Is It Music or Gibberish ?

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Apparently what ACD is saying is that there is a question as to whether "the work of music [is] to be identified as the written text or its performance":

But while ACD makes it quite clear which "side" he comes down on, it's a little difficult to reconcile (however resoundingly or categorically) such a comment with his emphatic approval of the work of Charles Rosen - for Rosen, as should be unmistakable from his dual career as musicologist and pianist, as analyst and performer, is quite as much interested in the written texts of music and in intellectual analysis as he is in playing such texts on the piano.

I guess ACD can be 'resoundingly and categorically' levelheaded when he wants to be...

I only hope Pink takes note of it, here...

[Sean]

You can start, Sean, by thinking through what evaluative choices with which you're front-loading opinion (and it is opinion, Sean, not Universal Truth) that "Jeux . . . [falls] short of the 'simpler' La mer in artistic terms.

It just does okay?!! It blinking does. There are more recordings of La mer, there's more beauty in the work, there's more to do with it...

[Sean]

... Eric. You make the mistake of assuming that what you can hear is all that there is to hear, and that if you don't hear it immediately it isn't really worth bothering about.

Aesthetics is universal, not subjective; it's only subjectively experienced.

[Sean]

Why odd? It's nothing different to the way I've answered this accusation of yours before. I don't think we should be surprised that people who dedicate their lives to analysing music, often for very little reward, actually rather like that music. I nearly follwed that path myself, re Janacek - and I dare you to suggest that I don't love every note of his music! To suggest sweepingly that no academics actually have a feeling for the music they work with actually seems to me hugely unfair  and monstrously dismissive and disrespectful. At the same time, it's a rather clicheed, anti-academic view ('they're all out of touch with the real world'  ) which I must say  is rather a conventional for one such as you, Sean. 

Hi Luke, I've spilled my bile on a Dinar thread, if you wish.

I think certainly in many cases that academics study and analyse music for reasons other than that they have a persona engagement with it. For instance many of them just like score-reading: they really do, and like talking with like-minded other score-readers/ analyzers. And take Schenker! What a berk!

And by the way, if I didn't think you'd demonstrated some genuine sensitivity I wouldn't be bothering, and you probably wouldn't be here anyway.

As for being disrespectful though, many of these characters have been extremely disrespectful towards me out of fear of me: that's not to say that allow me to be, but I need to take a stand against them.

[lukeottevanger]

Aesthetics is universal, not subjective; it's only subjectively experienced.

You and Eric (and ACD) do like going on in this way, but that doesn't at all answer my point, which wasn't about aesthetics, universality or subjectivity but merely about analysis Bringing-Stuff-To-Your-Attention-Which-You-Hadn't-Hear-In-The-Music-Before.

Hi Luke, I've spilled my bile on a Dinar thread, if you wish.

Spent a bit of time looking for threads on the Iraqi currency before I worked out what you meant...! 

But I know what you are referring to now. How depressing - I'm confused as to why do you feel the need

a) to extrapolate from your interaction with these few academics that you understand them and their personalities entirely/ It could equally be that you just rubbed them up the wrong way, and in turn that could stem from a failing in you, not in them - looking at your descriptions of your confrontations, and from what I know of your personality from GMG, I find it very easy to see how you could royally piss off someone attempting to talk on one subject whilst you insisted on talking about another...

b) to extrapolate from that that all music academics are the same (do you simply not believe me when I've told you countless times that I haven't met people like the ones you describe? - maybe I just mixed in better circles  )

and finally, c) to post these people's names on the internet. I find that most unpleasant.

Actually, I should 'fess up. In order to keep things simple I've always said that I've never met any music academic like the ones you describe. Not quite true - I met one, a man I dislike intensely and who I suspect does not care particularly about the music he is a (leading) specialist on. But maybe he does; maybe that is just my dislike of him talking - I can admit that, and you ought to be able to also. What is more, although the opportunity to slag him off has arisen many times over the years on these forums, I've never done so although I've mentioned his work, which is admirable.

I think certainly in many cases that academics study and analyse music for reasons other than that they have a persona engagement with it. For instance many of them just like score-reading: they really do, and like talking with like-minded other score-readers/ analyzers.

Yes, I'm one of these score-lovers. You've seen your own mystery scores thread, so you know that! And I love scores because I love music, deeply, and, as I said in an earlier post, I want to get to grips with it in all its manifestations and, in my own way, to 'possess' it. To equate score-reading with dry, anti-musical irrelevance isn't the radical iconoclastic thinking you seem to believe it is. It's more like the boorish, confused, spluttering, affronted-because-they-don't-get-what-the-clever-people-are-talking-about line that we see in e.g. the Daily Mail ('intellectual elite', 'ivory towers' yawn yawn). A self-confessed elitist like you Sean, ought to shudder at towing such a line.

And take Schenker! What a berk!

Because... This is just the sort of spluttering I meant.

And by the way, if I didn't think you'd demonstrated some genuine sensitivity I wouldn't be bothering, and you probably wouldn't be here anyway.

Well, exactly. And yet I'm one of these terrible score-lovers you've just demonised. It doesn't compute, does it?

As for being disrespectful though, many of these characters have been extremely disrespectful towards me out of fear of me: that's not to say that allow me to be, but I need to take a stand against them.

Well, there we have it - as I suspected, your hatred of musical academics (all of them, it seems) is rooted in your personal experiences of a small number. It's as if you think the characteristics of musicologists are universal too, and only our experiences of them are subjective. I hesitate to say it, but it could be that my] experience of them, which isn't tainted by anger or affront but simply on personal interaction, may be closer to the Universal Truth about musicologist which you imply than yours, which is full of your own subjective responses to your own rejection. And why, Sean, do you get into arguments so much.?

