The Chat Thread

[MN Dave]

Then perhaps you should take it behind the scenes.

Knight

Mr. Flaming Shed wishes to take it behind the scenes NOW? Right. If you think I started that thread because I like flame wars, I guess you don't know me as well as you think. I'll leave it at that and not bother to change your mind.

[knight66]

No one suggested that you started the thread with a deliberate flame war in prospect. Though the day it was started we agreed it was how it would end. So since you don't seem inclined to discuss this privately and since the lighter hearted hints are brushed aside as mods being touchy, I will be direct and reiterate that there have been too many threads affording opportunities for unpleasant disagreement.

By the way just what was a thread entitled, 'Old GMG War Stories' likely to elicit I wonder?

Knight

[MN Dave]

No one suggested that you started the thread with a deliberate flame war in prospect. Though the day it was started we agreed it was how it would end. So since you don't seem inclined to discuss this privately and since the lighter hearted hints are brushed aside as mods being touchy, I will be direct and reiterate that there have been too many threads affording opportunities for unpleasant disagreement.

By the way just what was a thread entitled, 'Old GMG War Stories' likely to elicit I wonder?

Knight

Talk of old times. Goodbye.

[Lethevich]

I hate software developers. How often must this happen:



A miniscule sub-1mb application forces a scan of every single hard disk (8tb in my case) just to check if you have enough space which 99.9% of all installers do. Frankly if somebody is running on less than the space required for one of these things, then they deserve to see a "this program did not install" message at the end of what is an almost instantaneous install anyway. I can understand why these were useful for windows 95, but omg, this is prioritising dunces at the inconvenience of everybody else. Raaagggeeee!

[greg]

One of the funniest things I've found on the internet:

"Missing Missy"
http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html

[Elgarian]

Sometimes a great wave of bleakness sweeps over me, and I find myself wondering if I understand anything about music at all. I was just looking at a discussion of English symphonies in the Classical Chat thread - and I'm very fond of some English music, and some of Parry's symphonies in general - but I simply couldn't think of anything to contribute to that thread, at the level of discourse that was taking place. I have no idea whatsoever how Parry's symphonies really stand, as music; whether they're really any good or not. I can hear wisps of Brahms flavouring, and passages of proto-Elgar in them, but I have no idea at all why that is (in musical theory terms), nor if it matters.

And then again, I listen for the umpteenth time to my Derycke Cooke CDs, and he takes me step by step through the Ring leitmotifs, and then I listen to the actual Ring ... and if I'm not careful, I spend all my time trying to decide whether that tune I just heard was this leitmotif or that one because they sound awfully similar, some of them, and often I can't tell one from another, there in situ; most of the time I just don't damn well know, after all these years of listening. So all I can do is sit and let it all happen, somehow, catching hold of whatever I can, knowing that at least nine-tenths of the fruits of the man's genius is just going over my head.

So here and now today, I'm just wondering what the heck this music thing is all about, really. I seem to enjoy myself when I listen to most of what I listen to. It seems meaningful (that is, more than mere pleasure) a lot of the time, on some sort of level. But I can hardly ever figure anything out. If I don't understand what I hear, then I don't understand, full stop. I have no inner resource to change that. (For comparison, if I find myself confronted with a work of visual art that I don't understand, I have a whole rack of different lines of approach I can adopt, often successfuly - so the contrast is very marked.)

Anyway, I thought I'd just pour this out here in the chat thread because I didn't know where else to put it.

[Scarpia]

Do you read music?  Having the major leitmotifs scribbled out might make them easier to keep in mind.

For my part, I don't put a great deal of effort into keeping track of them.  Many of them are similar, as you note, and Wagner tends to make one morph into another at various points.  I don't find trying to keep track of which Leitmotif is which is a tremendous enhancement to my enjoyment of the music.

[Elgarian]

Do you read music?  Having the major leitmotifs scribbled out might make them easier to keep in mind.

Only on the utmost elementary level. I have the leitmotifs available in various books, and in a very few cases I can 'imagine' the tune when I look at the music, but that's rare. So it doesn't really help all that much.

For my part, I don't put a great deal of effort into keeping track of them.  Many of them are similar, as you note, and Wagner tends to make one morph into another at various points.  I don't find trying to keep track of which Leitmotif is which is a tremendous enhancement to my enjoyment of the music.

Well, for instance - Cooke does this brilliant bit of analysis at one point where he explains how the spear motif morphs into the 'love' motif, and while I'm listening to him, I can follow it, and it would really make a difference, I can see, to be able to recognise that, at that particular dramatic moment. But I can't hold it in my head. I seem to have a feeble musical memory, so that although I follow him while he's telling it, when I plunge into the real thing on my own, it's as if I never heard or understood it.

I should stress that it happens to manifest itself in this way at the moment because I happen to be listening to Wagner right now, so leitmotif recognition is uppermost. But next week, next month, it could manifest itself quite differently, while listening to Handel, or Elgar, or Mozart, with no real understanding of what's going on at all, but just 'responding' vaguely to the flow of sound. And that's all very nice, and so on; but I know it's all rather feeble, really.

[Lethevich]

Elgarian: I am much the same. Often formalities of structure fly way beyond me, so - for example - I can recognise the very standard format of a Haydn symphonic movement, and where he tweaks with repeats, development, etc, but with more advanced late-Romantic sonata structures I often lose track. And yet, going by feel, it's still clear to my mind which works are well-structured and which are not, but I simply cannot explain in a detailed or effective way why. It's essentially winging it, but it's a lot of fun and the chaos adds a lot of mystery to music as a whole - if I understood everything I might find myself losing some elements of enjoyment that I take from music as much as I gain others.

