Am I worrying about concepts I'm better off leaving for later?

[karlhenning]

I'd like to add something else: I think it is extremely important for someone who wants to enjoy classical music to cultivate the kind of taxonomical hearing Luke and I have described.

Well, in the present discussion I find it of interest that this is your view, to be sure.

There have been some who assert something quite different, to the effect that even such ''taxonomical hearing' is unnecessary, and all one needs to enjoy the music is to let the sound wash over you. In one extreme case, this assertion was accompanied by an insistence that anyone who knew how to spell a C# Major triad in second inversion was incapable of appreciating the music as deeply as he did.

[karlhenning]

I can see that, but I don't come to a work with that kind of specific expectation. 

Do you mean (for instance) that when you listen to a piece for the first time, it is a matter of indifference to you whether the piece is a stand-alone entity, or instead one component of a composite work?

[Palmetto]

Just to be clear, my "Position" (funny, that) is that I think it is extremely important for a listener, new or experienced, to listen to a work closely enough to identify basic elements such as themes, and (whether they know the formal terms or not) to attempt to discover relationships between the elements as they reappear throughout the work.

As a newcomer, what I've found important is learning to listen for themes, multiple melodies, development, etc.  Where I got hung up was drawing the line between developing a basic working vocabulary and fretting over terms and details that aren't immediately necessary to get an enjoyable foot in the door.  (Yeah, I know; 'RTFB')

[karlhenning]

Well, there are so many terms, that a basic filtration of learn-it-when-the-text-is-otherwise-incomprehensible is not unusual ; )

[karlhenning]

Not sure what you've got against books/commentary specific to a given piece. But, hey . . . .

[jochanaan]

Re Beethoven's Opus 68: The fact that it's laid out in five movements rather than the traditional four immediately got my attention.  "Why five?"  But after listening to it, it became apparent that Beethoven could not have followed his intent by sticking with the traditional four movements; the thunderstorm and the "thankful feelings" afterwards were too dissimilar to fit into a single movement.  Another detail that struck me at once was that the last three movements were played without pause, as if the whole thing were a scene from an opera rather than three individual, unconnected movements.  Those things are neither incidental nor irrelevant, but are part of what makes this symphony both a unique entity and a seminal work.  It's not at all certain that Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Liszt's Faustsymphonie or any of Mahler's symphonies (among many others) would exist in anything like their present forms if Beethoven had not written the Pastoral.

Leon, it doesn't seem that you intended to raise these questions with your posts; but some of us remember others who positively gloried in their wilful ignorance.  Such an attitude is almost an insult to those of us who have actually studied music.

Granted, you don't need to know these things to love Opus 68; but knowing them adds greatly to my enjoyment of the Pastoral as well as the Fantastique and the Faustsymphonie.

[Scarpia]

I find it odd that you have settled on this aspect of the work and continue to ask me about it - yet you refuse to tell me how knowing the number of movements especially enhances your own enjoyment of the 6th symphony.

I find it odd that when I reply to this point you simply ignore it and claim that I did not reply.

Above I wrote

The second paragraph describes "I listened hard, really intently, in the dark (!), and my brain immediately began to hold onto to elements, to identify them, to hear their relationships."  Does that sound consistent with your statement that knowing Beethoven's 6th has five movements does not enhance enjoyment?  How could you understand anything about the "elements" and their "relationships" without knowing that Beethoven's 6th is a 5 movement work and that the structure of these movements organizes the musical "elements" and "relationships?

The five movement structure provides the basic framework within which thematic elements and relationships are organized.  Beethoven follows the convention of maintaining close relationships between thematic elements within movements, and creating more subtle relationships between thematic elements in different movements.   For instance the second movement of the symphony is a distinct piece from the first, with its own themes, tempo and structure.  The second movement, according to Beethoven's own program, is literally descriptive of nature, while the first represents the feelings of a person going to the country.  I would not fully appreciate and enjoy this work without being aware that Beethoven assigned to each of the five movements a different part of the story he wanted to tell.
 

[Scarpia]

I'd like to add something else: I think it is extremely important for someone who wants to enjoy classical music to cultivate the kind of taxonomical hearing Luke and I have described.  Even knowing all the terminology, attentive and close listening is really necessary to "get" classical music.

