhere that he doesn't understand why the exploration of a pictorial space defined only by colour should be so satisfying and mysterious - but that it is. And he's right, up to a point. But part of the reason why we respond as we do, I think, is that we've been so conditioned by our encounters with nature that we can't completely divorce them from our aesthetic response to art (whether visual or musical). Try as I might (not that I particularly want to), I simply can't listen to Sibelius's 1st symphony without mental images of snow and wind popping up - which in turn modifies my response to the music.

So I'm squirming a bit about the idea of 'needing' to translate non-representational sounds into a different reality. I can only speak for myself, but I don't experience it (if it happens) as a need. It just happens. I can't stop it, except by an extreme effort of will that hardly seems worthwhile. So I prefer your second suggestion - the idea that it's possible to be comfortable with the sounds and images as they are; but I think I want to qualify that by wondering if the 'being comfortable' is an illusion. Even if I think I'm completely absorbed by the formal relations of tone, shape, texture and colour, I don't need much persuading to accept that something else is also going on, subliminally - the extra layers that caused Ruskin to separate out the 'aesthetic' from the 'theoretic'.

It seems a terrible distraction to me. It seems a pulling away from whatever you're trying to understand/enjoy, a movement towards something else, something alien. But it's possible that that's just my personal problem, too, eh?

I think it might be - but only in the sense that we all have such preferences, and I think they're 'problems' only if we allow them to be. Often I don't want to separate out my responses in the way you like to do, though I'll fight anyone who says you shouldn't do it. The self-referencing distractions aren't distractions, for me, and I enjoy tracing them out, because so often they lead me back into the work with fresh insight. That tracing is part of what I do with my 50% portion of Duchamp's allocation of responsibility.

So what it comes down to (you see how magically we get back on track, and all the digressions funnel back in) is that Tchaikovsky places these notes before us - he makes his musical statement, in order to show us something. We attend to this musical object as closely as we can, and the result is a unique creation - a creative engagement between the best that Tchaikovsky could offer, and the best attention that we can muster. And if I feel sad, or even despairing, when I listen to the Pathetique, then that's an outcome of this engagement for me; it's neither right nor wrong - it's as close as I'm going to get to the partly musical and (I suppose) partly emotional expression he was trying to convey. We'll never know how close that might be, because there's no book of answers. There's just the art; and all we can do is give it such attention as we're individually capable of, and see what happens.

(Thanks, by the way, for forcing me to rethink all this stuff. This really is one of those instances of finding out what I think by seeing what I say.)

[jochanaan]

Elgarian, if I wanted "comfortable," I certainly wouldn't listen to any movement of Tchaik 6!

[Elgarian]

Elgarian, if I wanted "comfortable," I certainly wouldn't listen to any movement of Tchaik 6!

Definitely only to be listened to sitting on a hard chair.