This, coupled with a terrible memory, means on occasion a piece I know I like a lot and have listened to quite a few times can seem almost new to me when I return to it.

[Gurn Blanston]

snip...It's essentially winging it, but it's a lot of fun and the chaos adds a lot of mystery to music as a whole - if I understood everything I might find myself losing some elements of enjoyment that I take from music as much as I gain others....

Sara, well, this has long been one of my sources of frustration in so very many ways. On the one hand, I am in a similar situation to you and Alan, rudimentary knowledge of the finer points (or even the coarser ones) of music theory. Yet there can be little doubt that it doesn't impede me in my enjoyment of the music even one bit. Of course, I would like to be more fluent in discussion situations, but I'm not particularly fluent at anything, so why should music be excepted?

But the opposite side of the coin is something you touch on too, and it makes me rather content with my lot. Which is that whenever I read something by a really knowledgeable music lover, the element of pure enjoyment of the music is like totally lost, rarely even entering the discussion. IMO, music exists to entertain not to analyze, so I think that for now, I will deal with it... 

[MN Dave]

Yep. That's why I don't discuss. It's for listening.

[greg]

And then again, I listen for the umpteenth time to my Derycke Cooke CDs, and he takes me step by step through the Ring leitmotifs, and then I listen to the actual Ring ... and if I'm not careful, I spend all my time trying to decide whether that tune I just heard was this leitmotif or that one because they sound awfully similar, some of them, and often I can't tell one from another, there in situ; most of the time I just don't damn well know, after all these years of listening. So all I can do is sit and let it all happen, somehow, catching hold of whatever I can, knowing that at least nine-tenths of the fruits of the man's genius is just going over my head.

Just recently, I was looking at the development section in the first movement of Mahler's 3rd, and despite having heard it probably 80 times (wild guess, lol), I didn't realize until then that the opening horn theme was being played in those bars. (The horn theme was being covered by a wild march with stuff that sounds like different melodies playing at the same time, and it's natural to only pay attention to the strings in the high register play something different instead of the horn theme in the middle).

Earlier today, I was looking over the last movement of the same symphony because I realized that I didn't have a good grasp of the structure and didn't quite get how the themes were being developed. Just studying the score by identifying which melodies appear where helped a lot.

In short, such stuff is sometimes only knowable with the aid of a score- especially for music in the late Romantic style.

[Scarpia]

But the opposite side of the coin is something you touch on too, and it makes me rather content with my lot. Which is that whenever I read something by a really knowledgeable music lover, the element of pure enjoyment of the music is like totally lost, rarely even entering the discussion. IMO, music exists to entertain not to analyze, so I think that for now, I will deal with it... 

I don't think there is a dichotomy between understanding music and enjoying it.  That sophisticated listeners use a more technical vocabulary doesn't mean they are not getting pleasure from it, and I suspect a richer pleasure.  I'm no expert, I have some musical education but a lot less than many here, but when I've taken enough interest in a piece of music to study it I seem to end up enjoying it more, even if I decide to relax and just let the music wash over. 

Imagine two people sitting in a restaurant eating the same dish.  One is saying, "interesting, using dill in a cream sauce to bring out the flavor of the meat..." while another says, "wow, that tastes good."   The connoisseur is still tasting the food, even if he enjoys analyzing it as well.

[Elgarian]

And yet, going by feel, it's still clear to my mind which works are well-structured and which are not, but I simply cannot explain in a detailed or effective way why. It's essentially winging it, but it's a lot of fun and the chaos adds a lot of mystery to music as a whole - if I understood everything I might find myself losing some elements of enjoyment that I take from music as much as I gain others.

That's very comforting, though on levels of musical comprehension (judging from the knowledgeable character of your posts), I still feel that

<-- you're up here somewhere



<--- while I'm down here.

On the whole though (and now I'm responding to Gurn as well), I know from my personal experience of the visual arts that a significant improvement in what we might call cognitive comprehension can have an immense payoff subliminally. I even, in my own limited way, recognise this musically, too. If I think of a work like the Elgar violin concerto, where I've taken really significant pains, spread over years, to try to understand its structure, the effect on its personal emotive impact has been enormous. It shifted gradually from being (for me) one of the most tedious of Elgar's works to being one of the two or three most overwhelming.

Trouble is - life's too short. It took me years of listening and reading, to get to grips (at least to some minimal degree) with one 50-minute violin concerto. I couldn't possibly do that for everything. So I bumble along in the way that I do. And I agree wholeheartedly, Gurn - it's possible for knowledgeable people to lose track completely of the importance of enjoying the music (that happens in the visual arts too); but it's also possible to be knowledgeable and still be capable of being set on fire. I just want it all!!

[Philoctetes]

I'm officially a student at NIU. 

[CD]

Oh, you're in Chicago? Cool.

[Philoctetes]

Oh, you're in Chicago? Cool.

Yep. I actually live out in Geneva, essentially at the end of the rails.

[karlhenning]

Can hardly believe this headline I read:

Ex Kills Woman for Changing Facebook Status

[karlhenning]

Great Shed of Mercy . . .  did she really say that?

I am very proud of my posts in this thread, they are IMHO brilliantly intelligent!

[CD]

Haha god, imagine if this were any other forum...