Then why do you take issue when people express opinions that you later claim that you agree with?

[jochanaan]

I have studied music.  Knowing those things are not integral to my enjoyment of the 6th symphony. 

Like someone said earlier, we are mostly in agreement; perhaps we only differ in emphasis.  For me at least, though, the memory of "debating" (I use that word loosely) with certain others is a slightly sore point.  But you certainly are not like those others.

This article from the Kennedy Center makes the point that despite the programmatic aspects to Op. 68, Beethoven did not depart much from the sonata style...

'Tis true; Beethoven was first an instrumental musician.  Even with an opera and many choral works under his belt, he was never really comfortable writing for voice, and his vocal works are almost invariably not his best.  And it's to be noted that the Sixth is about impressions, not (with a few exceptions) literal tone-painting à la Vivaldi's The Seasons.

[Luke]

I'd like to add something else: I think it is extremely important for someone who wants to enjoy classical music to cultivate the kind of taxonomical hearing Luke and I have described.  Even knowing all the terminology, attentive and close listening is really necessary to "get" classical music.

Yes, of course, that's ture. Where we differ, I think, is that you see these listening-derived taxonomical definitions as more limited than I do. Limited, that is, to the sorts of things one is likely to notice in listening to a work a few times - the themes and forms and imitations and so on that are obvious enough to the standard ear that they are reasonably noticable. As you say (rightly) in a sense, it doesn't matter what you call these things, internally, as long as they make sense to you; the accepted names only matter and need to be known if you wish to discuss them with others

But, to me, the boundaries are more fluid. Yes, had I not been taught about them or read about them, it might have taken me years of listening to be able to spot that Neapolitan 6ths (which my mind would have classified under another name of course) even exist, let alone that they occur in a variety of works but usually in one context, which context I might or might not have been able to describe too. However, it happens that others have done the work for me, and so it only took my piano teacher 5 minutes to explain them to me, a demonstration which I've never forgotten and which has meant that, with listening experience, 'Neapolitan 6ths' slipped from a second category taxonomical term, one outside your parameters, one which is purely academic and not associated with the pure listening experience, to one within them, one that my ear hears in the same way it hears second subjects. The same goes for all (or at least many) analytical terms - once learnt, the ear identifies them in the same way as it identifies second subjects and other more obvious 'rudimentary' features. It's in the nature of these things, though, that one usually has to be taught to notice them, and therefore one learns the terminology by default.

The above, I think, it why I object when I hear that 'analytical listening detracts from the listening experience' - because my experience is completely the opposite: that analytical listening beomes second nature, not an add-on one can switch off. I also object because the implication is that those who hear music with an understanding of its workings are not simply enjoying the music too, are not able to, somehow. Because the truth is, and the wonder of it is - you can do both: you can enjoy, and you can understand, and the combination of the two brings an  even greater pleasure, in my experience.

[karlhenning]

Understanding is in no way inimical to enjoyment. Indeed, I have always found that it enhances enjoyment.

. . . Instead, I would advise them to listen carefully . . . .

Which is not bad advice, but there are no few listeners who find a little guidance to be a large assistance in 'listening carefully'.

[karlhenning]

Half of the sentence does not accurately portray the advice. 

Terribly sorry.  Let's try this:

Instead, I would advise them to listen carefully and eventually attempt to map the music as best they can.

Which is not bad advice, but there are no few listeners who find a little guidance to be a large assistance in 'listening carefully' and in 'mapping the music as best they can'.

[Scarpia]

Sorry, you lost me with this.  Luke expressed something which I had previously expressed in different words - I simply acknowledged that he used better language (taxonomical hearing) to say what I was getting at.   What that phrase means to me is a personal taxonomy created by a listener (when listening to a work) that is not based on prior knowledge of the established terminology.  Later when they encounter the standard terms they can map them to their own taxonomy.

Let's go back to the beginning.