[(poco) Sforzando]

I guess ACD can be 'resoundingly and categorically' levelheaded when he wants to be...

Perhaps he can, but it seems to me that one can acquire a great deal of freedom in one's musical thinking if he does not take ACD's opinions with anything near the solemnity that ACD himself obviously takes ACD's opinions.

[Operahaven]

Sforzando,

(slightly off topic for a moment)

Speaking of Taruskin and other 'experts' do you know where he ranks  Pelleas et Melisade  on the greatness scale ?... At this time I don't feel like paying 500 dollars for this:

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Western-Music-Set/dp/0195169794/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209907693&sr=1-4.... to find out.

If anyone owns this set I would really appreciate it if you could check for me... Thanks.

[lukeottevanger]

Does it really matter? I'm sure he ranks it very highly - everyone else of any seriousness does, it isn't the contentious piece you imagine it is - but why should it bother you in any case? This is what I genuinely don't understand - if as you claim the only important thing in music is its sensuous appeal to the individual listening, why should you be as concerned as you are to gather opinions of your favourite works so zealously? Be true to yourself, Eric - you like it, and that's all that matters, surely!

[(poco) Sforzando]

Sforzando,

(slightly off topic for a moment)

Speaking of Taruskin and other experts [and yes, he really is, your quotation marks notwithstanding] do you know where he ranks  Pelleas et Melisade  on the greatness scale ?... At this time I don't feel like paying 500 dollars for this:

http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-History-Western-Music-Set/dp/0195169794/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209907693&sr=1-4.... to find out.

If anyone owns this set I would really appreciate it if you could check for me... Thanks.

Why should you care about Taruskin's opinion? After all, he is an academic.

And no, I don't own these books. Perhaps your local library has a copy.

[DavidRoss]

Perhaps he can, but it seems to me that one can acquire a great deal of freedom in one's musical thinking if he does not take ACD's opinions with anything near the solemnity that ACD himself obviously takes ACD's opinions.

ACD's opinions carry no more weight than those of a the fellow standing next to you in any randomly chosen supermarket check-out line.  Maybe less, because odds are that the fellow in the check-out line has no pretensions to authority he doesn't possess.

Back to whether music is the score or the performance--I see this as a semantic non-issue.  Yes, we refer to one jotting down notation for an imagined conglomeration of sound as writing "music," but that's a convenience of speech understood by most, I believe--at least until they start overthinking it and get themselves all tangled up in category errors confusing reference and referents!   

[Dancing Divertimentian]

Perhaps he can, but it seems to me that one can acquire a great deal of freedom in one's musical thinking if he does not take ACD's opinions with anything near the solemnity that ACD himself obviously takes ACD's opinions.

Oh, I'm not defending ACD...

I just think it ironic Pink should get hamstrung by his own plagiarizing.  

[karlhenning]

It just does okay?!! It blinking does.

Assertion is not truth, Sean.

There are more recordings of La mer, there's more beauty in the work, there's more to do with it...

(a) There being more recordings of a work, does not demonstrate anything, one way or another, about its artistic worth, about its 'beauty quotient'.

(b) There's no way of 'weighing' whether there is "more beauty" in one piece or the other.  They are both beautiful pieces;  they are each about rather different musical 'things'.

'Tis pity, Sean, that you do not appreciate the beauty of Jeux for itself.  And further pity that you are playing the same dead-end game that Eric is mired in, of (essentially) wishing that Debussy had gone on to write La mer again, 5, 6, 25 times.  You and Eric are weirdly playing out Debussy's complaint, a hundred years too late: The Debussyistes are killing me.  Most of us here take it as a given that it is actually a measure of Debussy's stature as an artist, that he was not content to circle around in re-treads of himself, but set out to create excellence in ways subtle different to, and 'evolving' from, who he had been.

Next you'll be crying over your porter that Stravinsky ought just to have written (and re-written, and re-written again) L'oiseau de feu.

[Operahaven]

Does it really matter? I'm sure he ranks it very highly - everyone else of any seriousness does, it isn't the contentious piece you imagine it is - but why should it bother you in any case? This is what I genuinely don't understand - if as you claim the only important thing in music is its sensuous appeal to the individual listening, why should you be as concerned as you are to gather opinions of your favourite works so zealously? Be true to yourself, Eric - you like it, and that's all that matters, surely!

Luke and Sforzando,

Yes, I am true to myself but it's fun to read about other people's feelings and reactions towards a work I adore... That's all.

I am totally  ADDICTED  to commentary on  Pelleas et Melisande... Anything I can get my hands on. 

[lukeottevanger]

Have you read Dahlhaus on P+M? Very interesting things to say (which chime pleasingly with all the things I've always felt about the piece too  ).

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Have you read Dahlhaus on P+M? Very interesting things to say (which chime pleasingly with all the things I've always felt about the piece too  ).

I have read several books by Dahlhaus (two about Wagner, one about Beethoven, and a collection of essays, all in German). Where does he write about Pelléas?

[lukeottevanger]

In his book on 19th century music. A classic (or it should be)

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

In his book on 19th century music. A classic (or it should be)

I 'know' that book (saw it in a library), but haven't read it yet. Thanks.

[lukeottevanger]

It's an eye-opener, for sure

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

On JSTOR I found this review of Dahlhaus's book by Arnold Whittall. Perhaps of interest...

http://rapidshare.com/files/112576780/Arnold_Whittall_about_Dahlhaus.pdf

[Operahaven]

Have you read Dahlhaus on P+M? Very interesting things to say (which chime pleasingly with all the things I've always felt about the piece too  ).

Thanks Luke... I will check him out.   

But I'm really only interested in reading his subjective reactions about  Pelleas....  I have no desire for purely technical analysis/dissections... Now, if his observations are coupled with 'poetic-like' comments, then yes, that would be worth my time.