Sforzando posted:

But the first is not to be despised either, and it's not unusual to find people who do so (remember our late friend Iago?), on the false assumption that the heart is good and the brain bad (as in Wordsworth's "We murder to dissect" and Keats's "Though the dull brain perplexes and retards"). The problem is that to genuinely master the so-called technical terminology and concepts requires a good deal of study, until it all becomes natural and second-nature. Until then, you might not know that (say) a particularly magical moment in the Hammerklavier Adagio occurs because Beethoven suddenly uses a flat II or Neapolitan chord in root position, but the fact remains that the reason for the magic is that (duh) Beethoven suddenly uses a flat II or Neapolitan in root position.

Your reply was:

Labels do not create magic; effective composing does.  It does not much matter, imo, how a person refers to a harmonic event, whether they use the theoretical label for a chord or find some other way of communicating what they heard - the magic is in the music.

Again, Sforzando:

But that is not how Beethoven uses flat II in the Hammerklavier Adagio. Or in the op. 131 finale (where, in a C# minor movement, he recapitulates the second subject in D major before restating it in C# major; and where he also uses those rushing scale passages built on flat II in the coda). Here the Neapolitan takes on a very distinct character of its own that is more than a substitute for IV.

and your reply

That only underscores the surprise the chord/harmony would create since Beethoven was employing it outside the norm (which is what I was referring to) - but, in any event, my point was to say that knowing the term N6 is immaterial to enjoying the music.

which established the pattern for your participation in the thread.  People described hearing music and relating it to understanding of how the music is put together, and you latched on to the use of technical terminology to dismiss these descriptions as mere "labels."  Sforzando was not emphasizing that a listener must know that the harmony used is called a Neapolitan sixth, he was emphasizing that a refined listen will hear the harmony and recognize the combination of notes that produced them, which is conventionally called a Neapolitan sixth.  What started out as a very interesting discussion of the role of analysis in appreciating music degenerated into a pointless semantic exercise primarily due to the fact that you repeatedly quoted posts and expressed disagreement with ideas that were not present in the quoted posts.

[DavidRoss]

Terribly sorry.  Let's try this:

Which is not bad advice, but there are no few listeners who find a little guidance to be a large assistance in 'listening carefully' and in 'mapping the music as best they can'.

<guffaw>Ha!</guffaw>

[Palmetto]

what do we mean by 'mapping music'?  Or is this another concept I can put off to a (much) later date?

[karlhenning]

what do we mean by 'mapping music'?

Good question : )

[Grazioso]

what do we mean by 'mapping music'?  Or is this another concept I can put off to a (much) later date?

I assume what was meant is creating a mental model of the work's architecture, i.e., how its structure is created from thematic building blocks and relations of harmony, tempi, etc. If that's the case, then I'd say, it's something listening to classical music benefits from since much of it is created and traditionally interpreted according to such architectural/structural analogies. (As opposed to, say, graphing out frequency ratios for the sound waves.)

The map is not the territory. But the map can be useful for focusing attention and acting as a theoretical frame through which to hear the work.

[Scarpia]

I assume what was meant is creating a mental model of the work's architecture, i.e., how its structure is created from thematic building blocks and relations of harmony, tempi, etc. If that's the case, then I'd say, it's something listening to classical music benefits from since much of it is created and traditionally interpreted according to such architectural/structural analogies. (As opposed to, say, graphing out frequency ratios for the sound waves.)

The map is not the territory. But the map can be useful for focusing attention and acting as a theoretical frame through which to hear the work.

And it's not much different than what you might do with pop music (i.e., you might recognize the introduction, the verses, the chorus, the bridge, the guitar solo, etc).

[Scarpia]

I think, from now on, I will only respond to Palmetto's questions, since this is his thread asking for ideas about how to get acquainted with classical music.  There appears to be some kind of other agenda in play from some of the other posters, pursuing the kind of exchange I am not interested in.  In any event, I have posted more than enough comments for anyone to arrive at an understanding of what my thoughts are about someone coming to classical music for the first time.

In my case the "other agenda" is that I can't figure out what you're talking about.  I agree there isn't much to add to the discussion, and my overall conclusion is that you essentially agree with the posts you took issue with, and that you took issue with statements that no one made.

[karlhenning]

FWIW, a listener's attempts to get a grasp of the design of a piece, is exactly one of the activities in which most listeners benefit from reading about music. 'Carefully listening' will only get you so far.

Or, it takes you so far afield, that then you have to learn from scratch how to communicate to others about musical form.